Q & A With Assistant Director Of BLM Fire And Aviation - Grant Beebe On Pay, Classification, And Other Issues

The Anchor Point Podcast Episode 116 with, Grant Beebe, Assistant Director of BLM Fire and Aviation. On today's episode we will be discussing Wildland Firefighter Pay Parity, Classification, Mental Health Issues, and much more...

The wildland firefighting workforce is currently facing a number of challenges, and these issues are the focus of The Anchor Point Podcast Episode 116. The guest on the show today is Grant Beebe, Assistant Director of BLM Fire and Aviation, and the conversation centers around current concerns regarding wildland firefighter pay parity, classification, and mental health issues.

One of the primary issues facing wildland firefighters is pay and retention. With the expiration of the BIL pay and benefits supplement in October, many fear that they will be back to the pay schedules and rates that existed before the work of the Grassroots Wildland Firefighters and NFFE. Grant acknowledges the uncertainty and discusses the potential personnel crisis that could result from a lack of equitable pay, benefits, and classification.

Beebe believes that pay parity is crucial for the men and women who are the boots on the ground. In his opinion, an equitable pay rate needs to be established, and there should be efforts to retain personnel who are vital to the day-to-day operations of wildland fire ops, including dispatchers, WG, militia, logistics, and secondary fire personnel.

Beebe explains that there are plans to address these issues, including temp buyback, insurance and benefits, and classification. However, the question of how to fix these problems remains. Beebe suggests that it may require legislative action.

Another issue affecting the wildland firefighting workforce is mental health. Beebe acknowledges that there is a mental health crisis within the ranks and discusses efforts to address the issue. He notes that the BIL provided funding for the development and improvement of mental health programs across all agencies. Beebe discusses some of the programs that are being improved with this funding and notes that there are other mental health programs on the horizon.

Beebe also discusses operational changes and concerns, including aviation, fuels, and hiring. He discusses the BLM aviation programs and how they plan to bolster fuels programs without overburdening fire employees who have already worked 1000 hour seasons. Grant also discusses transparency and honesty with hiring.

DISCLAIMER:

For the topics discussed today: I want to make it absolutely clear that I disagree with some of the things said by Grant in this episode - And I do agree with some of the stuff he says as well.

However I will say this: Grant, we're all looking up to you in the Bureau of Land Management. We hope that you have those difficult conversations and listen to the boots on the ground - Because those are the people that have the most skin in the game, and you have the position and power to bridge the gap to do what's right by them.

I hope that this is of value and I hope that everyone out there gets to understand Grant from his position and his perspective...

Y'all know the drill:

Stay safe, stay savage... Peace!

The Anchor Point Podcast is supported by the following amazing folks:

Mystery RanchNeed badass packs? Then look no further than Mystery Ranch! https://www.mysteryranch.com

Hotshot BreweryWanna pick up our Anchor Point Podcast merch or need killer coffee? Hit up Hotshot Brewery!!!

https://www.hotshotbrewing.com

Not sponsors of The Anchor Point Podcast, but great organizations:

The Wildland Firefighter FoundationAnd, as always, please consider supporting this great nonprofit organization - The Wildland Firefighter Foundation! https://wffoundation.org

The A.W.E.Wanna get some history and knowledge on Wildland Fire? Hit up The Smokey Generation!

http://wildfire-experience.org

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Q & A With Assistant Director Of BLM Fire And Aviation - Grant Beebe On Pay, Classification, And Other Issues

What’s going on, ladies and gentlemen? Welcome back. This episode is brought to you by Mystery Ranch, built for the mission. If you don’t know anything about the Mystery Ranch Fire Line Packs, maybe you should. Look into it. Dana Gleason went down to a South Op Shop crew. He tied in with those folks. From there, they developed what you have on your back on the line. That is where the hotshot pack, the hot top and all those other packs came from. It’s direct relationships with the boots on the ground. They have a long-standing tradition and a promise to Wildland Firefighters that will not ever change.

What else do they do? They are also in charge of the Mystery Ranch Backbone Series. If you don’t know what that is, you got until May 31st, 2023 to submit your stories. If you are telling the story of Wildland Fire and your story is selected, you get an opportunity to win a $1,000 grant from Mystery Ranch in the Backbone Series. If you want to find out more, go to www.MysteryRanch.com and check it out.

The show is also going to be brought to you by our premier coffee sponsor. That is going to be none other than Hotshot Brewery. It is kick-ass coffee for a kick-ass cause. A portion of the proceeds will always go back to the Wildland Firefighter Foundation. What else do they do? They’ve done quite a bit, and they continue to do so.

They make all of the tools of the trade to get your mornings started off right. They have a full line of Wildland Firefighter-themed apparel to help rep that Wildland Firefighter culture. On top of that, check this out. If you want to get some Anchor Point swag, head over to www.HotshotBrewing.com, and there, you can find all the kick-ass coffee, swag, apparel, and tools of the trade to get your more to start it off right.

I got to give a quick little shout-out to my buddy Booze over at The A.S.S. Movement. That stands for the Anti-Service Shooting Movement. My homie is a firefighter up there in AK and he is doing the good deed of spreading poo-burying propaganda across the globe. I don’t know about everybody out there that is reading, but I hate it when I see a surface turd or someone doesn’t clean up the wreckage left behind their human excrement. It is disgusting and that s*** needs to stop.

Not only is he one of my close homies but we also worked together on some other projects. He got a good mission. It all started from humble beginnings, which you can ask him all about. If you have it over to www.TheFireWild.com and check out the A.S.S. Movement and use the code Anchor Point Ass 10 at checkout, you can save 10% off your entire order through The A.S.S. movement.

Last but not least, I have a great relationship with Bethany over there at The Smokey Generation AKA The American Wildfire Experience AKA Wildfire-Experience.org. It’s awesome. You should go check it out because it is a history-telling and storytelling project all for the boots on the ground by the boots on the ground. If you want to check out some notes and some interesting stories from your peers in the field or some of those folks that are still in the game but have a story to tell from long times ago.

Some of these stories go all the way back to the 1940s and there are well over 100 of them. If you want a little history lesson, a little trip down memory lane, or want to see what The Smokey Generation is all about, go over to www.Wildfire-Experience.org and check it out because you can win one of these $500 grants to tell your story of wildland firefighting by submitting your story and your project to the Smokey Generation. Bethany, you have a kick-ass organization over there. Keep it up.

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This has been a wild week. I have a ton of content and episodes to share. I have a little over 13 to 14 hours of content to share with you all. The reason why I have that is because Micah Booze and I, the A.S.S. Movement man himself, got invited down to the Bureau of Land Management pre-season meeting for all the employees. We had the opportunity to do not only a little seminar on social health and social wellness in a modern era, which was awesome but also we got to mingle with some folks that we cut our teeth with in the fire game. I hope everybody that sat in on that got some value out of it. Booze, shout-out to you.

I want to give a little special shout-out to Vanessa Marquez and Brock Uhlig. We got Paul Petersen. Happy retirement. It is good to see you starting some new endeavors. You got some cool projects. Fair disclaimer, this is going to be a lot of content, specifically the Bureau of Land Management from the State of Nevada. It is where I have done the majority of my career. I learned a lot of stuff from these folks. They have always treated me well. It might seem a little bit chilly, but I got to pay credit and give some love to the folks that made me who I am now because, without these folks, I wouldn’t be sitting here on this microphone.

This episode is going to be all about upcoming things. When I say that, we are going to be talking about the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the changes on the horizon. It does run out in October 2023. We have other things that are going on now like the presidential budget. Let’s cut to the chase. In this episode, I’m going to have a sit-down conversation with Grant Beebe. If you don’t know who that is, he is the Assistant Fire Aviation Director for the Bureau of Land Management. He is one of those head hunch shows up there at NIFC.

Full disclaimer, I do not agree with everything that is going on on Capitol Hill nor does he. However, he is forced to eat the same turd sandwich as you folks on the ground. He does have a unique power and position where he can communicate with those SES and upper-level Washington execs and help drive that narrative and changes.

Grant, we are all looking up to you in the Bureau of Land Management. We hope you move mountains. We hope that you have those difficult conversations and listen to the boots on the ground because those are the people that matter the most. I’m not saying that everybody else doesn’t matter, but let’s talk about the lowest denominator here, those GS-3s through.

As I said, I don’t agree with everything and I do publicly go against some of the stuff that he says. However, I do agree with some of the stuff he says as well. You guys get to decipher that. I hope that this is of value and that you guys and girls out there get to understand Grant from his position and perspective. Without further ado, I would like to introduce Grant Beebe. Welcome to the show.

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On the show, I’ve got a special guest, Grant Beebe. He is the Assistant Director for the Fire and Aviation Program with the Bureau of Land Management. How are you doing?

I’m doing well. Thanks for having me on.

I want to say thank you so much for being on the show. I sent you a list of questions, topics, notes, and stuff. Usually, I don’t do that. Everything is unscripted for the most part and mostly unedited but we had to submit those because of the level you are at.

As always, people are scared of what I’m going to say, but these are touchy subjects. People want to make sure that they understand the questions they are going to get asked. I’m always free and willing to talk. These are important issues. You can ask me whatever you want, even if it wasn’t on the list.

There has been a lot of stuff going on on Capitol Hill and questions from the boots on the ground. The intent here for this show is to bridge the gap between the boots on the ground, NIFC, and Washington. You are in the middle of all that, but at the same time, you have an understanding of what is going on at the upper echelons of government and the boots on the ground. You are going to be one of those people that has to implement some of these programs so I appreciate you being on the show and trying to explain all this stuff. Other than that, let’s get a little bit of history and background from you.

I am in the middle and I understand both ends imperfectly. I understand what’s going on on Capitol Hill within my purview. I was a boot on the ground but it’s been a while. I won’t say that I know exactly everything that is going on with people who are doing this job. It’s different from the way I did the job a couple of decades ago. I’ve been out of the field for a while.

I started with hand crews. I was a service hand crew person in Northern California. I got an opportunity to jump into the BLM organization at the Fire Center in the early ‘90s. We are going back a couple of decades there. I jumped for a while and then when I had kids, I decided I needed to stay a little closer to home. I had some skills that I could apply and got into budgeting and planning. People kept retiring but I kept applying and here I am. I’m happy to be here. I’m happy to try to represent some of those boots on the ground. I will try to remember what it was like when I was GS-2. I’m not that anymore, but I try to keep in mind what it was like. I don’t always do a good job of that, but I’m always trying.

Here is a question for you. The changes that you have seen over the years. You used to be in Ops. You used to jump out of a perfectly good aircraft.

There is no such thing as a perfectly good aircraft. You always want to have a parachute on your back when you are in an airplane. That is not me.

The plane is not a perfectly good aircraft. It is going to take you to one place and that is usually through the scene of the crash. One of the most overlooked things for the boots on the ground is looking to expand and diversify your career. A lot of people want to be Ops their entire life. They want to be the lifelong Hotshot superintendent in operations. As far as getting into the other things like finance, logs, and radio communications, what suggestions would you give to the folks that are out there now?

One thing that is different now than it was when I was coming up is that there are a lot more opportunities now. Across the Bureau of Land Management, we got many vacancies in different departments. If people have an interest in other things, they are always looking for help. One of the beautiful things that’s going on now is we have the opportunity to extend people’s tours more than we have in the past. Not to bring it all back to where I started, but it took me ten years to get an appointment with the agency.

Wildland Firefighter: Across the Bureau of Land Management, we have so many vacancies in so many different departments that if people have interest in other things, they're always looking for help.

that allows it to happenIt’s different for people now. You can get a career appointment earlier. You can work longer fire seasons than we used to longer tours. There’s more opportunity for people to branch out if they got an interest. Everybody out there in the bureau needs help so when people come available in the shoulder seasons in the winter months, they still want to work. Often, there’s work for them and they just got to ask.

It was a natural fit for me to go into budgeting. That’s where I went. I went into planning and budgeting when I did hit the end of that Ops career where I wanted to stop traveling but I had fewer opportunities back then. That was in the mid-aughts. Now there are a lot more opportunities than there were back then.

I was in the right place at the right time. I got a budgeting job because I love to do spreadsheets. Not everybody does, but I did. I turned that into a budgeting thing. Frankly, I loved that work. It was fun. I got to do some Op stuff off to the side but that was a good transition for me. It wouldn’t be for everybody. Radio, GIS, remote weather stations, fuel work, there’s a ton of fuel work out there, planning work, helping people out on stuff that they need help on admin functions. There are all sorts of work out there that needs to get done. The first step is to tell the folks who are in the supervisory chain that you got an interest outside of doing the Op stuff and see what they can do with it.

We were doing a preseason meeting with the Nevada folks. One thing we do talk about all the time is trying to keep people in the business and not drive them hard in the Ops chain that they have to turn their back on the career because it is hard to do. We’re always trying to preach that work a long season if you can but look for other opportunities to develop a skillset. When you decide either voluntarily or involuntarily that you no longer want to be found on the ground, be digging line, and there is something else out there that you’re ready and able to do. I did a little bit of that. I went to grad school. I perfected my spreadsheet skills and was able to apply those skills to a different job when I made that choice.

Sometimes that choice is made for you. You blow out a knee. You develop asthma. Your family situation changes and you can’t travel anymore. You want to be ready for that when it happens if you possibly can. As a bureau and community, we’re trying to make it easier on folks when that day comes and have them ready, willing, and able to make a transition and stick with us if they will.

One of the things I was trying to allude to is I’m a huge proponent of expanding your horizons, getting some more experience under your belt, and diversifying your career that way in case you do take a gnarly fall on a jump or you do blow out your knee Hotshotting. You have options out there and you can still put food on the plate.

Expand your horizons. Get some more experience under your belt and diversify your career.

We had a jumper drop out of training and we were able to pull him into our external affairs shop. He went to work on external affairs for the summer and developed some skills. It was a great thing for him and us too to have this operational person who was fresh off the line come in and help with external affairs stuff and do some work. There are always opportunities out there. You got to be a little imaginative and figure out what you want to do. If there’s something beyond Ops you want to do, by all means, ask the question and raise your hand. Learning on the job is always the best way to learn stuff.

Learning on the job is always the best way to learn stuff.

