AIR TANKER BILL HELD UP FEDERAL LAW WOULD ALLOW MILITARY AIRCRAFT TO FIGHT FIRES SOONER.

Byline: Lisa Friedman Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON - The U.S. Senate is holding up legislation by a Southern California lawmaker that could make it easier for military air tankers to help in future wildfires.

The bill by Rep. Elton Gallegly, R-Thousand Oaks, would amend a Depression-era law that requires all available commercial air tankers to be used in a firestorm before officials can deploy military tankers.

Gallegly's measure passed the House as an amendment to the 2004 Defense Authorization Bill, but the Senate has not agreed to it. Now, with wildfires sweeping through Southern California, the provision is emerging as a sticking points among lawmakers negotiating the different bills.

``The senators are getting calls from contractors who want to keep the arrangement in place,'' said one congressional aide.

Gallegly's measure has the backing of the California Air National Guard and Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-El Cajon, the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, whose own home was destroyed in this week's wildfires.

Military tankers - specially equipped C-130s - assigned to Point Mugu were requested Oct. 24 and activated Sunday to help fight the wildfires raging throughout Southern California.

Hunter couldn't speculate what the planes could have accomplished if they'd been activated earlier, but said, ``Having lots of assets coming in sooner rather than later has the potential of stopping small fires from becoming big ones. We want to get the Economy Act waived so military assets can get in first and not last.''

Gallegly, who has been working on the measure with Rep. Joel Hefley, R-Colo., for about nine years, said fire bureaucracy has long been a personal source of frustration.

As to the opposition in the U.S. Senate, Gallegly said, ``Follow the money. There's obviously folks that represent areas where these companies are located and for parochial reasons they're sympathetic.''

But private interests aren't the only ones at play. The Bush administration also opposes Gallegly's measure.

The U.S. Forest Service has testified in past congressional hearings against Gallegly's legislation. On Thursday, Bob Kuhn, the agency's acting national aviation officer, said the ability to call in military tankers earlier doesn't necessarily get crews out to fires faster.

Kuhn said the Forest Service normally contracts for about 36 commercially owned air tankers that are kept on standby, with crews ``cocked and ready to go at a moment's notice to a fire.''

Eight military units exist - two each at Port Hueneme in Ventura County, North Carolina, Wyoming and Colorado. Those, Kuhn said, are kept disassembled and normally need about 24 hours to be deployed once they are called up.

``It's simply not feasible for the military to stay geared up for this mission throughout the year,'' Kuhn said.

Richard Carson, an economics professor at the University of California, San Diego, and an expert on disaster response policies, agreed. But, he said, it still makes sense to change the law.

``(The military) is not used to fighting fires, but it's a good next-line resource to have in battles like these.

``Given that you saw the fire racing toward Scripps Ranch, you say, Why didn't you call them up and try? It might have made a difference, it might not.''

The real issue is ``just people defending their turf,'' Carson said.

The 1934 Economy Act is the procedure through which one government agency is allowed to seek supplies or services from another. Under the law, those supplies first have to be sought from private contractors before going to the government.

Gallegly's provision would waive that law for two years and create a pilot program giving the secretaries of the Interior and Agriculture departments the ability to call Air Force Reserve and Air National Guard planes into service first.

Lawmakers interested in changing the law said the Forest Service worries that the private sector might pull out of the business of leasing tankers if its enterprise is endangered.

``The federal government's aerial firefighting function is more than adequately performed by a cost-effective, professional industry within the United States consisting of private-sector companies,'' Roy Resavage, president of the Helicopter Association International, a trade organization that represents operators of civil helicopters, testified before a 2002 congressional hearing on Gallegly's bill.

Gallegly, for one, said he sympathizes with private-sector needs but added, ``There has to be a better way.''

Brig. Gen. John Iffland, First Air Expeditionary Task Force commander for the Northern Command, who is in charge of all the military aerial units fighting the Southern California wildfires, said he also doesn't want to hurt private enterprise.

``We have to be very considerate that if there is a consequence to the commercial sector, then we have to figure out how to make that better,'' he said.

But, Iffland added, he also wants the government to make better use of military aerial tankers.

``When we were put into the fight, we immediately and positively impacted the fire,'' he said. ``Had we been able to get them into the fight more quickly, we'd be able to make more headway.''

Forest Service spokeswoman Kathy Good countered that the main reasons military tankers weren't flying earlier had far more to do with the strong Santa Ana winds than bureaucracy.

``Nobody was flying. We were relying heavily on the helicopters,'' she said.

But those like Gallegly and Iffland said the blazes of 2003 remind them too much of 1993, when six Air National Guard C-130s based at Channel Islands remained on the ground for hours as major fires broke out in Los Angeles, Riverside, Orange, Ventura, San Bernardino and San Diego counties.

``In 1993, we stood on the tarmac with the planes ready. Here we are 10 years later, and it's a little bit of the same,'' Iffland said.

Lisa Friedman, [phone]

lisa.friedman(at)langnews.com