NFPA Journal - Summer 2023 - 34

20
23
C&E
PREVIEW
WILDFIRE
INFLECTION POINT
L
BY MICHELE STEINBERG
ast September, I traveled to Salt
Lake City for the first meeting of
the presidential Wildland Fire
Mitigation and Management Commission.
I was both excited and
apprehensive as to what I might
encounter at the meeting-it was
a new group that included a lot of
people I didn't know, and I wasn't
sure what to expect.
On paper, the new commission held enormous
promise. Created in December 2021 by the US Departments
of Agriculture, the Interior, and Homeland
Security (through the Federal Emergency Management
Agency, or FEMA) as part of the Bipartisan
Infrastructure Law, the commission's primary task,
according to its online description, was to form " federal
policy recommendations and strategies on ways
to better prevent, manage, suppress, and recover
from wildfires. " The infrastructure law required the
50-member commission to represent federal agencies,
the private sector, and state, local, and tribal
governments; the group's initial recommendations
would be submitted as part of required reports to
Congress within a year of our first meeting. No
wonder I'd arrived in Salt Lake City with a sense
that the clock was already ticking.
Our meetings took place at the Utah State Capitol,
and on that first morning I walked up to Capitol
Hill with Kelly Martin, a fellow commission member.
Kelly and I were among the 36 nonfederal members
who had been appointed to the commission, from an
applicant pool of more than 500. Kelly is a legend in
the wildland firefighting world, with a long career in
federal service and a passion to support the needs
of the workforce through her nonprofit, Grassroots
Wildland Firefighters. My background and skills are
quite different, involving outreach and education to
inhabitants of wildfire-prone areas and work with
local and state governments through NFPA's Firewise
USA®
program. Since 2021, I had been involved in the
wildfire policy arena with the launch of NFPA's Outthink
Wildfire™
one thing in common, which was a deep commitment
34 | NFPA JOURNAL * SUMMER 2023
initiative. But Kelly and I had at least
Two years after the founding of an ambitious national wildfire
policy initiative, NFPA's wildfire chief sees many encouraging signs.
But progress remains slow, and the process is complex.
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