I hate when people do that whole like, “All I know is operations. That is all I am. I’m just a firefighter.” No, it’s bigger than that. You’re a professional problem solver and you’re good at it.

One of the beauties of fire and why we always talk about having other people come in and help us manage fires is because they get to practice things like leadership, decision-making, collaboration, public speaking, and all those things that you get to do as a fire person on a routine basis that other people can only dream about. Don’t sell yourself short. If you’re a ground pounder, you got a ton of skills. You need to apply them in the right spot.

Last but not least, before we get into the meat and potatoes of this episode, let’s talk about the fire behavior when you are coming up through the ranks, what you experienced out there, and how it has changed.

The risk of reusing a story, I use this a lot, and I remember in guard school. I was in Northern Cal going through basic. We would talk about the big fires that people had seen and experienced. They were the war stories people would talk about during 130 and 190 in those introductory courses. They would talk about this fire called the Fat Rat Fire.

That fire was on the lost batteries. It was 130,000 acres or something like that. You compare it to your basic year in California these days with the Dixie Fire, Caldor, Camp, or Car. The fires that were held up as calamitous fires in California when I was cutting my teeth as a college kid trying to pay his way through school are way different from the war stories people are telling now about Dixie hitting a million acres. Big fires, different fire behavior, longer lasting, different seasons, all that stuff.

We have been saying it for three decades but we’re finally getting across to people that this is different. This is not what we grew up with in the ‘50s, ‘60, ‘70s, ‘80s, ‘90s, in the aughts, or even a few years ago. It is changing. It feels more than mathematically possible that things are getting way more intense. On top of it, we’re seeing effects of fires that we didn’t see before. We’re running the risk of losing entire ecosystems, at least in our lifetimes. Forest types might not re-establish. We’re running the risk of changing the landscape in such a way that we’re going to be missing some particular pieces of the landscape that we’ve grown used to over the years.

It sucks to see that because we grew up, at least I grew up, and probably a majority of Wildland Firefighters out there grew up doing outdoor stuff. It’s a natural calling. You’re seeing this generational damage of cross forest and it’s all because of these mega-fires, giga fires, or whatever you want to call it in the Steve Prime context, but it’s happening.

It is tied to climate change. You may have a fire driver system in some sterile state. It will never come back in our lifetimes because of the available moisture and the temperature regime. There’s a real concern that we need to preserve some landscapes and we can’t let nature run its course.

There is an application for good fire across the latest case. It’s not a one size fits all thing. It is one of the safest ways to fight fire with fire. It is also effectively nature’s garbage disposal. We got to apply that practically at the right time, environment, force, and ecology.

We talk about hitting fuel targets and the fuel treatments that we need to do as land management agencies. I’m talking inclusive here. Fed agencies, state, and local need to account for a good fire however it shows up. If we’re lightening it, that is one thing. If it’s occurring from a lightning strike, we’re shepherding a fire around to do good things. The only way we’re going to hit the acre targets that we need to hit is by making use of fire that occurs on the landscape without us needing to set it. I got to admit that is part of the equation.

Here is the question that wasn’t on the list, speaking of those pop-up questions. As far as targets, what are our targets as far as fuel treatments across the West? If you want to throw it in a nationwide thing, that’s hard to say.  

We should admit that we’re going to burn 10 million to 20 million acres a year across the West one way or another on average. The question is, how much of that are we going to light ourselves and how much of that is going to be lit for us? That’s what we should expect for burning. What we want to see is that when those 10 million acres burn in a majority of places in a way in which we want them to burn, they create the effects that we want. That’s the goal.

Not that we banish burning from the landscape because this is a fire environment. We live in nature and it is built by fire. It is always going to burn but it is burning in a way that we can live with. People can live because of where they recreate where they live and fire that’s creating the ecological effects that we want it to create on the far end. That’s the goal. The way we get there is sometimes suppressing fires, using it, and doing a hell of a lot more fuel management than we have been by virtue of effort, other priorities, and money.

For BLM, informally, we have been aiming for a million acres of treatment a year. We manage about 240 million. A million seems like a lot but it’s small compared to that 240 million. Of that 240 million, that’s not all high-priority work. Let’s say that we have 80 million acres and that we want to focus on the BLM because of values. Those values could be homes but they could be grazing allotments, community interests, and things that people depend on. They could be timber and recreational values.

Let’s say we got 80 million acres to manage intensively of fire risk and we want to treat or we have been treating about a million. That was an aspirational goal and we got to it. In 2023, we’re hoping to hit somewhere in 1.3 million acres treated. As a group, we’re aiming for 2 million acres a year. Of that 80 million, if we’re treating 2 million acres a year, we think we’re on a decent glide path.

This is a generational investment. This is not one-and-done, a budget cycle, or a political thing. This is what we need to do forever. We need to be treating 2 million acres until I’m dead, you are dead, and our kids and grandkids are dead. That needs to be going on and on. This is not something that we’re going to treat and be done and be like, “We don’t have to fight fire anymore. We don’t need Hotshots.” No, we’re always going to be managing the fire.

I’m speaking from my agency here. If we get the landscape in better shape, we’re going to be able to make better use of fire. We’re going to be beating our heads against the wall maybe a little bit less and we’ll have fewer deleterious effects on the far end when fires do occur. In the BLM land, a lot of what we manage is full suppression ground. It’s ground that’s burning too much. It’s a range of land that is degraded and burned every 3, 4, to 5 and should be burned every 25, 75, to 100 years.

We're always going to be managing fire, but if we can get a landscape in better shape, we're going to be able to make better use of fire.

We’ve had a lot of places where we’ve flat out to have many exotic invasives coming in and cheap grasses. The noted example is Winnemucca to Bird Valley and you see it. We get a lot of lands where we need to put the fire out for a long time to try to recover that landscape. That’s a big emphasis in our bureau.

We also have landscapes where we need to do a little more burning. Juniper, for sure. There is a lot of discussion about how much is the right amount of pinyon-juniper. We know sage grass could use a little more opened pinyon-juniper stands. We got pinyon jay. That is a different species that have different dependencies. We got people who also depend on pinyon nuts. We got to find a balance there because we got a lot of pinyon-juniper. We need to manage that a little more intensively. That might require more fire use.

That’s a good way to get rid of the stuff, especially in the areas where it is overgrown. You’re going to have to nuke it out, but it requires intense fire.

Anybody who has done PJ work knows. Season burning is one of the only ways to deal on a big scale. That’s scary because that gets up in the crowns and rolls. It takes a while. Boise district has been doing a great job of getting the landscape set up so that they can let more fires burn out there. They are burning some holes out there. They got more fine field growth. The fires will do more good and burn into some of those stands. They are setting it up for success long-term.

These are all long-term investments and goals. My worry with a lot of these investments is that people will see a big fire season next year or the year after, and they will say, “What are we doing? We are throwing all this money on fire and still having big fire seasons.” We’re going to have big fire seasons for our lifetimes and the next lifetime. It is where we’re going until the weather changes for a decade but it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen anytime soon.

Those 2 million acres you’re talking about is a drop in the bucket comparatively speaking to other agencies and departments like the Department of Agriculture and the United States Forest Service. They got much more land.

I don’t know the Forest Service numbers now, but they probably treat 2 million acres in the Southeast on an annual basis. Those are different burns. They’re doing more maintenance burning. In the Southeast state and private sector, those guys are burning way more aggressively on shorter intervals because they have to. Also, because of the ecological nature of the Southeast with longleaf pine and all that stuff that’s going on down there, plus their incredible history of doing burning.

We can’t export that model from the Southeast to the West easily. They have different landscapes, fuel, topography, and weather. The Forest Service would like to get to much bigger numbers in the West. That is their goal across priority fire sheds and the chief’s priorities. You see all that stuff rolling out. It is great stuff. It is going to take a lot of work on the Forest Service part to hit the targets that they are trying to hit in the West. A lot of it is going to be taking advantage of natural ignitions where they can. I’m sure that’s going to be part of it because that’s the only way to hit some of the big goals that they have.

We also have a little bit of a people problem that we’re starting to develop here. That’s a good segue into the next set of topics that we’re going to be talking about. That is going to be all of the gripes from both the public and the boots on the ground. I don’t want to say these gripes because there is change on the horizon. I do believe that with enough guidance that the Federal government legislators and the agencies can direct this into a positive change for the boots on the ground. You agreed with me. You said, “Yes, we do have a people problem.” Is it getting worse?

We are holding our own but it’s anecdotal. I saw some attrition data, for my bureau at least, that talked about when people’s crews do they leave the agency and what series? I can see that 462s, where most of our forest techs are soon to be 456 Wildland Fire Specialists or whatever we’re going to end up titling them. Wildland Firefighters tend to leave at the GS-6 and GS-7 levels. For permanent employees, that’s the way they depart. That’s where a lot of people are like, “I’m done with this. I have no transition plan in place. I don’t like what is above me in the pay grade scale.”

We have fewer opportunities at that next grade than we should, which is one of the problems, especially for people who want to transition into something that is less Ops sit, travel, and a little different. It’s a tough grade level to make that transition. What we want to do, at least in the fire organization, is build more opportunities.

If you’re a GS-7 or GS-8 and you want to be done with that GS-7 or GS-8 work because it entails duties that you can’t handle any more for whatever reason, but there is something else out there for you within the fire organization that’s more fuels work and more tied to a home base that has some different set of duties that you can still contribute and do some fire stuff but doesn’t necessarily have to be on the road all the time. That’s the goal.

A lot of what we’re doing is trying to build out the organization, not building the boots on the ground doing firefighting work but also the support organizations that have been underfunded and understaffed in the past that also give people more opportunities or to flat out give people its “sabbatical time.” Give them save time to do something different like if you want to take a season and do something different.

Personally, I have done that a couple of times in my job. I don’t have a lot of boots on the ground in my organization other than the smoke jumper unit. I have had a couple of guys who want to go out and learn to fly. I’ll say, “Take a year off. Learn to fly and come back.” That has been successful. That model has to happen more.

People have to be more ingenious as managers about recognizing they have invested in this employee who is invested his or her time in the organization. Let’s keep that relationship going. Look for a way to feed those interests. Give somebody an opportunity to either inside or outside of government and bring them back in. Those are the things that need to happen at every level so we keep people in the organization and they don’t bail out on us.

We have a people problem. We have people leaving the organization for a variety of reasons, but not lost on us is they can make more money doing easier work elsewhere. It could be working for PG&E doing fireworks. It could be going to work for Cal Fire doing fireworks for Cal Fire. It could be working for Colorado, Oregon, or Washington. I’m trying to think of all the states that pay more than the Federal government, at least before the bill that we are paying more than the Federal government for doing fireworks.

We have people leaving the organization for a variety of reasons, but it’s not lost on us that they can make more money doing easier work elsewhere.

Part of what happened with the Infrastructure Law and with President Biden coming out and saying, “Every firefighter should be making at least $15 an hour.” It was that pay inequity that people were doing the same work in state organizations or private organizations and getting paid less. That was the first recognition.

The Infrastructure Law came around and said, “Let’s apply that to everybody regardless of where they live, bump up that pay, and try to make it commensurate both with other organizations that are doing the same work and with the general level of risk that is attributed to the job that should be compensated flat out by itself. You are doing this hard work. We should pay you better than $13 an hour.” You see GS-3s making in the mid-twenties, which is awesome. It’s perfect.

It’s not sustainable if you are going to stay at GS-3.

As you alluded, that hasn’t necessarily fixed our problem. There are two things going on out there. One, it’s not about pay. It is also about the life that is required of you to make this pay count. You still got to travel, work a lot of overtime, and be on the road a lot. There are still a lot of pressures and dangerous jobs, plus the permanent fix isn’t there yet. I’m sure most people are hip to that. They’re waiting to see if Congress will come through with some permanent fix as opposed to this Band-Aid approach we have had so far.

Moving back to what you were saying earlier about having your most attrition at that GS-4 to the GS-7 level. That’s a life issue compounded with your pay and classification. When I was a GS-6 and GS-7, I was getting married and trying to buy my first house. I was serious about it. That’s why a lot of those mid-level career persons, that would be mid-low career professionals in the fire service, are dipping out and finding other jobs in the private sector or a different agency in a different state.

It’s because you have this sudden realization that your ground-pounding is a young man’s and young woman’s sport. When you settle down, want to have kids, have the two-and-a-half kid’s white picket fence, and the American dream, that is hard to do on $16 to $17 an hour. Even with the BIL, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, it got an expiration date on it. It’s hard.

Ground pounding is very much a young man and young woman's sport. When you settle down and have kids and a white picket fence, it's really hard to do on $16 or $17 an hour.

We could do a whole episode on housing. That is not unique to us. Housing is housing now and there isn’t an industry that isn’t affected by the lack of affordable housing for its workers.

It doesn’t even matter if you’re in tech in San Francisco.

I work at a fire center where we hire a lot of GS-12s, GS-13s, and GS-14s. We get a lot of people up in that pay scale, at least for base pay. It is considerably higher than GS-7. Those folks have a hard time moving, especially with interest rates being what they are. It’s a huge investment in my market and the Boise market, and that is not atypical. People were buying houses over the internet almost unseen or seen through whatever fish islands that somebody wanted to use on their Zillow listing.

People were flat-out buying what they could because they were desperate. That is a hard thing. I did buy my picket fence when I was GS-7. My wife and I pulled our savings. I borrowed some from my mom when we managed a down payment and got a house. It’s not the same world now. Housing is its own thing. How are we going to figure that out? That is a different discussion with the country figuring out how to build more housing.

It’s not the same across the country.

Rents are high too. It is a tough market in every Western town that I can think of. It’s not just Sacramento, Reno, Boise, or Winnemucca. As a result, if they don’t have housing provided for them, they are faced with living out of their van and hoping that they go off on a lot of fires. They don’t have to live in their van every day. They go off on Pretium, manage to get a hotel, and get a shower. It’s a tough thing.

My boots-on-the-ground experience is different from what folks have these days. It is a tough time in people’s careers. The GS-7 and GS-8 level were like, “What am I going to do? Am I going to do this for a career, or do I have to do something else?” We are still going to lose a lot of people at that grade level. They are going to say, “This was fun. I don’t want to do more of this. I don’t wanna bump up a level and become a supervisor.” A lot of people are going to make that choice and flat out. That is going to happen.

