The B.C. government has spent most of its annual forest fire budget already, with a long hot August still to come.

The $60-million budget is an estimate based on previous years, which lately have been calm. To give an idea of the volatile costs, the recent Tyaughton Lake fire near Lillooet rang up a bill of $15 million all by itself. This is in a remote area where a scattering of dwellings necessitated the full response of the B.C. Forest Service. Land is one thing, real estate is another.

Tom Hobby, the Royal Roads University forest economist who’s been measuring B.C.’s forest fuel work, has suggested that B.C. has dealt with only two per cent of its interface zones since the 2003 Okanagan and North Thompson fires. This figure has not been challenged by the government. Forests Minister Pat Bell still likes to talk about local fuel treatment plans, which are coming along wonderfully.

As a logger, Bell knows what we urgently need here is not more plans, but the smell of Husqvarnas in the morning. The question is how to get them fired up, quickly.

As with emergency plans for fire, flood and earthquake, forest fuel plans have been assigned to local governments. This is what Premier Gordon Campbell calls subsidiarity, the principle that decisions are made as closely as possible to the people affected, with senior governments stepping in only where local efforts are insufficient.

That’s clearly the case with small communities hammered by a logging slump. And who better to run those chainsaws than out-of-work loggers, most of whom can’t even get EI?

As forests flared in the Okanagan again, Bell defended the B.C. Liberal record in an interview. The fuel management fund held by the Union of B.C. Municipalities was $37 million, more than half of which has been spent in partnership with local governments, 50-50 or 75-25 in a pine beetle zone.

The Central Okanagan Regional District is among those that have “executed,” he said, and the containment response to the latest fires was better as a result.

What about communities too broke to pitch in? If the UBCM wants a change in the formula to spend the rest, they can ask for that, Bell said. And another $4.7 million has been spent since the “Firestorm 2003” report, to pay off-season firefighters for fuel management jobs that should keep their summer overtime bills down.

Wow, almost a million bucks a year. They’ll soon spend that much on carbon offsets for politicians and bureaucrats to hop the Helijet.

Hobby says the only way to finance this huge job is to develop a biomass energy industry. So how’s that going?

Alas, the retreat of glaciers seems faster.

There are business people anxious to get going. One of them is Run of River Power CEO Jako Krushnisky, who is focused on the company’s recent acquisition of Western Biomass after running into urban power pole politics on his Upper Pitt plan.

Western is working on a waste wood project with the Tsilhqot’in near Williams Lake that would use beetle kill. Another proposal is with the Gitxsan in northwest B.C., where low-grade pulp trees haven’t been cut since Skeena Cellulose went chest up 12 years ago.

Rural development, aboriginal jobs, renewable energy, fire prevention. Perfect, right?

B.C. Hydro has two biomass power purchase schemes in the works. For larger projects, an actual call for bids is still many months away. Bids should be accepted this fall for small community-based biomass, for all of two projects.

Get on with it already.

Tom Fletcher is legislative reporter and columnist for Black Press newspapers.

tfletcher@blackpress.ca