A History of extinguishing wildfire legislation: What to expect from Colorado’s 2025 legislative session
Also, CSU wildfire science, the Roaring Fork Valley's fire risk, and inside Colorado Springs Utilities' wildfire plan
By Matt Gensburg and Grant Thompson
Typically, firefighters use water to put out wildfires. In the same way, in recent years, legislators and private entities have watered down wildfire legislation, sometimes to the point of extinguishment.
Since the Marshall Fire in late December of 2021, Colorado’s most expensive wildfire to date, state lawmakers have brought wildfire-related legislation to the floors of the Colorado General Assembly in increasing numbers.
However, in recent years, the contents of these bills have substantially changed along the way.
Democratic Sen. Lisa Cutter is the current vice chair of the Wildfire Matters Review Interim Committee, a bipartisan group that consists of both senators and representatives.
When speaking with Colorado College’s “Reporting on Wildfires” class on March 31 at the Capitol in Denver, Cutter emphasized that a lot of wildfire legislation ends up watered down by the time it reaches the floor, if it ever does.
“We’re going to have to create an amendment to create the framework [for funding] rather than [directly] funding it,” Cutter said when discussing one particular prescribed fire bill.
In 2020, lawmakers introduced HB20-1142, Hazard Mitigation Grant Program, which sought to establish a hazard mitigation enterprise that pooled funding from a small fee on the premiums collected by insurance companies offering disaster-related policies.
According to the original text of the bill, this insurance-centered funding pool would have allowed for the establishment of a hazard mitigation grant program. The proposed law also would have provided “public education on the importance of insurance,” and “provided local governments technical information and support on natural hazard mitigation through land use and building codes.”
Although the bill made it out of its original committee, the Natural Resources & Environment committee, it went on to die in the House Finance committee.
So, despite being a bipartisan issue, why does Colorado wildfire legislation get watered down or extinguished altogether?
One reason wildfire legislation is so difficult to pass in its original form is because the Wildfire Matters Review Interim Committee only gets to pass along five total bills to either the House or Senate floors, Cutter said. While wildfire-related legislation can begin in any subcommittee in either chamber of state legislature, the committee directly associated with the issue is limited to five.
This committee limitation allows for increased influence of special interests, a factor that impacts plenty of legislation seen inside the Capitol walls.
“Almost every bill we do is heavily lobbied,” Cutter said. “So, there’s a lot of special interests.”
According to Cutter, a proposed expansion of HB20-1142 during this year’s legislative session was trumped by an AI wildfire bill bolstered and lobbied by a major defense contractor. The AI bill would go on to lose a vote in the Transportation & Energy committee. The bill, according to Cutter, likely died because of its hefty price tag of $7.5 million, while the proposed expansion never saw the light of day.
Becca Samulski, the executive director of Fire Adapted Colorado, a nonprofit that works to support and advance proactive wildfire resiliency work, added her own reasons for why the edges of bills get sanded down as they make their way through the committees and chambers.
“Things get through when the time is right … most of the ideas, when they actually get all the way through the process, have been ideas for a really long time,” Samulski said. “Maybe drafted in one stage or another, gone back to the chopping block, different sponsors, different work-with partners on the back end to figure out and work through the kinks before they get through … and that’s just part of the legislative process.”
Samulski added that lawmakers might alter a bill for the purpose of political can-kicking.
“I’ve seen that a lot … where something goes from a big idea where people are saying ‘this would really help,’ to ‘let's authorize a study on it,’” Samulski said, adding, “I … haven’t really seen those studies turn around into recommendations that then get adopted … it’s just kicking the can.”
Samulski also described how the nature of wildfire legislation is often reactive and not proactive, a sentiment shared by Cutter.
“The cost of not doing the work up front to protect against wildfire to the degree that we can is [a] massive cost in suppression, rebuilding, any number of things,” Cutter said.
Samulski added that for the legislation to pass in substantial numbers, and to remain intact, the previous year had to have been a bad wildfire year, and lawmakers are trying to strike when the political iron is hot.