We want to give more opportunities to people who think, “I love fire. I like to stay involved, but I don’t necessarily want to be pounding the ground. What else can I do that feels like fire that is a little less the job I have been doing?” That’s where I say building out fuels organizations, incident business, warehouse support, and all these jobs that we should be supporting better with some of these funds that we are getting.

What we’re trying to do is trying to build that organization. We’re building land organization because we need those skills, but it also hopefully will give an opportunity for folks who want to make that life decision where they stop traveling but still work in the field or do something else for us. Work GIS or do this other thing. There there are all sorts of great opportunities out there in public land management that aren’t firefighting.

People are screaming to fill jobs. It’s a great opportunity in a lot of ways to be somebody entering the field because it won’t take ten years to get an appointment the way it did for me. It’s our grapes on my part. That is saying, “It is a buyer’s market. You’re the seller. If you got something you want to do, make an offer, and somebody will jump at it.”

There are all sorts of great opportunities out there in public land management that aren't firefighting, and people are screaming to fill jobs.

You have to move around to move up in your career. I don’t think that’s ever going to change. You can pipeline or stove pipe all of your career ladders to perfect. However, the reality of it is you got to get other experience in other fuel types, other areas, and all that other stuff to diversify your career. If you’re going to be sitting around in the same forest service station or BLM duty station, you’re not going to progress as fast as you want. I don’t know any other way to put it other than that.

It’s a choice you make. Some people make that choice. You have fallen in love with the place and you see what you can do in that place. Some people have made that work fine. Getting well-rounded is a great way to operate. Move around and get a lot of experience. One of the beauties of fire is that you move around in your own job. If you are an operational person and you’re doing a lot of fire assignments, you get a lot of experience in a lot of different fuel types from your day job. You don’t necessarily have to move.

There is that tradition in the agency of moving around to move up. With remote work and telework, that has changed a little bit. There are a lot more remote opportunities in our agency than there used to be where people are saying, “You don’t have to live in Salt Lake City to have this job, but you got to live somewhere in Utah.” That is a much different solution than we used to have where it used to be like, “You must move to this other town. Here’s your cubicle.”

Everybody cringes about it, especially operational folks.

Cubicle Town is a real thing. We’re a lot more flexible in what we do now. There are a lot more opportunities to work in a more flexible manner in the Federal government than there used to be. That’s mostly a good thing.

Being a young person in your twenty-somethings, there is something wildly attractive about living out of your car, that dirtbag lifestyle. You and I have lived that to some degree. There’s something enchanting about that dirtbag lifestyle, but that GS-6 and GS-7, when you’re starting to get serious with your wife or girlfriend and you have kids, it’s hard.

That was a decision I made. When it was my wife and I, she had her own business. I would check out for 90 days. She would have to get used to me when I got back like everybody has experienced or many people have experienced. When we had kids, that was a whole other thing. That was me saying, “I don’t want to be the absentee dad.” Luckily, I was able to transition out. I was at a point in my career where most people weren’t. I wasn’t a GS-7. I wasn’t locked into an option. I didn’t have to keep taking fire assignments to make ends meet. I was incredibly lucky. I also delayed having a child until I was a little older and more established. That is hard.

I pity anybody who has to make that hard call because that is tough. Nobody wants to be missing their kids’ events and leaving to their spouse major chunks of child-rearing. That feels unfair. Unfortunately, the way the world works these days, the male is pawning off those duties on females. That is the way it’s typically gone. That’s not going to change in our lifetimes. It’s a hard call to be a spouse and say, “You take care of our kids. I’m going to be the breadwinner.” That feels awful, to me at least, as a parent. I know many people going through that. Many people don’t have the luxury that I had of opting out so I feel lucky to be able to do that.

The people at home are oftentimes the people that have to bear the burden of the firefighter out doing operations in the summer. One of the reasons why I got out of the game is because one was to pay. Reno is an extraordinarily expensive town to live in. My family and my wife’s family are here. My kids are here growing up next to their grandparents. However, you need X amount of dollars to make that dream a reality. Living out of my truck with a 2-year-old and a 10-month-old is not going to happen. I had consciously made that decision. I have no regrets about that. Do I miss it? Absolutely. Looking back, I couldn’t imagine some of the burdens that some of the folks on the boots on the ground have to face. That’s something that you and I opted out of. It’s a real thing.

People are torn about it. I love the job and I love my family but I got to make a choice or do both poorly, which must feel bad. The goal is to give more folks more opportunities when they’re faced with those sorts of things. We’re talking about kids. It doesn’t have to be kids. It could be, “I’m burned down on this lifestyle. I want to do something different.” If we could find homes for those folks when they reach that day or even if it’s temporary like, “I need a year off,” we got to be able to find that solution there. Keep people in. Don’t lose them permanently if we can help it.

That is especially hard for dual fire.

I know some of those. It is beyond comprehension how they manage, but they do. It’s ingenious. I said this earlier. We’re talking a lot about the challenges in the work. I want to put a plug-in for how awesome this job is. We’re trying to bring people in who have gotten affinity for taking care of the land, people, fire, and business. It’s an amazing profession. There are all sorts of opportunities in it. It teaches you things you won’t learn any place else or very few other places. It gives you opportunities to experience things you won’t experience anywhere else, including teamwork camaraderie, a sense of purpose, a sense of mission, and all that stuff that attracts people to the job.

We want to say, “That stuff is still there but let’s make it a long-term livable job, not only something cool that you do and by definition, you have to burn out on because it’s unsustainable.” We want to recognize that it’s a great job. We want to keep plug-in that there’s a reason to come work for us. Sometimes, we make it seem like there’s no reason to come work for us.

I was having this conversation with Kevin Kelly, Superintendent of Silver State. He was like, “Some of the lessons that I have learned in Wildland Fire have been some of the most influential things in my entire life. It’s undoubtedly formed me into who I am as a person now. It has done wonders for me.” That experience alone, plus all the friends, the fire family, and all the cool, untouched-by-humanity nature that you get to see, whether it happens to be on fire or not on fire, is irreplaceable. It’s a beautiful job.

Change is happening. It’s got to be slow. If we can attract those new applicants and retain our current workforce with these new changes that are on the horizon, this would be an absolute dream job for all walks of the GS level. We’re getting there. Bureaucracy is a large and cumbersome ship, and it is hard to turn.

We’re talking about big changes. One way to think of it is that it’s going slow. Another way to think of it is that it’s going incredibly fast. If you look at the legislation that’s stacked up out there that we see proposed for the most part, you are like, “Look at all this stuff.” If 1/10 of this comes true, we’re going to be in a much different and better spot, but it’s a long-term commitment. We’re worried that people will lose interest. It was like, “It is going to be the next issue.” It can’t be the next issue. It’s got to be every year’s issue. This has got to stay foremost in people’s minds.

Fire is not going away. If it did, we would be in trouble as a species. We are inexorably connected with fire. We wouldn’t have evolved as a species unless it was for fire. Let’s keep that around.

If we don’t have fire, that means everything has turned into a desert and we’re going to be moving North. We’re going to be headed to Canada.

Sorry, Canada.

You didn’t want 350 million of your closest neighbors coming.

Let’s get into the topics and concerns. This is a wonderful job. I will state that, however, there are some things that we need to address as far as how we do not necessarily treat our firefighters. The way our bureaucracy works and some of the things that we need to re-engineer, revamp, or re-look at in some way and those things are happening, especially with the efforts of Grassroots Wildland Firefighters, NFFE, and all the boots on the ground. There has been a big change from the silent professional of the old school into this transitory because some people are going to be vocal about it.

Not all of them, but nowadays, we have a lot of people standing up and shouting from the rooftops, saying, “We need this.” It’s all walks of life, including people at the upper echelons of government all the way down to your GS-3. I applaud those people and the efforts they’re making. However, these questions right here that I submitted to you are directly crowdsourced from the audience of the show. For the folks out there who submitted their questions for Grant here, I appreciate you. Let’s get into it.

These are ordered by severity and how many times they came up. Keep that in mind here. We brushed on this earlier with our rants, chat, and little side note that we went down there. The number one topic of concern is going to be pay and retention. People are scared about the uncertainty of the BIL, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, and its looming expiration. Correct me if I’m wrong here, but that is going to be expiring on October 10, 2023.

Technically, it expires when the money runs out. We are ballparking when that will be, but let’s say early fall of 2023.

Many fear that they’re going back down to the pay schedules and rates before the work that Grassroots Wildland Firefighters and NFFE have accomplished with this. What do you want people to know regarding this?

The cliff is real. The bill had a certain amount of money for the foresters and the DOI to pay for the supplement that people have been experiencing since last summer of 2022. That was retroactive to when the law got passed. That would have been October 1st of ‘21. It was retroactive to then. It has been paying forward ever since. We did retroactive payments in 2022. It caught people up and had been paying forward.

When we run out of money, we run out of authority to do that. That was particular to a law that Congress passed and it was the Infrastructure Law. It was Bipartisan hence the bill language or IIJW. There are other dollars that are still floating around in the bill. We’re doing fuel work with it, but they have all had specific dollar amounts and targets for those dollars.

It is true that those funds will expire. This is a congressionally mandated initiative. Congress needs to do something. They probably have a number of things they could do. They could do another bill. A particular interest for us is the ‘24 budget proposal that went forward. It is the President’s Budget, we call it, which includes ways to get similar pay supplements to what the bill has been doing for firefighters. The legislation is required to do that and the money that is required to do it. It takes money from Congress to pay those salaries into the future. It takes some congressional action to force the change in our payroll systems that allows it to happen. That is the easiest way to describe it.

Wildland Firefighter: It takes money from Congress to pay those salaries into the future, and then it takes some congressional action to force the change in our payroll systems that allows it to happen. 

The solutions that have been proposed are in discussion about what it looks like, but it’s a different pay table for fire folks. It’s for people who are in special fire retirement coverage. Primary and secondary firefighter retirement are the people who are getting the pay supplement. Those are the people who are proposed to get it in the ‘24 budget.

If Congress acts on that presidential budget and enacts the part of it, as described, from October 1st, 2023, this new way of looking at pay supplements would come into force. People would notice a difference because the pay amounts will change but they would continue to be getting some pay supplement.

Two things have to happen. Congress has to give us some money to do this. They have to do some legislative fixes to something called a pay table for firefighters. It’s April 18th, 2023 now so there is not a lot of time. Congress is still negotiating the debt ceiling and other things. There’s a lot of posturing on what should or shouldn’t happen in relation to deficits.

To my understanding, there’s a lot of support for this initiative. There’s a lot of support for paying firefighters more as appropriate. There’s a lot of support for getting this done. Firefighting is a white hat thing. One of the beautiful things about fire is that it doesn’t matter who’s in the White House or who’s in Congress. Nobody ever says, “Go away, firefighters.” It is bipartisan and there’s bipartisan support. It’s part of that whole negotiation process. Everybody wants to do this.

Firefighting is a white hat thing. It doesn't really matter who's in the White House or who's in Congress. Nobody ever says, “Go away, firefighters.”

It will be a question of how they get it done, but you know how this stuff works. Nothing happens without some countermeasure happening out there. This is how Congress works. It is going to be fraught with discussion, brinksmanship, and everything else. It’s going to be a chip. It’s like, “We will do this if you do that.”

I’m confident. I’m usually not a glass-half-full guy on everything but this is crazy not to happen. The legislative fix for the pay and some funding to pay for it. At the very least, the legislative fix on the pay table is going to happen. I do have a concern that we’re going to have to scramble to figure out how to pay for it, but if nothing else, we would be forced to pay higher salaries. We have to figure it out. That’s where my brain goes. It’s too popular to let fall it’s going to happen but it might not happen until late in the game.

My primary job is to try to manage the BLM’s 3,500 fire folks in concert with all their local managers, but I try to make things right for the program to make sure that the program is successful. We don’t do that without bringing in great people and keeping them. We’re not going to do that if this fails. I have faith in Congress that they’re going to make this happen. It is truly bipartisan and a no lose situation. They’re going to figure it out. It’s laid out before. They know what they need to do. Every congressperson I talk to, I don’t talk to that many, but the ones I talk to recognize that they need to make it happen. That bill was a flash in the pan and they needed to do something permanently. I think it will.

They need to do it right. If they don’t do it without the input of the Wildland Firefighters and the boots on the ground, it’s going to fall flat on its face. People are going to be pissed.

There’s a proposal out there that is a sliding scale for GS-3s through GS-15s and it does not look like what has been happening in the bill. It’s a combination of portal-to-portal pay and base rate pay. It is tilted toward the lower grades and boots on the ground, more so than it is to higher-graded managers.

It is good for recruitment and mid-level retention.

It’s honoring what Congress said they initially wanted to do, which was pay firefighters more. I am a fire manager. They didn’t say, “Pay fire managers more.” They said, “We want to pay firefighters more.” This proposal that has gone forward is reflective of that. For the lower grades, it pays them more of an increase than it does for higher grades by percentages. That’s more in line with what Congress said they wanted to do.

There was a lot of scrambling when the bill got passed on how to make that happen. People grabbed at a fairly easy solution, the $20,000 or 50%, whichever is less. With this one, there’s a little more math involved. It’s great. It’s way better than we had before the bill but people are not going to remember before the bill. The 800 people in our agency are new. This is all they have ever experienced. The perception is that people are going to see that we’re taking something away from them, not that we’re giving them something that they didn’t have before the Infrastructure Law.

My big fear is people are going to look at it as, “I’m getting less,” as opposed to, “We’re trying to create a permanent solution. Bill was a temporary solution.” That’s a lot for people to grab a hold of. You are living on a paycheck and the paycheck goes down. Some of those people that are going to get less are key people doing tough jobs at the GS-11, GS-12, and GS-13 levels. I’m not happy with that myself because we need those people. It’s not all about GS-3s. We need all of it. If I were doing it, I rather have kept doing what we were doing because at least people were happy with the BIL, but it’s not the way it queued up.

