Bill Introduced to Rename Federal Wildland Firefighters

Under a bill recently introduced in Congress, wildland firefighters could someday be called wildland firefighters.

U.S. Rep. Doug LaMalfa, R-Richvale, has introduced a bill that would change the job title of employees in five federal land management agencies to “wildland firefighter.”

In the U.S. Forest Service, firefighters are called “forestry technicians.” Because the Forest Service and other federal agencies won’t change firefighters’ title to reflect the job they do, Congress will have to force them to, said Kevin Eastman, a spokesman for LaMalfa.

“Congress shouldn’t need to pass a bill to address this issue, but the fact is that the federal bureaucracy has failed to do so,” Eastman said.

Casey Judd, executive director of the Federal Wildland Fire Service Association, said the issue has been a top priority for his organization for about 20 years. “It may seem silly to some, but it is a huge issue to these firefighters,” Judd said. Changing the job title could boost morale and result in better job retention among federal wildland firefighters, he said.

“Failing to recognize their value means federal agencies will continue to lose trained, experienced personnel to agencies like Cal Fire, which correctly classify their firefighters,” Eastman said.

The firefighters association has asked the federal Office of Personnel Management to change the job title, but officials there say it is up to the Forest Service, Judd said. And Forest Service officials say it is up to personnel management to change the title, he said. HR5677, if approved, would require the personnel management office to change the title, according to LaMalfa’s office.

“The only way to light the fire is to do a bill,” Judd said. A similar bill was introduced in 2006, but it died before a full vote of Congress, he said.

The forestry technician title is a remnant to a time when Forest Service employees might have fought fires as “other duties as assigned,” Judd said. But today’s federal firefighters primarily fight fire and sometimes year-round, he said.

Judd estimated there are about 26,000 federal firefighters nationwide. He said the bill also would apply to firefighters for the National Park Service, U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Bureau of Land Management.

“There are thousands of these men and women in the North State at this very moment, spending weeks of 18-hour days on fire lines in our national forests,” LaMalfa said in a statement. “If they aren’t firefighters, I don’t know what is.”