Last year was a quieter year for wildfires, both in cost and acreage burned, relative to past years.
While this is not politically unusual, Samulski went on to say that this lack of proactive effort from lawmakers is a major problem for an issue thats solutions rely so heavily on mitigation.
“I also think that the large majority of wildfire bills that get created are response focused or response capacity focused,” she said. “And then, legislation will get suggested for mitigation stuff and sometimes lose out to that response stuff which is unfortunate but not everybody in the legislature has as much background knowledge to recognize the value of proactive work on wildfire.”
The final factor echoed by both interviewees as a reason for the major changes seen in wildfire legislation was cost. As seen in the Hazard Mitigation bill, money is a huge factor in decisions to modify or kill bills.
So, what does this mean for this year’s wildfire-related bills? Already this year, House Bill 25-1302, Increase Access Homeowners’ Insurance Enterprise, sought to provide grant programs for homeowners to properly mitigate their homes from catastrophic events, including wildfires.
In addition, the bill provided a wildfire-specific reinsurance program for insurers to partially make up losses due to state or federally declared wildfires. The bill sought to prevent insurers from leaving the state or denying insurance to wildfire-prone areas.
In the original text, however, insurance companies would have had to pay 1.5% of collected premiums to the grant program.
After time in committee and in collaboration with said insurance companies, lawmakers heavily amended it. Instead, now homeowners would be faced with this extra cost if this bill were to pass.
From AI to a drone: The new tech Colorado Springs Utilities is using to fight wildfires
Sofia Joucovsky
A pilot program Colorado Springs Utilities is using to fight wildfires involves an unmanned aircraft.
In a 22-page “Wildfire Mitigation Plan” released earlier this year, the public utility in the state’s second-largest city outlines how it wants to spend more than $6 million to prevent fires around critical infrastructure and watersheds.
The plan includes over half a million dollars allocated to testing new technology such as drones, artificial intelligence software programs, GIS technology, and remote reclosers and circuits. The remaining millions will go to forest restoration and wildfire mitigation near watersheds, vegetation management, and system improvement projects for 2025.
Steve Berry, senior public affairs specialist with Colorado Springs Utilities, said the company is allocating $612,000 in its 2025 plan for pilot projects.
This includes the use of AI.
The utility company wants to use technologies for “real-time” intelligence, according to Colorado Springs Utilities Fire Program Manager Steve Reyes. That could include help with system monitoring, such as infrastructure, weather, fuel, and vegetation conditions.
Colorado Springs Utilities is looking at working with three different AI companies, Reyes said.
One of the programs the utility company is considering is Pano AI. The San Francisco-based startup uses “deep learning AI and computer vision to automatically detect, verify, and classify wildfire events in real time,” according to the Pano AI website. The technology includes stations on “high vantage points” that monitor high-risk areas with advanced cameras and data analysis that is supported by AI. Once a fire is confirmed, it will help fire personnel disperse up-to-date information while they are fighting a fire.
Another program Colorado Springs Utilities is looking at is AiDASH, which provides “satellite-based vegetation management” to help protect electrical grids.
Colorado Springs Utilities is also potentially going to use Technosylva, which uses AI to perform wildfire risk simulations and analysis, which would allow electric companies to mitigate liability during wildfires.
Sometime “in the near future,” the technology will deploy, but Reyes could not definitively say when.
To perform “system improvements and system hardening,” the utility’s Wildfire Mitigation Plan details the use of “drone-aided 360-degree inspections and infrared imaging.”
Colorado Springs Utilities has someone on staff who is drone-pilot certified.
The public utility has already begun test flights for the drones, which will continue over the next few months, Berry said, adding that Colorado Springs Utilities will be “doing launch flights this year” to see if they can even get the viewpoints they need.
Some of the technology the city’s utility company plans to deploy using the drone is Light Detection and Ranging technology.
LiDAR could do vegetation analysis to map all the trees and “figure out spacing and height with filters that allow you to determine the health of certain trees,” Reyes said.