On the plus side, the portal-to-portal pay we’re talking about also applies to everybody who responds to fires, not only the people who are in firefighter retirement coverage that has a benefit. It would equate to a couple of hundred bucks more a day for a lot of folks when they go out there and fight fires. We need those people to help us. I love it from that point of view that we’re rewarding those people a little bit more for sacrificing and going off on large fire assignments for the most part. That’s a good thing.

I know that morale is at an all-time low across all agencies. It’s because people are getting disillusioned with what’s happening on Capitol Hill. I can’t put a word to it but people are starting to get over it practically. They are disenfranchised, especially when they’re chasing OT and hazard all season long. They are expected in some places to keep going past their term of appointment if they’re seasonal. Sometimes that gets a little bit much, especially if you cranked out a 1,000 to 1,200-hour overtime season, and now you’re expected to respond to Santa Ana in region five. That’s hard. That’s a lot to chew on.

We have homeless and unemployed veteran Wildland Firefighters in some areas. If that were to hit the news about stories like that, I don’t know if that would ring with Congress. It might motivate people to do so. People have heard it all before for the past several years. All of a sudden, in the last few years, we have had these monumental changes.

We literally have homeless, unemployed, veteran wildland firefighters in some areas.

We need both agencies. We need the Bureau of Land Management, USDA, DOI, and all of these fire agencies to accomplish our missions. It’s not only suppression but all the folks involved with that. What I’m concerned about is what you said, and it seems like you share a similar level of concern that if this does not go through and it falls flat on its face, people are honestly going to use this BIL money as a severance package if something doesn’t get implemented right away. What are your thoughts on that?

I won’t argue with you. Let’s back up a little bit. The bill was proposed as a retention thing. It was intended to retain people. It served its purpose in a lot of cases. I personally know folks who have delayed retiring or quitting because the bill was there. It did what it was supposed to do, which was to retain folks. If it expires, it has retained folks for two years and that’s it. Our goal is to replace it before it expires so that people continue to be retained if they are motivated by what’s in the bill, at least for pay.

I have the same concerns that people will say, “That’s what I expected.” This was a momentary thing. People moved on to the next issue and there was no incentive to make this thing happen. I am not confident that we will reach a solution before people get jaded that we’re waiting until the last possible minute.

In all honesty, I try to be plainspoken. When people ask me, I say, “Yes, it is going to run out and we need a solution.” When congresspeople come to me and ask me, I say, “It’s going to be a problem. We need this fixed before it runs out.” When firefighters come to me, I say the same thing. I say the same thing regardless of the audience. It’s like, “That’s going to get fixed.” It’s plain as our noses on our faces.

I’m giving somebody a benefit and taking it away. We see this in all walks of life in the United States and in the world. You could go anywhere. You give somebody a benefit and you take it away. That’s why tax breaks are hard to ever expire. They may have some time lapse in law. You always see Congress walk in and extend those tax breaks at infinitum. It’s human nature. Once something is established as a benefit, it’s hard to take it away.

I hope we’re not looming toward a mass attrition event because that would suck. Between the two agencies, this is a wonderful job. It’s like issues. It’s wonderful. I loved it. I’m several years removed from the game. I miss it every day. However, we need to address the elephant in the room or else we’re going to face mass attrition.

It’s hard for me to use that language that you use. You’re freer to use language than I am. I fear that will be true. That makes sense to me that people will say, “This is both a blow to my income and a sign that this country isn’t serious about this important work because it’s fair to pay people a living wage.” A living wage is way higher than it was. There are a lot of other people in the Federal sector who are also not making a living wage. It’s not just us. We are the beneficiary of the focus on fire but there are a lot of coworkers out there who do similar work but aren’t getting the same benefit. I always want to be mindful that there are a lot of people left out, even in the fire organizations who aren’t in special retirement.

Since we’re on that subject, let’s segue into the elephant in the room. One of the biggest things that is a concern is the exclusion of dispatchers. That was a huge blow. People are crawling into my inbox and sending me nasty grounds like, “Why isn’t Grassroots doing this? Why isn’t Anchor Point doing this for the dispatchers?”

Dispatchers are part of this game. It’s like the military. If you can’t shoot, move, and communicate, you’re gonna lose the war. This is not to be compared with warfare. Wildland Fire is not war or combat. However, we do derive a lot of our SOPs from the military. We still need to move items logistically. We need to be able to communicate and be operationally efficient. If one of those things falls, we’re done. If we have a situation where dispatch and logistics are being excluded from this presidential budget, that’s a problem. What is going on in the BIL?

In my organization at NIFC, I have 400 employees. Hundreds of those are left out of the bill. They are not dispatchers but direct fire support people who are not in special retirement coverage and they’re all left out of the pay supplements and have been since day one. It is not lost on me that 20% of our organization or 700 people who are in fire positions, not covered by special fire retirement coverage, and left out of the pay supplement and will be left out going forward apparently. It’s not just dispatchers. It is the whole support organization that exists out there to keep things rolling. Those folks have not been included in the bill based on what Congress said about firefighters being the focus of the pay supplement.

President Biden came to the fire center and announced the $15-an-hour thing. He was thinking firefighters and people have been thinking firefighters ever since because that’s what they hear, Hotshots, engine crews, and helitack. I feel that there have been a lot of people left out of the discussion. Those are people who are critical to the fire organization who are not being compensated the same way that firefighters are.

That is an ongoing discussion, but I haven’t been able to influence that. The BLM, our organization, has been able to award those people with some pay supplements but it’s not enough and we feel that. Particularly about dispatch, we’ve had dispatch problems for a long time, staff and upper dispatch centers.

We’ve had people in dispatch who are fire covered and got fire line experience on the ground and there are people in dispatch centers who do not. That’s by necessity. Our workforce is better for having enough folks from a variety of backgrounds. We’re faced with these two sorts of employees who are in dispatch centers, especially local dispatch centers.

It is divisive. It has the haves and haves not.

We got a couple of issues. 1) Pay issue. 2) What is the future for folks who come into those dispatch centers who don’t have that fire line experience? Can they progress? Is there a place form in the organization? For the 456, which is what you started with, there were some ground truthing of fire duties that happened in 2022 when “they” were first looking at the 456 series. It was people from OPM and other folks who were trying to figure out how to roll out this new series. They did it in a hurry. Bureaucracy moves slowly. They had to and they went fast. Frankly, that got missed. That dispatch was an essential function to fire. The whole dispatch element got left out. It’s back in the discussion.

There are some surveys coming out here that are going to try to plumb what exactly the duties are in dispatch. People are honestly trying to find a way to fit dispatch back into the 456 discussion, which is a little separate from the pay supplement. At least it recognizes that dispatch is an inherent function and inherently stressful, maybe more stressful than other people’s jobs when it comes down to it with no off switch. You can never take five.

I have a feeling that dispatch is going to end up back in the 456. I’m hopeful about that, but there was recognition that something got missed. It has all been re-engaged. Grassroots, Forest Service, and BLM were part of that discussion about the effects of leaving these people out. That is important to all of us and their job is inherently wildfire centric. They do other things but so do we all. There was some miscommunication, and hopefully, we will write that wrong.

It’s not just the dispatchers. It’s your wage grades that are included there. There’s a lot of confusion on the wage grades side.

There are a lot of different wage grades. I got wage grades who do warehouse work and those folks aren’t necessarily in fire jobs. We have wage-grade heavy equipment operators who are. They will be included in the pay piece. I’m not sure about the 456 in all cases, but there are going to be plenty of jobs that are fire-covered jobs that are not in the 456, like some aviation jobs. There’s a whole bunch. You don’t have to be in the 456 to be part of the pay solution. You have to be part of the firefighter retirement system to be part of the pay solution.

It transitions into the next question. All of these questions that I’m asking you are crowdsourced. These are directly from the boots on the ground and some public. With that, that is a good segue into whether or not we’re going to be moving towards a National Fire Service or some national fire fighting agency as far as in a Federal context.

Do you support a National Fire Service? Why or why not? Explain if it’s an advantageous or a horrible idea. I understand that the Forest Service mission is completely different with some overlap. They are completely different missions to the BLM. Specifically about wildfire suppression, do you support a National Fire Service?

I don’t, but I don’t say that lightly. We have been arguing about this for my whole career.

It’s not a new topic. It has been talked about for decades.

It’s the “fire folks” who see the appeal of it because they will get upset by things like OPM taking two years to figure out dispatch belongs in the 456 series. They were like, “How come it takes so long to get this to happen? These people are worried about something else that doesn’t have anything to do with me. I want them to worry about fire. If we had a fire agency, it would be more responsive to my needs as a firefighter.” That’s the argument that we should stove pipe this stuff because we don’t have anything to do with what the rest of the bureau does.

It’s that statement that I said. We have nothing to do with what the rest of the bureau does that I dispute. We have fire problems because we have fuel and land management issues. We got 250 million acres, give or take, that we manage in the BLM. We have a fire on that landscape because the landscape supports fire, and the fire mission that we have in the bureau is tied to that landscape that is being burned, for which fire is a huge change agent. You could supplement Forest Service for BLM in that sense or it would be the same.

You can’t separate fire from fuel. You can’t separate the fuels from the land management actions that happen. This is why fire belongs in the land management agency because those two things work together. What we want to do is have the same folks who are managing fire suppression or fire management primarily in the summertime helping to manage the fuels in the shorter seasons because they have the experience on what fire behavior looks like and what fuel should look like that they can apply to the fuel situation when they got time to do it. That is the marrying of fuels management and fire management or fire suppression that has been in the program for decades.

We created the fuels management program because it is a recognition that the best people who prescribe fire are the people who go out and do fire suppression. They like fire for a living. They fight fire for a living. Those are the great people to do prescribed fires or to plan fuel projects because they’re good at identifying places where we need fuel projects. That’s why fire and fuel are in the same program. That’s why fire and fuels are in the land management agencies because that tie to the condition of the land.

The FEMA doesn’t have on-the-ground people. They borrow people. This will be like TSA. This is my example. We’re going to do TSA for fire. I have friends in TSA. I don’t want to impune TSA. It would look something more like that, where you would have to have this wildfire agency X sitting in Winnemucca, Nevada because they need the staff in Winnemucca. They would set up an outpost in Winnemucca separate from the BLM. Maybe across the street from the BLM in some office and be responsible for putting fires out on all BLM land.

I don’t feel like that agency, as an experienced bureaucrat, would be responsive to the agency’s needs. That’s a monolithic approach that would separate firefighting from land management. In the long-term, that is the opposite of where we need to be. Our approach in the Feds is to respect agency missions and work collegially and collaboratively, which we do incredibly well. I don’t have to tell anybody on this show that there’s nothing more seamless than a team showing up with people from twenty different local, state, and Federal county agencies agreeing to the same standards, managing fire the same way, and talking the same language.

There's nothing more seamless than a team showing up with people from 20 different agencies and all agreeing to the same standards, managing fire the same way, and speaking the same language. 

We’re good at doing that right there. We’re a stronger organization because we have to do that. We are not commanding control all the way to the top levels. We have to get along with people. We have to listen to people. We have to collaborate. When you create this national monolithic federal response agency, you lose that need to talk to one another. You start ordering people around. You end up with boots on the ground having way less ability to influence what happens to them as an organization.

I flat-out believe that. I’m part of the BLM because it’s an incredibly flat organization. I was a firefighter. I have become this assistant director. Not that I’m hung up on titles, but I have managed to warn my way up or fall into jobs that nobody else wanted. That’s a great thing. I get calls from people on the ground who say, “This is screwed up.”

That availability of folks who can maybe try to help influence things is a great thing. I fear that this National Fire Service would neither serve the land nor the people well nor do I think it would serve firefighters well. Even though it looks like on the surface they would jump and would be responsive to whoever they are, I feel like all of us in the fire agencies would lose in the long run.

I got frustrations like everybody else. I have to deal with bureaucracies and competing priorities. That’s called being an adult. I find my agency is incredibly responsive to the needs of firefighters. My boss and my boss’s boss are good, smart, and caring. They got other things going on too, but they are putting their time, money, and effort into protecting the people at the Grassroots, not the organization. They’re in the right place. I don’t support it.

Despite the differences between the BLM and the Forest Service, I will say that some agencies are a lot better at taking care of the personnel than others. I’m not going to disparage any particular agency or another, but I’m pretty sure everybody can get drifted. It’s not necessarily they are bad at it. I think that there are different missions. The personnel difference, the sheer numbers, and the volume of personnel involved with some of these organizations are going to be one of those factors. The Bureau of Land Management is a people-first organization. It’s a boots-on-the-ground-first organization. It’s got its drawbacks, but I tend to favor Team Yellow.

I love the Forest Service and I started with the Forest Service, but if they’re the most bureaucratic and the least responsive to the field and you want to make a super agency where you’re going to take the Forest Service model and grow it even bigger, I’m not sure that is a solution. The Forest Service is great at this, and so are we. There is healthy competition. That’s where you get grade creep. All those things that, as managers, were supposed to not like but we will offer more than the Forest Service because we want to steal Forest Service employees and they will try to do it back. That’s a good thing. We are in competition with one another in a healthy way like, “Do you know what they are doing? They are doing that. That makes perfect sense.”

Forest Service does it all the time. It’s like, “How did they get away with that? How come we can’t do that? We will try to pursue it.” There is part of that. If you’ve got one monolithic agency, you’re not going to have that. You’re not going to have competition among the agencies trying to make lives better for their employees because they are trying to steal them. That competition among the agencies is reason enough to keep it dispersed because there are a lot of benefits there to having people do things independently, figure things out for themselves, and offer them up to their partners. That’s how we progress. If you had Ford and no GM, cars would be a lot crappier.

I’m torn on this whole subject about a National Fire Agency because of what you said. I’m thinking about it in the grand scheme of things. You could solve a lot of these problems with some agreements or memorandums of understanding. In reality, is adding more bureaucracy the answer? We may end up getting that, especially if it’s managed by a bigger department like the Department of Homeland Security. It’s going to come with the good and bad but I’m indifferent to either way. I don’t understand the pros and cons.

