Arizona Fire Prevention and Preparedness at the Legislature

RERPRINTED FROM ARIZONA AGENDA | May 8th, 2025

Editor’s Note: Many SaddleBrooke and Ranch residents have reported that they are receiving notices indicating their current Fire Insurance carrier is cancelling their policy. The purported reason for this change is because is our area is subject to wildfires.

Republican Rep. David Marshall opened a sobering ad hoc study committee hearing on fire preparedness last week with harrowing memories of 2002, when the Rodeo-Chedeski Fire incinerated 550,000 acres — and came close to swallowing up Show Low.

“When the Rodeo-Chedeski Fire hit, I was manager at the Walmart in Show Low,” Marshall told members of the blue ribbon committee he leads. “We had one way in and one way out. It took three hours to evacuate that part of the mountain. My job at that time was to make sure all the firefighters were fed well — with all the food we had in Walmart. I lived there for 10 days. They stationed a fire truck in front of Walmart.”

Marshall then recalled this January’s Palisades Fire in California that burned 23,000 acres, killed 12 people and consumed nearly 7,000 homes as hurricane-force winds drove flames through an area that had received almost no rainfall in the past eight months.

Arizona remains primed for just such a disaster, he said.

“Hopefully, through this ad hoc hearing, we’ll learn enough to put together a plan to preserve what we have in Arizona,” Marshall, a former cop turned minister, said. “We want to come up with some solutions for what we can do, the needs of our Forestry Department and what kind of appropriations we need to raise so we can defend our forests.”

But as the subsequent four-hour hearing revealed, Arizona — and the US Forest Service — have largely squandered the nearly 23 years that have passed since the Rodeo-Chedeski Fire underscored the frightening new era of megafires.

Ambitious efforts to thin forests, scale up firefighting capabilities, restore natural low-intensity wildfires and spur changes in building standards to make communities more fireproof have largely faltered.

Year by year, visionary efforts like the Four Forests Restoration Initiative have fallen far short of the initial goals.

Meanwhile, the problem has become steadily worse — as Arizona Department of Forestry and Fire Management Director Tom Torres explained in his presentation.

That’s partly because the state is now in the grip of perhaps the worst drought in 1,000 years.

But it’s mostly because cities and counties have rushed to approve construction of new homes and businesses in the Wildlands Urban Interface (WUI) — without adopting fire-hardened building codes or even planning for evacuations.

Statewide, the number of homes built in the high-risk WUI zone has increased by 124% — these days, an alarming 1.5 million homes are in high-risk areas.

Pinal County has seen the most explosive growth, a 224% increase in the number of homes in the high-risk WUI area. That means 128,000 homes are potentially in the path of wildfires, up from 39,000, according to Torres.

The number of WUI homes in Gila County has grown by 41%, and in Navajo County, it’s a 58% increase.

But in the decades since the Rodeo-Chedeski Fire, none of those counties have adopted building codes intended to prevent embers from an approaching wildfire from setting whole blocks on fire all at once.

The initial hearing for the blue ribbon task force focused mostly on the scope of the problem.

But the committee is ultimately charged with coming up with a statewide strategy to prevent catastrophic loss.

The problems that the committee, which is packed with stakeholders from various industries across the state, is trying to address are myriad.

• Salt River Project and Arizona Public Service spoke about their efforts to keep power lines from sparking a California-style calamity.
• The Professional Fire Fighters of Arizona issued a desperate plea for the state to support Arizona’s 141 rural fire districts. They’re often the first to respond to a brush fire, but are starved for resources.
• The U.S. Forest Service has struggled for 30 years to reinvent the timber industry to deal with the thickets of small trees that now dominate millions of acres, after a century of big-tree logging, cattle grazing and fire suppression.
• Over much of Northern Arizona, tree densities have grown from 50 old-growth, fire-resistant trees per acre to thickets of small trees at densities closer to 1,000 per acre.
• The explosion of home construction in the most vulnerable areas has made the danger far worse.
• The spread of non-native grasses like buffel grass and red brome has altered the fire patterns in the desert south, fueling damaging wildfires.

The committee includes a bipartisan cadre of rural lawmakers who have been struggling for years with uncertain success to convince their urban colleagues to make wildfires a priority.

And the initial hearing represented a wrenching effort to sound the alarm in a state that, until recently, has left wildfire prevention and suppression to a largely distracted and overwhelmed US Forest Service.

The state has played mostly a bystander role when it comes to preparing for the worst, despite owning about 9 million acres of the 73 million acres in Arizona.

Another 13 million acres are privately owned and rely on fire districts and departments. The federal government owns another 30 million acres, and Tribal Trust land accounts for another 20 million.

Each year for the past five years, an average of 2,000 fires have burned an average of 443,000 acres annually, Torres told the committee. Most are human-caused.

But there are some slivers of good news.

The state has tripled its leased air resources for fighting fires in recent years. Last year, the state negotiated Good Neighbor Agreements with the Forest Service.

And Arizona has now taken over some of the timber sale preparation work from the Forest Service, which has been beset by budget problems tied to the chaotic effects of continuing budget resolutions as well as mounting, seemingly haphazard federal layoffs.

But even if the committee comes up with a statewide strategy to prevent and fight the growing wildfire threat, it doesn’t mean much if lawmakers don’t allocate the money to enact that plan.

Republican Rep. Walt Blackman, who also sits on the House Appropriations Committee, drilled into Torres’ presentation with questions about past budget allocations — including the disposition of some $75 million in one-time, mostly federal grants from the Biden administration’s stimulus and infrastructure bills.

A lot of the money went to post-fire mitigation and capital spending, with most of the money either spent or already committed to unfinished projects, according to the department’s legislative liaison.

Blackman, who represents the sprawling, forested Legislative District 6 alongside Marshall, was suspicious. He wanted more details about where the money had gone.

Marshall, on the other hand, wanted to know whether the Arizona Department of Forestry and Fire Management’s budget was sufficient to keep Arizonans safe.

“I would say we could always use more,” Torres replied.

However, he noted the department has grown from 85 employees to 240 in recent years.

The hearing mostly exposed the sweeping breadth of the problem — and the complexity of a solution. Not to mention the massive amount of money it will take to solve, just as the state is bracing for another round of tight budgeting.

But Arizona has already squandered 23 years since Rodeo-Chedeski demonstrated the danger — followed by the Wallow Fire in 2011. The number of homes at risk has doubled — and the danger has only increased.

“We’re not here to have hearings and walk away without doing anything,” Marshall told the committee and audience. “You guys are providing the information we need. This legislative session, we had 10 to 12 bills for firefighters for like $100 million. We’re not going to see that because of the budget concerns we have right now. But without you, the forest would be burning down. Neighborhoods would be burning down. We have to come to some type of resolution so we can come together and do what we can.”