The company is not currently using the drone for actual fire prevention because it is in the testing phase and not approved for wide-scale use, Reyes said.
The utility company is also taking steps to mitigate wildfires started by power lines.
This includes “remote reclosers and circuits where you can isolate a stretch of powerline in a given area with a flip of a switch,” which keeps personnel from going to individual power lines to prevent fires. The utilities company is also looking at “covered conductors to keep lines from blowing into trees and vegetation and keep them from sparking if they slap each other,” Berry explained.
According to the mitigation plan, another technique for wildfire prevention is undergrounding, which is the process of putting electrical wires underground. Doing so is “an effective technique to reduce wildfire risk,” the plan stated.
Seventy percent of the utility’s electrical wires are underground, but the process of undergrounding exposed wire could be three to five times the cost of leaving them above ground.
Furthermore, Berry said that to bury the wire in mountainous areas, the company would have to dig through rock and terrain, which could prove difficult.
The utility even had a major fire a few years ago in an underground vault, he said.
Berry said undergrounding “doesn’t guarantee you would never have the failure, but it certainly helps with weather and weather-caused fires … that’s the big advantage and why it’s the best solution on paper. But once you look at the monetary investment and time it takes, with expenses and everything. It becomes a situation where managed risk on return on investment doesn’t come to your favor.”
“If money and time were no object, if terrain wasn’t an issue, it’s the best way to protect [power lines] from weather and wildlife,” Berry added.
When it comes to protecting Colorado Springs Utilities’ infrastructure during wildfires, it has a 30-year-old, in-house wildland firefighting team.
Reyes said many of the firefighters work regular jobs within Colorado Springs Utilities. The team is additionally certified as wildland firefighters, and also have further medical and driving training. Reyes meets with his team monthly to make sure their skills are up to par.
He said that his firefighters “understand how important it is not to just protect our infrastructure, but our community.”
Within the company’s operations, Berry said that Colorado Springs Utilities has faced pushback from the community, particularly about the wildland-urban interface following the Los Angeles fire earlier this year.
Colorado Springs Utilities is responsible for maintaining and operating fire hydrants and sends its wildland fire crew to help both the city’s fire department and the National Forest Service to help with prescribed burns and fighting fires.
Between the drone, AI monitoring, and updating the powerline technology, the utility is trying to figure out which of these new technologies works and which they want to further implement in the future.
“We have budgeted $3.5 million for system improvement,” Berry said, “which will depend on the climate programs this year, such as GIS mapping, remote switches, and a more formal drone program.”
Colorado State University scientists discovered an easier way to study high-intensity wildfires: Pile burning
Sydney McGarr
Scientists studying the effects of wildfires on soil microbiomes are hitting a frequent roadblock: inability to sample soil from immediate wildfire aftermath because of safety concerns such as fallen debris, leftover heat, and locations blocked off by law enforcement officials.
Driving into burned areas can be difficult because of outside factors such as flooding and oftentimes science is not the first priority in the days following a wildfire.
(For a refresher on what soil microbiomes are check out our January 2022 edition of “Burning Questions.”)
One solution? Julie Fowler, a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate studying soil microbiology at Colorado State University, says it can be found in pile burns.
Pile burning is a type of prescribed fire where firefighters burn piles of forest debris, often derived from fuel reducing logging projects.
Fowler and her colleagues found that pile burns changed the microbial community in the same way as high-intensity wildfires, making an effective scientific argument that soil recovered from these burns is an appropriate proxy to study hotter wildfires.
The study was published in July 2024.
“What is great about using something like a pile burn as a proxy for wildfires in this field of research is how relatively controllable they are,” Fowler said. “There’s a lot of room for experimental manipulation of things like fuel types, fuel loads, water addition to simulate post-fire rainfall events, etc. It’s another tool in the toolbelt.”
Chances are you’re not a career wildfire scientist, so you may be asking yourself: why does studying soil microbes post-wildfire even matter?
The soil microbiome, namely fungus and bacteria, plays a critical role in plant health.