You hear a lot because I’m at the fire center. We have five different major agencies that are doing stuff. They will say, “Why do you need five different agencies? Why is there a fish person, a BLM person, and a BIA person? Why don’t you have one person?” If you had one agency, you would need a National Fire Service/BIA person to deal with the BIA. You would need a National Fire Service Fish and Wildlife Service person to deal with the Fish and Wildlife Service. You would need the same organization. You would be calling them something different. You would have the same bureaucracy even more because you would need the same number of people to manage it. The same person can’t be managing all of the fires on BLM who’s managing tribal interests specific to the BIA program.

A lot of the “efficiencies” that people see are a losery because you would need the same staff. They would be working for a single boss or some cabinet-level person who may or may not have the interests of firefighters at heart. If it’s something like a FEMA model, I’m not sure that firefighters would see a better representation of their interests up at that level in that bureaucracy. It may happen to us. Somebody may tell us to do it. We’ll see. I hear the same conversation and I know there are people who lobby for it. I’m not a fan.

There’s a lot of complexity and nuance with this. There is no silver bullet or one size fits all solution for any of the problems we have across the United States, particularly in Wildland Firefighting or fuels management. Little chunks at a time are going to be the best way to fix it.

Wildland Firefighter: There is no silver bullet or one size fits all solution for any of the problems that we have across the United States particular to wildland firefighting or fuels management.

Progress is incremental. We shouldn’t expect whole-hog solutions overnight.

It’s like the state agencies, private contractor world, and all these other cooperators that work with us on Federal incidents. We’ve had some detractors with the efforts from Grassroots, not the Grassroots Firefighters, but the Grassroots Wildland Firefighters, the organization, saying, “What about contractors? What about the state?” It’s not our mission. We are specific and keyed into one particular element of what we’re trying to change, and that’s Federal Wildland Firefighting.

You even alluded to it yourself in that previous conversation with the fact that a rising tide will raise all shifts, like the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management are competing with each other for stealing each other’s employees. If the agencies and the Federal government side set the standard, everybody naturally has to go. A rising tide raises all ships.

I’m from Idaho. I don’t see the Idaho Department of Lands competing with the Federal pay scale, but they have always been below and they probably always will. Maybe not always, but in effect, they become the minor leagues, the feeder crew. That has been the case for the Idaho Department of Lands for some time. For folks who wanted to move for higher pay, they would have to get out of IDL and move into some other agency.

It depends on the state. Some states outcompete us. I don’t think that necessarily means that everybody from the Fed side will automatically work for Cal Fire or Washington. It is the same way. Those IDL folks won’t automatically come to work for us because we pay more. It creates a tension in the system. There will be economic pressure on those other agencies to raise their pay. Even in Idaho, which is bullish on pay for state employees. They have to catch up because the world is an expensive place these days.

Topic and concern number two. We have a problem affecting the workforce with mental health, substance abuse, and suicide. This problem is indiscriminate to the agency, department, race, gender, rank, region, or other demographic. Many will argue that it has entered a mental health state of crisis. What is being done to assist the boots on the ground with this other elephant-in-the-room issue? Are the agencies aware of the issues that are running rampant within our ranks?

Without endorsing all the language you use, I would say yes. Let’s dissect this a little bit. We have, by tradition, a culture that has not been as open to asking for individuals less interested in asking for assistance than they might otherwise be. That’s a cultural thing. I hate to throw out stereotypes. In a lot of these cases, you can act as if it’s true because, even if it’s only partly true, you might act that way.

Suicide is a great example. We don’t have good data on suicide rates among Wildland Firefighters because wildland fire tends to get lumped in with other fire or people who sometimes respond to wildland fires. The numbers tend to get conflated, and it’s hard to know. I have a person, Dr. Patty O’Brien, on my staff, who is amazing. She’s done as much work on this as anybody else.

I will put a plug-in for more science that we need. We need to know a lot more about our firefighting workforce. I’m going to say firefighting in the broadest sense. Let’s include dispatchers and everybody in the organization because we know the stresses of the job apply to everybody. We need to know a lot more so that we can intervene in the way that we want to intervene being mindful of individual differences.

We need more data to back up the stuff you said. Suicide rates among Wildland Fire get conflated with other wildland responders who might be EMTs or urban departments who see much different stuff than we do in the Wildland Fire community. We go through trauma different from the typical trauma that somebody in an urban fire department might see.

There is a difference there. When we talk about interventions, we want to be confident that the data is good, but the data is what it is. We look a lot at our demographic. In our demographic, 80% are White males. If you look at the cohort that you want to compare to, it would be 20 to 50-year-old White males who live in the West, who enjoy outdoor pursuits and maybe own a gun. That’s a different cohort from the general American population.

When you start making comparisons about substance abuse, suicide rates, and suicide ideation, you should first say, “Who are we comparing to?” Compared to binge drinking between grandma, there is no comparison. Grandma doesn’t binge drink. First off, we want to say, “How much different from that normal demographic are we?”

Let’s assume that we are different and we have specific stresses that are leading folks to substance abuse, alcohol abuse, and suicidal thoughts. Let’s act as if that’s true. The data aren’t as crazy high as sometimes portrayed, and suicide is a great example. I have had a couple of folks in my organization kill themselves. One is to many, but we do want to be careful about portraying problems in the proper way. That’s my introduction.

We know we have high rates of binge drinking and alcohol use. We have higher than we-need rates of suicidal attempts. Are they outrageous compared to the total demographic that we should be compared to? Maybe not, but we know that the age group 20 to 50-year-old White males living in the West with a gun has a super high suicide rate. We might look like the other folks in similar professions out in the West. It might not necessarily be the Wildland Fire that is doing it. Maybe the people who attracted Wildland Fire also have those tendencies. It’s like chicken and egg stuff.

What are we doing? We got to acknowledge that the tendency is high in that demographic of our veteran firefighters. We have specific stressors that are greater than other people experience. The risk of fire, turnover, and bad things happening to our friends and the time away from family and home. We have all the stressors. Do we need to intervene? Have we been? Yes, we have. We’ve been working on post-traumatic stuff well for a while, like system interventions and critical instance stress management. We have people who do that. We have contractors who help us.

I want to say that the Bureau of Land Management has been a pioneer in that.

I will put a plug-in for the three folks who have gotten us where we are. Nelda St. Clair, who kicked us off. Shout-out to Nedda. Bodie Brock and Patty O’Brien, who is a licensed clinical psychologist and also a former firefighter. Great work by all those folks to get us where we are now, especially in the trauma side of things when bad things happen. The part that it took longer to get to was getting to people before the trauma happened and giving them the tools to deal with stuff. The stuff could be trauma or going off on your own foot because you’ve been cut loose from your work, peers, and partners.

It is the worst time of year sitting idle and going from 120 miles an hour in one direction to practically reverse. It’s hard. It gets worse every season for me.

I don’t know about you, but the people I know who’ve killed themselves have killed themselves for the most part in the off-season. It’s not in season when it happens. That is a particular stressor where your mission has disappeared. If you’re Special Forces, your mission doesn’t disappear in October 2023. You’re training for the next cycle.

We cut loose people and we leave them to their own devices. Maybe we check in on them, but traditionally, we haven’t. We expect them to show up back in the spring. We need to be way more mindful of what happens when the fire bell stops going off. That’s all great. We’re doing more resilience work with folks. We’re having people go out and visit every firefighter in their stations and talk about issues, open up about issues, destigmatize, and seek mental health. Young folks coming into the workforce these days have different expectations of mental health investments. My kids in high school have daily mental health check-ins. They’ve got counselors and suicide prevention materials.

I had none of that s*** when I was growing up.

The mental health crisis is not ours. The mental health crisis is the world’s. The mental health crisis is America’s. We have incredibly high suicide rates compared to where we were before across the board. We’re part of it. We have stressors that we need to deal with, but we’re part of a bigger trend, which is critical mental health issues across the culture.

The mental health crisis is not ours. The mental health crisis is the world's.

People come in with expectations since we’re going to talk about it. For people that come in with the expectations, we’re going to help them take care of it. We’re going to provide services where it’s appropriate or provide insurance where they can get their own counselor, be portable, and take care of themselves. All of the above approach is what we’re after.

The infrastructure has given us an opportunity to have more discussions about making a bigger investment in that piece of the program. Unfortunately, we haven’t funded it all yet but we’re making a better effort to provide better services across the industry. The Forest Service, DOI agencies, and BLMs have been at the forefront in a lot of that stuff. I’m proud to be there. I don’t want to slow down.

This is one of those cases where we want to keep pushing the envelope and keep listening to the field and hearing from folks what’s working, what’s not, what they want to see more of, and what they want to see less of. Patty has done a lot of pulling folks to say, “I’ve got all these ideas about things I should do as a specialist for the BLM. What do you think I should do?”

I don’t understand your basic 25-year-old. I admit freely that I don’t so I want to hear from those guys. What do you want? What do you expect? It’s not for everybody. We are not going to put everybody through mandatory because the first way to kill a program is to make it one size fits all, make it cheesy, and make it a requirement.

I don’t want to do that to people. We want to make it meaningful and useful. If it’s not, we shouldn’t do it. I’m not into window dressing. It’s got to be real and beneficial. The way to do that is to meet people where they are, hear what their ideas are, and invest in it. That has been a great model for us in the BLM, and we’re going to keep pushing it.

You said it right there. There’s no one size fits all solution for this. There is no silver bullet for this. It’s like our fuel problem and our suppression stuff. It’s human nature. Human nature is inherently complex.

There are some universal solutions that I’m going to propose. It is to pay people better because one of the prime stressors in life is not having enough money. Pay people better and give them benefits so they don’t have to worry about how they’re going to pay their medical bills and they’re going to be taken care of. Also, give them a career. If they want to, let them work longer so they know that they’re going to be taken care of. They get a paycheck coming in. More career opportunities, more permanent jobs, and better health benefits that don’t go away in the wintertime as they have in the past for our temporary employees.

I want you to expand on that one.

They know that they have a job in the spring. They don’t have to reapply and hope that they get picked up again. Let’s take care of some of those stressors. Finally, let’s make it possible that people don’t have to take every fire assignment. We have enough bandwidth out there. People can turn some assignments down, go to a party, take the boat out, and do whatever they want to do. Being a Wildland Firefighter shouldn’t be who you are. It should be what you do. It should contribute to who you are as a person. It helps make you, but it isn’t you. The goal is it’s not all-consuming. People can have a life outside of their job. It seems crazy, but we can achieve that piece.

Being a wildland firefighter shouldn't be who you are. It should be what you do.

Financial stress and all the other things are more complex than throwing money at a problem. You can’t do that. It doesn’t work. If you were to appropriate some of these funds to pay people where they don’t have to worry so much about their finances or where they’re going to get their next meal from in the winter and the long-term benefits.

I’m not talking about temp buyback if that’s going to be a thing ever. I know it’s not a part of the BIL. It may or may not be included in the upcoming presidential budget talks. That’s a different subject. Something as simple as insurance for a temporary seasonal through the winter would have changed my entire life as a seasonal when I was coming up through the ranks.

Did you opt in when you were a temp?

Before, I was ineligible because it didn’t exist, but a little bit longer in my career, it was available.

That’s a fairly recent development. When I was a temp, it didn’t exist. You could even buy-in health insurance. You don’t buy into retirement, but you can buy into health insurance. The downside of that for temp is you have to pay both portions in the wintertime. I’m going to stereotype people, but folks who are younger than 26, in Obamacare, you can be on your parent’s health insurance.

Sometimes people don’t opt in. I forget what our rate is for opting in. It’s not high because people don’t see the benefit of it. They won’t opt into the health insurance because, by the time you sign up, your season is halfway over. I can only imagine but it is out there. What would be better is if they didn’t have to pay the employee or the employer portion in the wintertime when they are laid off.

They are setting it up to the perm seasonals. They pay their double portion.

We don’t have that ability now. We got the ability to put them on the roles for health insurance at all. The better option, which is what we are pursuing, is making people not be temps. Let’s get rid of temps. People like being temporary sometimes because they’re going to school. One thing that is within our control is the terms of a seasonal career appointment. In the BLM, we’ve done 13 and 13. We’ve done six months in a day. You’re guaranteed six months a day as a WAE, While Action Employed.

Our appointments have always been six months, no shorter. We need to pursue shorter appointments. People can come in as a seasonal career appointment, come in for a shorter period of time, and lay off and go to school. That would be a better option than having people be temps. One of the goals from 2019 on what we have been doing is trying to say we need fewer temps and way more career seasonal and PFT people. We need 80% of our workforce to be either career seasonal or permanent full-time and 20% of our workforce will be temps.

We give way more of our people solidity. We give them benefits that carry over. We give them retirement benefits if they want. Stop hiring people over and over again. In the temps, it’s not the appropriate hiring mechanism for the work we have. It’s an old model. It’s antiquated and we’ve been pushing that way. There are still always places for temps. It’s more nimble. People can get their foot in the door, try it out, and see if they like it. We think we have way many of them. That has been a conscious investment on the part of Congress and the administrations to transform our workforce into a more permanent workforce.

That is not bill related. That is independent. We’ve been working on it for a while, the same way we were working on making every engine captain in the BLM GS-8. The same way we said, “Every engine captain should be offered permanent full-time status if they want it. Every GS-8 and GS-9 in the Hotshot ranks should be offered permanent full-time status. Every GS-8 in the bureau, if we’ve got meaningful work forms, should be offered the opportunity to be permanent.” We haven’t got there.

Some people don’t want it. That’s all well and good, but for folks who want it, we should offer it. We’re still working on that. We’re still offering our pilots and GS-12s. We’re still offering them permanent full-time status. I’m not sure if they’re going to take us up on it, but that should be an expectation of employees when they reach a certain point. If they want to be permanent year-round, they can be.

That is pushing it towards a better future for all of us. Going back to the mental health thing, the BIL provided a bunch of funding to research, development, and improvement of mental health programs across all agencies. What’s something new that the BLM will be implementing with these funds? We mentioned earlier that we didn’t have a lot of data. Is there any funding going to the data for these mental health studies?

There is an effort going into the data. There are a couple of different groups that are interested in exploring mental health and pushing the envelope on that. I won’t even go into it, but it doesn’t require necessarily money. It’s just effort. Our joint fire science program that we have at the fire center is getting more into firefighter health and wellness. Let’s broaden it out to say firefighter health and wellness and mental health being a key part of it. We have a whole bunch of other things we need to understand about firefighters.

