Nevada lawmakers to feds: Pay up for Tahoe fire work

Fed up with waiting, Nevada lawmakers are ramping up efforts to have private companies, fire districts and others paid for work conducted years ago to reduce fire danger in vulnerable areas around Lake Tahoe.

The Legislature earlier this month passed a joint resolution urging Congress to pay contractors who performed extensive fuels treatment work in the wake of Tahoe's disastrous Angora Fire of 2007.

More than $3.4 million is still owed for work conducted through the now-defunct Nevada Fire Safe Council, which filed for bankruptcy in 2012 after a federal audit uncovered financial irregularities in how U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management grants were handled by the nonprofit group.

"It's just really, really frustrating," said Brian Rye, president of Bushwhackers Tree Service, Inc., which is still owed more than $16,000 for tree thinning and other fuel management work the firm preformed several years ago at Tahoe.

"Basically on these projects we got nothing," Rye said, adding that the situation caused significant cash-flow problems for a small business that usually employs 12 to 20 people.

"It definitely altered the direction of my business plan," Rye said. "It's hard to make payroll when you're expecting that money to come in. That is money we would use to purchase equipment, to expand, to advertise more."

For others the burden is more onerous. The owner of South Lake Tahoe's Kimball Tree Service, still owed more than $100,000, said he was forced to take out a second mortgage on his home to pay his employees. He declined to be identified for purposes of this article.

What many describe as a highly successful program, the Nevada Fire Safe Council was formed in 1999. With development continuing to push into fire-prone areas abutting the backcountry, the group's mission was to help communities organize and promote the use of "defensible space" to protect homes and neighborhoods from wildland blazes. By March 2007, the council had grown to include 60 chapters with more than 3,500 members.

Three months later, an abandoned campfire fanned into flame during a windy June afternoon and exploded into Tahoe's most disastrous wildfire. The Angora Fire burned more than 3,000 acres outside South Lake Tahoe and destroyed more than 250 homes.

The fire also prompted a surge of activity in treating fire fuels to prevent future disasters at Tahoe, much of it coordinated through the Nevada Fire Safe Council. Between 2008 and 2012, the council was awarded more than $21 million in federal grants to fund public and private hazardous fuel treatment projects.

Problems arose in early 2012 when an audit conducted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Office of Inspector General revealed the co-mingling of federal grants with other funds, lax accounting practices and other problems. The Forest Service and BLM immediately halted payments into the program.

"Those granting agencies just slammed the door even though there were legitimate invoices that needed to be paid," said Elwood Miller, the Fire Safe Council's original director who left the post in 2006. Miller is himself owed some $61,000 for work he later conducted for the Nevada Fire Safe Council as a private contractor.

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