RIPON, Calif. — Overgrown vegetation covered the few emergency access roads still in place along the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' Stanislaus River property the day Dennis Bitters and the Ripon Fire Department responded to a fire threatening homes in 2021.
Two years after firefighters knocked down the multi-day 70-acre blaze, the Ripon Fire Department and other agencies who responded to help have yet to see a check for their work.
"It's a huge burden on the local taxpayer," said Ripon Fire Chief Bitters. "We tell the federal government about it and, you know, it's kind of a split thing."
Bitters, who commands a staff of 15 firefighters, says his department is often called to battle fires on federal or state-owned property. Neither pays property taxes, the sole funding source for many fire jurisdictions like Ripon.
While the occasional two or three-hour grass fire doesn't put a substantial dent in the small department's pocket, Bitters says the flames aren't always on the first responders' side.
"I have to make sure I can still answer medical calls, I can still answer the calls for service every day," said Bitters. "It gets very difficult when all my stuff is stuck way down in the river, buried in the trees and I can't get them out, and I've had damage to vehicles and damage to personnel."
Beyond injuries and damage, the toll of frequently providing free fire service to the federal government lingers.
"It challenges our budgets," said Bitters. "Then, we have to look at where do we go to make the budget balance. Most of the time it ends up being in the personnel area, whether in pay or benefits or people themselves."
The 2021 fire, which allegedly started on federal property and threatened $100 million in home values, cost the responding agencies at least $35,000, according to Bitters.
It was his department that was forced to pay for and bring in a bulldozer. When fires break out on state-owned property, Bitters already knows how to apply for and get reimbursed, but at the federal level, the same process doesn't exist.
"If this was a state fire, the state's responsibility area, there's a vehicle in place that allows us to start an incident and then get reimbursed for all of our costs, just like we do when we go to these large wildland fires that we see on the news," said Bitters. "We'd like to see the federal government be able to have something like that in place so that we know how to process these fires, to make sure that when we have to call in lots of resources that we're going to be reimbursed for them from the federal side."
San Joaquin County Democrat Congressman Josh Harder is aiming to change that. In May, he introduced a bill that would establish a process for the federal government to pay local fire departments back for fires fought on federal land.
The Fire Department Repayment Act would call on the secretaries of agriculture, the interior, homeland security and defense to draw up the plan within a year.
"Our local firefighters put everything on the line to keep us safe from wildfires, which are only getting bigger and burning longer year after year," Harder said in a statement. "The federal government is responsible for reimbursing our fire departments for their service on federal lands, and they shouldn’t be skipping out on the bill."
The bill now heads to subcommittees where five Republicans and two Democrats have already agreed to cosponsor it.
"At the federal level, it's your property and you're responsible for it," said Bitters. "We put the same fuel in our equipment that everybody else puts in at the gas pump. We don't get any breaks."
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