It’s much more than a mental health component.

We need a better foundation for how we do work rest, tours, and nutrition foundations. We need all better data on how this life drives you into the ground or doesn’t. We don’t know a lot about it. We don’t know a lot about smoke exposure. We should know more. It’s hard to do and figure out. There’s a lot of new or renewed emphasis on that and a more organized emphasis on firefighter health and wellness of all sorts.

In the Infrastructure Law, the Forest Service took some of that money and used it for investments in mental health. On the DOI side, we were instructed not to use bill funds for that so we carved out some other funds. We have a whole little department at our bureau that is now funded out of these funds that are designated for mental health and wellness.

The new piece that we’ve also funded at the DOI level that hasn’t been stood up yet is a trauma services contract for the backend of when bad things happen after the season is over and people need to follow on care. That has not been light yet. That contract has not been yet, but it’s a thing that people have found that employee and EAP, that longer-term services that are your typical government services, don’t necessarily do that well. That is a new thing that will be funded by some of this money we set aside, but it’s not infrastructure money. In the president’s budget are this whole new $10 million investment on the DOI side and another $10 million on the Forest Service side to make a more permanent mental health program.

It was like the transition into Aspire from the previous EAP program.

Aspire is there. Aspire always exist. People can use its services. Sometimes EAP or Aspire works for people. Sometimes it doesn’t.

It’s oftentimes underutilized.

It is and there are all sorts of services they offer there. They also limit how many times you can use those services before you have to transition to your own health services. If you find a counselor through EAP that you like, you only get so many visits and you have to transition to your own insurance, which is not the end of the world, but you have to have insurance to do that.

There will be this $10 million in the president’s budget for more of a firefighter mental health program. There was a summit that the DOI and the Forest Service hosted to figure out what that program should look like and what people thought they wanted from the program. That is scoping still out there. We’re waiting for that piece. We’re waiting for Congress to act on that and give us the funding to do that. Regardless, the BLM is charging ahead and investing in our people to help the bureau bring services to folks at the ground level and district level. That’s Dr. Patty’s job.

There is a lot of data component that could be pulled out of programs like this because if we don’t know, how are we going to direct an agency into bettering the boots on the ground? Historically, we haven’t hit track of it. You even said that, but now we are starting.

It’s anecdotal still on. People are calling in and saying this and that. Some of the best data on suicide is from CDC. Where is there good data that we can plumb? Patty got some of the best data. There are some other folks out there who have some data. We need a more concerted effort to know what we’re shooting at. It shouldn’t stop us from getting started, but I’m into measuring performance. You can’t do that without knowing what you’re shooting at. How do you know you are succeeding if you don’t know what your measures of success are? That’s a challenge.

You got to know what your goals are and have the data to back it up. We will see where it goes. This is going toward the tail end of the episode here. I know you got to get out of here soon. The number three topic and concerns are operational changes, concerns, and suggestions. These are some of the issues and concerns that the boots on the ground have brought up when it comes to being able to effectively accomplish their mission with suppression and fuel management. At the top of that list, there are a lot of questions about aviation. Where do you see the BLM aviation programs changing the most in the future?

I see the biggest change is going to be UAS. It is going to be how the DOI and the BLM pushes forward with UAS. Uncrewed aircraft are going to take on a bigger workload for the bureau and in fire to some degree. We’re not going to replace all staffed aircraft with unstaffed ones. We’re going to do a lot more burning with PSD machine drones. We have a lot more high-capability aircraft out there in the UAS world.

We’re driving towards a new uncrewed aircraft, not the cheap throwaway ones we had before. They’re going to stay in the air longer. They are going to have more capacity and capabilities. They’re going to require different skills from the people who operate them. It looks more like an aircraft and less like a toy. The people who are flying drones on fires and resource projects are going to be highly skilled. They’re going to be pilots and know what they’re doing so they don’t crash into people and other aircraft. It’s a profession. It is not a hobby. This is not the mall drone that you’re going to fly around the living room.

It’s going to take a whole other level of commitment from the bureau to train folks. We got UAS specialists in my aviation shop who are working on this stuff. It’s a plan for how we train people, how we keep them current, where pilots are located in the organization, and what their job duties are. UAS pilot is going to be part of the 456 series.

We have some dedicated program folks at the state level who help manage drone usage within states for resource work and fireworks. There’s way more potential on the resource side of the house than there is on the fireside of the house for drones. There are also alternatives to use in UAS but it’s not the answer for everything.

You can’t ever remove the human element from fire.

We got satellites that can do what some people think they need UAS to do. There’s data out there already. Regardless, we need specialists who are going to manage this stuff at the regional level in all the drone usage. We need fire teams who can go out and do the things like burning out Division D. That’s going to be a set of skills in high demand.

Cross-training some folks to do that stuff has been a good model. We see that continuing to some degree, but it’s hard to be a Hotshot sup and to be a drone pilot at the same time. You got to be one or the other. We’re going to have to get more specialized. The big investment I see is both in aircraft, the people to pilot them, and the people to keep them organized.

The second question to that is the contracting issues that we have been having. This is more of for service question as far as the contracting and it may have changed since the last time I looked into the topic. Forgive me if this is an old question. I understand there were some issues with light and mediumship availability for CWNs and exclusive use. I don’t know the ins and outs of this one, but as far as your knowledge, how could you explain that to address some of the concerns from the boots on the ground, especially the aviation folks or the type-1 ship?

There are clearly type-1 issues. Type-2s as a class are going to get pushed to the middle. We have a challenge keeping some of the older type-2s s in the air. All of us are looking for the new models that are going to be the aircraft that we have going into the future. In the rotor world, the next-gen looks expensive. How are we going to get to it? What do we want to get to? How are we going to get there?

We got the capabilities we need. We need solid aircraft that people can repel. For instance, we don’t want to be flying in pieces of junk. I know you had one of your questions in there about type-1 aircraft in the BLM. We contracted one several years ago to work out of the Boise airport there and be it a crude type-1 aircraft. It didn’t fit in with the Forest Service policy but BLM checked out the aircraft that we contracted. We thought it was safe and it offered capabilities we wanted to use. We contracted it for a five-year cycle. We’re on our second five-year cycle.

What we do is look for the capabilities we want and see if we can do that operation safely, even though it’s a type-1 ship. Forest Service doesn’t like flying type-1 ships for reasons of their own. They use type-1s for bucket work only. You will see the State of Colorado and the State of California, both of them contracting brand new civilian versions of Black Hawks. It is super expensive but the industry is headed that way into bigger investments in aviation.

BLM is trying to keep up with that and recognize that the same old type-2 ships that we have been using in the past might not always be available to us. We need to start pushing the envelope a little bit. I know the Forest Service is thinking the same way but maybe not quite the same mindset but we’re all looking at the same thing. How do we add capacity, capability, and effectively at a price we can afford? If we can’t afford it, we have to ask Congress for money to make it happen.

Sometimes aviation is the easiest thing to ask for because what do people see on the news? They see retard drops and sky grains. Sometimes, aviation is the big ticket item that people are willing to fund. Unfortunately, ahead of firefighter salaries, I wish the world were not sales because give me firefighter salaries first and bang toys second.

Hasn’t that always been the case with congressional spending? They all want the Tonka trucks and the fancy new toy but they don’t want to take care of the operator.

It tends to be the flashier things that sometimes raise interest, and hopefully, firefighter salaries are the flashy thing this time.

That answers my question about the crew, which I’m not going to mention the name of the crew because you went around the name of the crew with that Type-1 ship.

Is it the Boise crew?

I was wondering if you were avoiding them.

It’s not a mystery. They like being on the cutting edge as a crew.

We’ve worked with them in the past, and they are awesome.

They’re staffed heavily. They have special demands placed on them because they get to travel a lot more. Sometimes, it is always desirable. We talked about good things that happened in the Forest Service. I was talking to the Forest Service repeller. She was talking about Forest Service operating two aircraft out of an air base. One that can stay home and one that can go hit the road so people can rotate between road assignments and home assignments. I was like, “That’s brilliant. We should be doing it. How come we’re not doing more of that?”

We talked a lot about the hub and spoke, where we hub people up and allow people more time to work out of their home station and do more IA work from their home unit as opposed to being on the road all the time. The downside of being the Boise helitack is you do have a big road component. I love that Forest Service model of one at home, one on the road, and switching back and forth. You can tailor your work assignments to your personal needs. I love that so I’m going to steal that and pretend it was mine.

Another question we had with the aviation context is, do we have a national aviation toolbox that everyone has access to? Aviation oversight is significantly diminished in regions where there are no FAOs on the org chart. This leaves a ton of liability and accountability on managers to be dialed, which isn’t always the case. A one-stop shop for universal required forms and the most current policies would be beneficial. This is more of a request.

We do on the BLM side. A Forest aviation officer is the FAO reference. For us, that is a unit aviation manager. We have most of those in place. We have state aviation managers in every BLM state. We tend to have unit aviation managers in places where we have a sizable enough aviation workload to warrant it. We don’t have vacancies where we need people. We might have vacancies where we’ve figured we can cover it some other way.

In some places, aviation can be a collateral duty, but where we need one, we invest in one. When I talked about filling all these support roles better now, that has been part of the great thing that has been happening with new money from Congress. We have been able to target specific things in the bureau that we haven’t been able to fund in the past, like air tanker bases, which sounds silly. However, we’re always staffing up air tanker bases, especially seat bases with folks who were coming on as emergency hires and not investing in actual government or BLM employees to come and manage something critical.

You load an aircraft and you’re making sure it’s loaded. You’re making sure it’s safe to operate, fly, and drop retardant. We’re dropping $70 million worth of retardant every year. Maybe we should invest in a person to staff that base on a full-time basis and not do it with whomever we can find. Not to disparage our AD workforce, but we got to put our money where our mouth is. We use an AD for flex time, but we got to invest in our air tanker bases. That is the same with UAMs. We got to fill out the support organizations, and we have been doing a lot of that stuff.

We brushed on this earlier. I don’t want to beat a dead horse with this one, but how do they plan to bolster fuel programs and meet new objectives and existing objectives without overburdening fire employees who have already worked a 1,000-hour season? This is bordering on two things. The target goals for fuel management and addressing our workforce concerns with the burnout and many hours, especially that whole 1,000-hour and 1,200-hour season. You’re asked to go IA in SoCal for the Santa Ana season and do fuels management in the off-season.

You probably have a lot of Forest Service folks on this call. I know the Forest Service is in a different place than we are. I know they’re talking more about mobilizing for large-scale burning on some of their priority areas. Some BLM and DOI folks will not get roped into that, but they will be allowed to participate in that thing based on some work we’re doing at the bureau levels and the higher levels to pool some funds. If a Forest Service has a burn going on and they want to borrow some folks from a neighboring BLM unit, they don’t have to figure out how to pay them. There’s a pool of funding that we can dip into that they can go without asking questions.

It is more of an ease of operations as far as mutual assistance between the Forest Service and BLM.

I’m talking about not fuels work generally, but prescribed fire more suppression. You go and you got a code that you can use that’s pre-ordained. You don’t have to work out an agreement. We always have neighborhood agreements like that where people can go help their neighbors, but this would formalize it. That’s a great thing for the Forest Service, especially fish or parks, who do more large-scale burning than we typically do in the BLM.

Not that we don’t do any, but it’s more them. That’s a great thing to make things easier. The downside of that is if it’s too easy, people will start ordering folks from all across the country and will have what you described. You worked four months straight on suppression and now you’re going to work another six weeks traveling around doing prescribed fire. It is not the life we foresee for our firefighters who need a break, but for people who want to do that, we could make it easier for them to do it.

To each his own, sometimes people want to go out and do more work in the season. Sometimes people don’t. Sometimes people want a little and not a lot. We got to make room for all that stuff if we can because that will be efficient and help the Forest Service achieve some big goals. That is a good thing. On the BLM side, 70% of our fuels work, and we’re looking to treat 1.3 million acres this year, is handled by agreements, grants, or contracts. We’re not necessarily the same force account model that the Forest Service can be for these large-scale burns. We do a lot more work with other mechanisms. It’s not necessarily people out lighting fires.

It’s a different workload for us, but my goal as a manager is to try to make resources available to folks so that there’s enough fuels work locally. People could do it if they got the time and bandwidth. There’s a need in Nevada. If you’re done with your engine and you’re putting it away for the winter, you can go help write some burn plans, work on a contract, do a site inspection, do fencing, or paint GIS. There are all sorts of work out there, but we want to have enough fuel support out there across the world so that people can be gainfully employed in the wintertime. We don’t want to pay people to sit around. We want meaningful work out there.

Wildland Firefighter: We need to have enough fuel support from across the world so that people can be gainfully employed in the wintertime.

You have a stir-crazy workforce if you allow people to do that.

It would be awful. Nobody wants that life, at least in my mind.

I’m too much of a busybody. I would go nuts.

You would be causing problems for other people.

Next question, we’re going to get into hiring. The Bureau of Land Management has a much better system and more efficiencies in hiring anybody. It doesn’t matter if you’re a returnee seasonal or brand new recruit versus the Forest Service. That’s my belief. You may or may not agree with me, but that’s fine. How do we address the hiring?

One of the questions is how do we improve transparency and honesty with hiring and performance incentives, pay rates, benefits, and retirement when advertising these fire positions? I sound like a hypocrite saying this because I’m talking about hiring to you. You’re at the top of the Bureau of Land Management. I had an announcement saying that I was going to cease all outreaches and recruitment announcements for the Federal government. It doesn’t matter which one because of the fact that there has been so much concern regarding pay, benefits, and retirement. I said, “No more.” Let’s talk about hiring. How do we improve this whole situation? I know this is a large topic.

I don’t know that we’re any better than the Forest Service, frankly.

Every time I put in for a Bureau of Land Management job, I would always get an interest call.

That’s step number one. If nothing else, there should be somebody you can call and say, “I’ve applied to your district for this job. What can you tell me?” I know the question is talking about transparency, incentives, and announcements. The problem is there is too much information there. It’s all there, but can a normal person, and by normal, I mean somebody new and trying to figure out their way in the Federal government. Can there be any way for them to read something that’s posted on USA jobs and understand what the hell it means?

I could say, “You are going to apply for a temporary job. That means you could opt into health insurance if you want. You’re guaranteed 90 days of employment. You’re going to do two weeks of training. You can’t work beyond six months unless Congress says it’s okay. You or I could summarize that for people, and you got to reapply next year if you want to work again. This doesn’t count towards retirement if you decide you want to do this as a career.” I can do that in 30 seconds if I were talking to somebody. If somebody is reading USAJOBS and trying to figure it out from there, that is horrible. It is written by HR professionals because they have to.

There’s a liability threshold or criteria you have to meet with all the information that you advertise.

We’re applying this USAJOBS model, which is for more permanent employees and people who know what they’re doing more. It’s more for those folks who are familiar with the system than it is for people brand new. What we’ve done with our external affairs staff is we do all the temporary hiring for all the DOI bureaus out of NIFC. We do much of the hiring for many of the BLM states. Less a couple, we do all the fire hiring for them.

We have an incredible external affairs staff who put out videos on how to apply, where job opportunities are, and who to contact. We try to make common sense investments in messaging, especially in social media for people. We say, “Look at USAJOBS and put in fire. You will see opportunities like kiss of death.” It is never going to happen.

We and the BLM have been trying to hire 100 interns across the bureau to do all sorts of different stuff. High school kids graduating from high school especially and college kids who might want to work in the Federal government. We are trying to lure them in as interns and they would go back to school. I have been talking to some of my daughter’s schoolmates in her high schools because I know some of them want to do fire. I’m pushing job announcements. I’m saying, “You could apply to this. There are fire jobs in here. You could work fire. Go to forestry school or whatever you are going to do and come work for us. When you graduate, you could be a full-time employee.”

I have been trying to talk to them through these systems like, “How do you do this?” It’s great for me to try to talk through the Federal hiring system with a high school student. There is nothing better and nothing will tell you that things are tough for a normal human being trying to negotiate USAJOBS than trying to talk somebody through it. I hope that some of those kids have got applications in. My fingers are crossed because otherwise, I’m a terrible teacher.

It’s not lost on us. This is a cumbersome system. We’re doing our best to explain to people and to get their applications in and treat their applications fairly on the far end, but people make mistakes all the time in those complicated systems. One of your questions is, “Can we get out of USAJOBS?” No, we can’t. There is a double negative for you. There is nobody not complaining about USAJOBS in any place in government. We’re using the tool the best we can, trying to work around the edges of it, and make it work for us. It’s a challenge. It doesn’t help us for sure.

USAJOBS is a very archaic, clunky, and cumbersome system. It’s terrible.

Is this a question?

No. This is me bitching about it, especially on the Forest Service side. No one likes to try and apply for a new position on the road in the middle of August. Sometimes the timing with these job announcements is piss poor. How do we go about fixing that and getting away from USAJOBS? I think that USAJOBS is here to stay. It’s too big. Correct me if I’m wrong here, but it’s a third-party contractor that developed the website. We utilize that exclusively. I’m not sure if that’s factual or not. Someone will correct me.

It sounds like a good story. I’m sure we didn’t invent it in-house. We paid good money for USAJOBS. Is that what you’re saying?

Yes.

It is tough trying to recruit jobs in the summer. What I found with these high school kids I’m trying to counsel, even in the BLM, is you need to know in October or November that you want to apply for a job in Billings, Montana for the following summer. You’re expecting high school kids to make that decision in the fall of their senior for the following summer. That’s a crazy system right there. I love these internships that we’re flying right now because it’s way closer to summer. Kids are worried about what they’re doing in the summer.

It’s hard enough for adults to think that far in advance, much less for teenagers to think that much in advance. We need a system where we’re not trying to recruit people the year before for our summer jobs. Some of that comes back to giving people permanent status earlier in their careers. They’re not having to make those decisions. They’re already in the system.

We can take them in at the GS-3 level, and in the new series, go 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 if they want to stick. We can fly these jobs in a series of steps that are tied to one another. In essence, they come in at the 3 and they get spit out the other end at the 8. The career ladder and pipeline jobs are tied together. It’s a great opportunity. The new series is perfect for that. We got to exploit it so people don’t have to negotiate USAJOBS annually, which is a kiss of death.

It sucks but you have to do it. I could go talking on about USAJOBS all day, but let’s leave that one. The next question would be, will the BLM be following suit with the United States Forest Service proposal to convert all permanent seasonal employees to permanent full-time? Let’s be specific there. Permanent seasonal and permanent full-time are wildly different things. We honestly beat this subject to death. We have talked about this several times. One point of clarification there is the permanent seasonal employees. Are we trying to make more of a push for that to replace our temporary-seasonal workforce?

What I described before of 80% and 20%, that 20% would be temporary seasonal. The 80% would be made up of a combination of permanent full-time and permanent seasonal, otherwise known as career seasonal. The bulk of our workforce used to be temporary. It used to be 1/3, 1/3, 1/3. Figure 1,000 in each of those columns, 1,000 PFT, 1,000 career seasonals, and 1,000 temps.

We want to take that 1,000 temps turn it into 400, take those 600, and move them into the other two categories. I don’t want to convert every career seasonal employee into a permanent full-time because they will quit. I’m not going to tell people they have to do that but we want to offer it to people. We don’t want to force it on people who want to do, within reason, other stuff as well. We got room for all those folks.

From my experience, when I was an apprentice for the Forest Service, I was in a situation where I was being politely asked, see, forced to convert into my position as a permanent full-time. What was the thing I did? I found a new job. I wasn’t going to do that. It’s not a good thing.

It’s a hard thing because we are telling Congress, “We got all this work to do and we need people permanently.” We also need to be respectful of people wanting to do a couple of months outside of the Federal government, and there’s room for it.

For the new complex IMTS, what are the benefits and drawbacks of this new program?

The idea is that we won’t have type-1 and type-2 teams. We will have just teams. Those teams will flex according to the needs of the incident. A team can flex, grow bigger and handle a large, complicated type-1 fire. They can stay at their normal core size and handle a less complex type-2 incident. We will manage all teams as if they’re one team and put them on some more formal rotation up at the higher planning levels.

We will manage the workload better. We will equalize experience opportunities so that teams all get a share of the incident assignments. We don’t have losers and winners. We also don’t have teams that get worked hard that they burn out. The idea is that we can make better use of people if we don’t send teams out loaded for bear when they only need to be loaded for the cartridge. That is a problem. You got people mobilizing that you don’t need them. That is wasteful of their time and scarce resources that the country needs to manage fires in other places. That’s the idea. It’s a change in the way we do business.

We can make better use of people if we don't send teams out loaded for bear when they only need to be loaded for cartridge.

The downside is you get a team and a group of people who go out as a team. If not all those people get to go out all the time, you lose a little spirit of core, teamwork, and familiarity in the interest of making more resources available in the bigger picture. That’s a downside. To do this, we need to invest more in training. We need to do a better job of preparing our teams to manage incidents. We need to train better at the type-3 and type-2 levels. We know we need to invest more in training to make people feel like a complex incident team.

When it comes in, it is going to be able to handle its complicated fire. We need to sell that type-2 teams can do the work. We know they can do the work because we force them to do the work all the time anyways. We say, “We don’t have a type-1 team for that fire. You guys got to go.” They rise to the occasion and they do it. We want to make it so they don’t have to rise to the occasion that that is a capability they know they have.

The other downside is there are some folks who aren’t interested in being on some of those gnarly type-1 fires in the Angeles. I’m raising my hand as a former Ops chief but we need to make people feel confident that they can handle most situations. They will be able to flex and make this work. Big picture, it looks like a good plan. We should try it. We’ve been trying for several years to make some changes in incident management team rotation and composition. We’ve always run up against the “we have never done it this way” roadblocks.

If there are two things that firefighters hate, it’s changing the way things are.

We got to be mindful that these are volunteers. They’re volunteers. That’s not their day job, mostly. They don’t have to go and do these team assignments. We also don’t want to force people out by forcing change on them, but we’re hoping that enough people will see the benefit of it. We will both keep most of the people in the team game because the workload is more manageable. We will track more people because the workload is more manageable.

That’s the hope but there are some risks. We’re hoping it doesn’t explode in our faces because it’s crazy talk. It’s changed, but we are going down the toilet. We’re losing teams and team members. We got to do something. We got to try something different. This is an attempt to try something different. Team membership might be up a little bit in 2023. It is the first sign, but maybe we’re turning the corner a little bit. We hope so because we need those folks.

That’s another thing between attrition and retirement. People are moving on to different agencies and retirement. We’re losing those hitters of Wildland Fire management. It’s not like we’re backfilling these positions at a steady pace. That’s something like this. Do you think that this is something that is going to be proven useful out of utility for a current state? Is it something that is going to have longevity?

I think it’s both. It’s born of utility but it’s going to have longevity because it makes more sense to how we operate in the world. We have other avenues open to us. This may stem the tide of attrition, but we can staff up better by making better use of cooperators and being more receptive to people with other skill sets coming into fire.

RPL, Recognition of Prior Learning, we talk about it all the time, but we don’t do as good of a job as we could do in saying, “You got that skillset. We can apply it in this way. Let’s do that.” Our cooperators, especially local municipal departments and rural fire departments have been pointing out that we can be a little rigid and we should be a little more open to folks coming in and helping out. We can do a much better job.

We’re working on this with the Wildland Fire Commission. That is congressionally mandated to make the agreements process easier. We can bring people in through business processes that are more nimble. We’re not turning people away because we can’t figure out how to pay them. That’s criminal. That’s one we can fix without Congress telling us to fix it. That’s an administrative thing. We got to get out of our own way as the Federal bankrollers of much of the system. That’s our responsibility so we need to figure that out. We shouldn’t necessarily have to wait for the Congress to tell us.

We talked on this subject but the obvious issues with stagnation and upward mobility from the GS-3 to GS-8 levels. This is the pipeline we are referring to earlier. Let’s talk about that. What are some of the new things that are sticky that stand out with the new pipeline that’s going to be hopefully implemented here with the 456?

Applying for a job is a 345. You come in as a career or seasonal appointment, maybe at the four level. We can get you a 456 position. You come in, apply once, go through the system, and get to the sixth level. It’s not after a couple of years that you have to think about applying for another job. You got that built-in where you can say, “If you come into us at this pay grade, you will come out and talk about transparency. If you stick with us this long, we will achieve this pay grade in this amount of time. If that’s your expectation, that’s where you can go.” We can do that in this new series way better than we could before.

It needs to happen.

It will happen. If nothing else, it saves us the administrative burden of hiring people, processing applications, and all that crap that slows us down. That job can go from the GS-3. You can go all the way up to the GS-8 level. They’re all one job series that carries you all the way through. That’s a great opportunity as long as the place you’re at has enough positions at the higher grade levels.

The other career pipeline we need to make better use of our internships or academies. We’re flying these 499 internships. They’re fire interns. We have another one in the works that should be a DOI standard coming out with the same thing. It’s an internship. It’s another career progression thing and the foot in the door. Try to get people varied experiences and all that we used to do to jack academy in California that service is still doing along with some DOI partners. Those opportunities are out there. That’s great.

Finally, the disappearance of the 401 qualifications up at the upper grades is a great thing. People can carry their 456 qualifications all the way up into GS-11 to GS-15 if they stick with us without changing series, without having to go back to college and worry about their transcripts, and all the stuff that they have to worry about now. We’re going to take people by their value, not at their academic degree, but for what they bring to the job from their background. It could be a background in business, education, high school education, or OTJ.

We still make people go through silly exercises to get an academic stamp when they don’t necessarily need it. That is going to be a great thing. We’re working on that now. Not everybody wants to be a 401, but for the people who do, at least they can see themselves in that job more readily. We’re rolling those out soon. We’re putting the last touches on some of the FMO jobs and the PDs that are going with those. We have a deadline of June 2023 to start implementing these 456s. We’re scrambling to make that happen.

That 401 series is going to be a huge thing because now people have without going to school necessarily. A degree in Biology is not going to teach you much about fire management because that’s a lot of stuff that you have to learn in the field. Granted, there is an educational component in there where you can apply some of that stuff. To remove it is one of the best decisions out there for having that glide path to those upper levels of management.

I’m one of those people who went to college for that. I went to a land grant school in Colorado State and got a Wildland Fire Management Master’s degree. It was before 401. It was because I was interested. I thought, “I want to be an FMO one day. This will be handy, not knowing whether it would be useful or not.” It was like, “What am I going to school anyways? I got my off seasons off. I’m going to do this. It will come in handy.” It did come in handy with the 401.

I learned stuff that I wouldn’t have learned in other places, but does it make me a better fire manager? Not necessarily. I could have learned some similar things by going to business school, architecture school, or not going to school at all and doing an internship at a design house in New York City. I could have learned in a lot of different ways.

There are a lot of different paths and I’m glad we’re doing that. For people who have an interest, education is a great thing. I would never tell people don’t go to school. I say go to school for something that interests you, not for something that somebody else is telling you should interest you. The primary thing is to meet people where they are. There are many MBAs out there that had to go back and get forestry credits. They come back to work and are using their MBA skills more than anything else. It’s like, “We got this backward going.”

Go to school for something that interests you, not for something that somebody else is telling you should interest you.

It was an old attempt to professionalize the workforce. It is the same thing we are doing now. It was an attempt by some folks to say, “If you’re going to be part of these teams that are helping manage the land, you need some academic background in land management.” It’s not a stupid thing. We know now that managers have so much more to do. They are as well served to go to Psychology classes than anything else.

Several years from now, I guarantee you, the conversation you and I are having now is going to look incredibly stupid to the people. They’re going to say, “Listen to what these Jackasses were saying. They didn’t know what they were talking about.” It’s going to be true. That goes with the kid’s territory of saying something out loud. Our problem is we’re saying things out loud. Thinking out loud is where I get into trouble.

Those are all the questions that have been submitted by my readers. I want to pick your brain about some of the finer details. We can make this quick. I understand you got to go here soon. As far as the presidential budget that was released and the details of that, can you give us a top-level overview of what that was and what it means for the firefighters on the ground? I know this is not BIL. This is something that isn’t passed yet. Let’s talk about that briefly about what you know about it. I don’t want to get too off into the weeds with it and specifics because there are not a lot of specifics to be had yet.

There are a couple of good things in the president’s budget. Housing is one right off the bat that we should highlight. There is a sizable investment in fire facilities accounts on the DOI side of the house, particularly to fund projects that have to do with firefighter housing. That would be a great thing to have. Those projects, and there aren’t a lot of them, are not the solution to our housing problems. We have $170 million worth of fire facilities investment we could do, but we’re not going to turn it down. That would allow us to tick off some needed investments in firefighter housing. That’s a great thing.

We talked about the pay supplements. The money to make to do the pay supplement for fire folks without having to make cuts elsewhere is in that president’s budget. Somebody said, “Yes, this pay table that we’re talking about, the one that’s posted on a Grassroots.” If this pay table got implemented, we have to fund it some other way. We have to figure out funding that we would take. We would have to take from some other part of the program to fund that pay supplement without the new money that is in the president’s budget.

The president’s budget also allows us to do more workforce transformation. We do more of this with fewer temporary seasonals and more permanent positions. It allows us to knock off more of that. We like to add a couple of crew members to your basic twenty-person crew. Your Hotshot and veterans crew on the BLM side could hire 24 if we could find 24. It staff up your engines and helitack betters. We have given more opportunities for folks to duck out for a couple of days and take a couple of days off. If the staff is full, maybe people have an opportunity to flex a little bit more. That’s the thought.

We’d like, not necessarily, to hire a bunch more crews or engines but to staff more fully the stuff we have so that people have a little more breathing room on their crews. That would get funded. More fuels work and all that stuff are all included in the president’s budget. Those investments in our workforce, pay, and housing is key parts of that president’s budget that we would love to see making some appropriations bill. Sometimes this stuff doesn’t work exactly the way it seems. People will always say, “The president’s budget is dead on arrival.” You hear that all the time.

Sometimes you consider the president’s budget a statement of policy intention more than it is a blueprint for an actual budget. The great part about this budget is that it sets out some concrete things that an appropriator could put in an appropriation bill and say, “Do you see this thing that they were talking about with firefighter housing? Let’s make sure that makes it in the appropriations bill.” It is not necessarily the budget itself that gets accepted, but elements of it can creep into appropriations bills that we see finally.

In appropriations, bills are law because they are laws even though they don’t seem like it. That pay table could end up in an approach bill and find no Grassroots. They’re talking full-time to appropriators about how to make some of this stuff happen. I’m not allowed to have those conversations, but they are. That’s their job. There are some conversations going on about what’s in those budgets. On the Forest Service side, I’m not familiar with what’s in their stuff, but it’s similar. Another facility stuff is in theirs as well.

There are a bunch of gripes with the BIL versus the presidential budget. One of them was the pay rates. I know there’s going to be a lot of talk about how some of these folks are taking a pay cut comparatively speaking to the BIL. I want to play devil’s advocate here with the folks out here reading. Are you going to take the long-term gains over the short-term Band-Aid as you eloquently put it earlier? That is what BIL is. How do we avoid people chasing hazard pay and overtime with this new proposal? How do we redirect the discussion to make it more equitable? People are expecting like the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law pay in this new presidential budget. This is going to get into the weeds but go ahead.

This is going to get into the math. What the bill does in your base pay is not in base pay in the solution in the ‘24 budget. It’s a combination of more overtime paid on off district or unit assignments and paid as a guarantee on assignments. It says 15 and 9 concepts. If you run off on a fourteen-day assignment, you are paid from the hour you leave until the hour you come back. You’re paid 15 hours of straight time, overtime, and 9 hours of standby rate flat out.

On the plus side, when you go off on off-duty assignments, it allows you to not push the envelope on the assignment itself. From a firefighter’s point of view, if you think about it, it’s like, “I’m paid 15 and 9 regardless. I’m not going to hang out here on Division X for a couple of extra hours sharpening tools. I’m going to go to my fight camp, get rested, and bed down.” That’s a good thing. It takes the incentive away from stupid logging-on incidents. Not that that happens.

Can we stop hearing about showing lunch? You don’t have to show a lunch. You don’t have to worry about it. You don’t even have to do time sheets, as far as I know. You got to do time sheets for your home unit, but you don’t have to tune in a CTR because you’re paying 15 and 9. Awesome. Save the administrative burden and a lot of paperwork for everybody.

If indeed your assignment on division X is over at 9:00, you can go back to camp. Somebody may say, “Can you hang out for another hour? We need to tie off this piece of line.” You may say, “Sure.” You may get screwed out of one hour of overtime because you’re only going to get paid half-time. You’re going to get paid a standby rate for that hour that you stayed out longer. In the long run, you’re making flat-out 15s, and you’re making 9s on top of it.

From firefighter math, you figure, “That’s probably, in most cases, going to equal more pay than we did before for those assignments we take, plus it gives us the incentive to get adequately rested because we’re not getting paid for those nine hours. We’re getting paid to sleep because our time is not our own when we’re off duty.” We’re stuck in camp. What have people been complaining about all along is it’s not my own time.

The math on the base pay is not the same as the bill. It’s not $20,000 or 50%, whichever is less, but the combination of the base pay that they are adding plus the increased overtime calculated on people not making 1,200 hours of overtime but making something more like 700 hours at most. They’re calculating it based on people not having to work as much overtime and still coming out to close to equal to what the bill is paying.

It doesn’t say, “You’re going to make that regardless, no overtime whatsoever.” The reality is that people are going to work overtime because that’s the job. It goes with the territory that you’re not going to be working 9:00 to 5:00 five days a week. That’s not the life of a firefighter, but hopefully, the pay is better and people have a longer season and enough money over what they used to make that they can feel free to, within reason, turn down some assignments and be a little more flexible with the time they take. Not be chasing every single fire assignment.

If you’re on a crew, you’re on a crew. The crew is going to go when the crew goes. If the crew has got 22 and they can live without you, you ask ahead of time, get your leave in there, and you want to miss a roll, that’s one thing. Often, you’re on a crew. You don’t want to miss a roll with the crew either. Those are crew dynamics. You’re going to talk with crews later. You can ask them about that. I know how that goes.

If you’re a more independent resource, like a jumper or working on a helitack crew where you have more flexibility and you control your own time more, it feels like you would be able to say, “I’m making enough money. I can turn down a week’s worth of overtime to go to a family reunion.” Hopefully, people can make that choice. We’re never going to legislate away from people wanting to chase overtime. Sometimes, there are people out there like, “Every hour, I don’t make an hour I’m not going to make.” That’s in their nature.

We're never going to legislate away from people wanting to chase overtime.

I hate to be the one who says, “You may not work more than X hours of overtime because that feels unduly restrictive.” At some point, managers do need to step in and say, “You’re going too hard. You need to ratchet back.” There are folks who are motivated to make as much money as possible. Within reason, they’re part of the culture. As long as they’re not endangering themselves or other people, we got to see that’s a lifestyle. That’s part of the culture and we probably need to live with some of that stuff. That shouldn’t be the model for everybody out there in the world. That’s not a healthy lifestyle.

One question that I have following up with that is how does this affect the initial attack? You do an initial attack on an emergent incident and then it rolls into a two-week assignment. At that first operational shift, you go up to 32 hours or you cap out. How does that standby pay get affected? Is it affected at all?

I understand it probably as much as you do. Our initial concern was for initial attack folks. You’re not telling folks that they’re going to IA fire, and at the end of fifteen hours, you’re on standby. It’s not going to help us contain fires because you know how it goes. You have worked since 9:00 in the morning. At 7:00 at night, the lightning storm rolls through. That’s when you start to work.

If you’re going to stop getting paid at fifteen hours, that’s not going to work. It doesn’t work that way. If you’re on initial attack, it’s hours as worked up until certain hours. That’s fair. It separates initial attacks from those off-unit assignments. It makes a distinction between the two. For initial attack firefighters who spend most of their time in their home unit, they are paid the way they have always been paid, but the rates might be a little bit different.

I’m calling it the bill solution, but this solution in the ‘24 budget does think about overtime and fire assignments in those fourteen off-unit assignments, which is not our bread and butter in the BLM. We’re an initial attack organization. I haven’t figured out the ins and outs of how that would work for a crew that doesn’t spend as much time on the road or a typical engine crew that is locked down at home more. I’m hoping the math works out for those folks, but I haven’t explored it to great lengths.

It’s hard because there are a lot of what-ifs, and that’s every season. It was in 2022 when we were talking about predictive services. It was going to be doom and gloom. It was going to be 2020 and 2019 all over again.

It didn’t show up.

Nothing happened. That’s part of the dice when we roll. It’s a feaster famine in this industry. I don’t think that’s ever going to change. Can we make some administrative and legislative changes to help remove that? We can, but it’s never going to be perfect. There’s no such thing, but we shouldn’t let perfect get in the way of good.

I’m not a firefighter anymore. I wonder what does the slow season look like anymore? Is it 500 hours?

I don’t know.

My take is there’s no such thing as a slow season anymore. There’s what used to be a moderate season is now the average low season. Everything has moved up one phase. It feels like it, but your readers probably tell me better than I could say. My experience is that people are working a lot and maybe not as much as they always want to, but plenty. In many cases, more than they want. I don’t think a slow season hurting people. It doesn’t feel like it’s in the cars. It doesn’t feel like we can have a season that is slow. Some of the experienced when I was growing up, were some low overtime seasons, which were hard to survive on. It doesn’t feel like we’re going to see one of those in a long time.

We have to do more with less in the context of we have more frequent, more intense fires. We have more stars, both human and lightning or natural causes. We are having less people as well that we have to work with. We are forced to be doing less. As long as these folks are out there, they are not endangering themselves and they’re being rewarded for their efforts.

You got all the glory in being a firefighter. This is a kick-ass job. I wouldn’t replace my eleven years in the BLM and the Forest Service for anything. It made me who I am now. If we can make it even better and keep progressing those issues and progressing further into more modernized organizations, I think that it’s going to be awesome.

Grant, I know you got to get out of here. We’re at the end of the show. I want to say thank you so much for coming to the show and answering all these questions. You are directly answering the boots-on-the-ground questions that are the hot-button ticket items right now. I appreciate you taking the time with me. I’m thankful for you being here.

I appreciate you asking me. Let me say that none of these questions was a surprise. That’s good. That means that I’m hearing these same questions through other channels. I appreciate the opportunity to talk more directly to folks. I will put it out there that people can always pick up the phone and call us. If you got a beef or a compliment, give me a call. I’m always there. We’re always listening and trying to pay attention. There’s usually more to the story. Sometimes it’s simple and people need to tell us how simple it is. There is that too.

At least, you’re willing to be in the position that you’re in to listen to your subordinates. That’s a good leadership quality to have.

They’re not my subordinates. They’re my peers. We’re all in this together. I get to represent them sometimes. I appreciate that. It’s an honorable position to be in. I feel like we’re all in this together.

At the end of the show, I was given an opportunity for you to give multiple shout-outs to some homies, heroes, and mentors. Who have you got for us?

Chuck Sheley is the person who got me into the business. Chuck, if you’re tuning in, power to you. Thanks for all you did for me.

Grant, thank you so much for being on the show. I hope everybody enjoyed it.

Thank you.

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Another episode of the show is in the books with Grant Beebe. Grant, I want to say thank you for being on the show and not pulling any punches, even though I’m sure a lot of people are going to be reading this. I’m glad that you had the courage. You came onto the show, got real with people, described yourself, talked about yourself, and all the other things. I did have a very extensive list of topics to give you. They were all crowdsourced from the boots on the ground. Let’s try and make things better for the folks moving into the future.

Once BIL expires, hopefully, we can have something to continue on. Once you take it away, it’s going to be hard to come back. I do not agree with everything he said. I do agree with some things. I’m sure he is going to be in the same boat. If he agrees and disagrees with some of the stuff I said, that is a common discourse. It’s important that we have these conversations because how in the hell else are we going to identify what it is and also direct change to where it matters for the most people?

With that being said, take this episode as you may. If you want to love it, hate it, crap on it, crap on me, and crap on Grant, that’s completely up to you. However, I encourage everyone out there that if they do like something or don’t like something, I highly encourage you to 1) Go and join Grassroots. 2) If you have the opportunity, join NIFI. 3) Make your voice heard in a respectful way because if you don’t present solutions for a problem, there ain’t s*** that’s going to get done. It’s also important to make your voice heard in the right way.

I wanted to give a shout-out to the State of Nevada Bureau of Land Management. I got to show my love for my homies. I got to give a shout-out to my buddy Booze. You killed it with the social wellness seminar. That was awesome. I like to also give another special thank you to Brock Uhlig and Vanessa Marquez because they’re the ones who invited us down here and made this all possible. Once again, thank you, everybody.

Special shout out to our sponsors. We got Mystery Ranch built for the mission. Go over to www.MysteryRanch.com and check out that Backbone Series because you will be able to hopefully win one of those $1,000 grants to continue your education and improve your state in fire. We also got Hotshot Brewery, kick-ass coffee for a kick-ass cause. A portion of the proceeds will always go back to the Wildland Firefighter Foundation. Go over to www.HotshotBrewingcom and check it out.

We got The A.S.S. Movement. My boy Booze is changing the way we bury our turds and trying to educate the public with the finest of poo-burying propaganda. Go over to www.TheFireWild.com and check out The A.S.S. Movement. Last but not least, not a sponsor of the show, but I am a huge supporter of what they’re doing over there. That’s going to be none other than the AWE or the American Wildfire Experience. Go over to www.WildFire-Experience.org and check them out. Bethany of the kick-ass organization over there. Keep it up. As for the rest of you, you all know the drill. Stay safe. Stay savage. Peace.

Important Links

• Mystery Ranch

• Mystery Ranch Backbone Series

• Hotshot Brewery

• Wildland Firefighter Foundation

• The A.S.S. Movement

• www.TheFireWild.com

• The Smokey Generation

• American Wildfire Experience

• Bureau of Land Management