As wildfires increase in their frequency, severity, and extent because of outside factors such as climate change, understanding microbiome recovery allows scientists to understand how ecosystems build from the bottom-up to return to their once flourishing states.
Fowler found that in both pile burns and actual wildfires, the fungi that remains prominent in the soil is pyrophilous, which means “fire loving.” According to Fowler, pyrophilous fungi are able to survive in the ash layer of burned structures because they have thermo-tolerant structures.
“[Pyrophilous fungi] can eat the carbon that’s been burned and changed by the fire,” said Fowler. “That was a thing we used to think microbes couldn’t do.”
Scientists are continuing to study the ways that this behavior affects environmental recovery as well as carbon output back into the atmosphere. Pile burns are an effective way to study this growth and push future research on environmental bounce-back.
Fowler is currently working on a new study using her findings about pile burns as a proxy. She is looking at long-term effects of wildfires on soil microbiomes, spanning up to 15 months.
“It’s thought that the soil microbiome is extremely dynamic in the first year post-burn,” Fowler said. “So I am really looking forward to our results here and what we can discover and what implications it may have for forest nutrient cycling post wildfire.”
To the average reader, the broader ramifications of this study may seem convoluted. But Fowler hopes that the study will help make science surrounding wildfires more accessible to the general public.
“Hopefully work like this exposes the general public to [pile burns’] existence, their purpose, and maybe to the concept of proxies ... in science in general,” Fowler said. “We often think of science occurring strictly in sterile lab environments, but scientists who do primarily field-based work often have to get creative under challenging circumstances.”
A world class ski town in Colorado has a ‘quite high’ risk of urban wildfire spread
Beau Toepfer
Aspen and its surrounding Roaring Fork Valley communities are famous destinations for vacationers, skiers, and outdoor enthusiasts.
One thing visitors might miss when they visit is that the communities in the valley are at a “quite high” risk of experiencing an urban conflagration, or a destructive fire that spreads into a city as was seen in Paradise, California or in the Marshall Fire, according to Angie Davlyn, RFV Wildfire Collective executive director.
The valley, almost in its entirety, is a part of the Wildland Urban Interface. The WUI is defined by the National Institute of Standards and Technology as the “area where human development ... meets or intermixes with undeveloped wildlands.”
Almost a century of rampant wildfire suppression, coupled with a warming planet inducing years of drought-like conditions and extreme fire weather, has led to a massive accumulation of fuels in our forests, making the valley a high-risk area.
A Wildfire Risk Viewer map maintained by the Colorado State Forest Service, a forest management service operated through Colorado State University, shows the valley region as having on average a moderate-to-high burn probability. And much of that land is expected to burn at a high intensity, which is often unresponsive to firefighting measures.
“We’ve chosen to build our homes in a highly forested area,” Davlyn said. “We’ve got climate aspects too, where we live in a place that’s a bit hotter and drier, and a lot of places in the valley are quite windy, and then there’s steep slope. And so those factors combined make our area at quite a high risk.”
Houses and property in the RFV may be at risk, but that doesn’t mean they’re doomed.
Colorado’s Democratic governor, Jared Polis, said in an April 2 meeting with Colorado College students that building materials “still matter,” but he said the “bigger issue is going to be fuel.”
Polis said defense barriers around communities and around homes are more important.
Davlyn, however, believes that there must be more of a mix between wildfire resistant buildings and their surroundings.
“I think we got very lucky with the fires that we’ve seen here in the valley recently, including Lake Christine and Grizzly Creek,” Davlyn said. “We lost some homes and the Lake Christine Fire, and it was just amazing that we didn’t see more damage and destruction from that. And I don’t know how many times we can keep getting lucky during a wildfire.”
Despite this, Felix Tornare, a regenerative rancher who owns a ranch in the WUI above Carbondale, has gone through extensive efforts to defend his property. When asked what his evacuation plan was, he was confident he had done enough.
“I wouldn’t,” Tornare said about evacuating. “I’m ready. I will be. Last time with Basalt Mountain (fire), we were supposed to do that or work on it. And I’m like, ‘I’m staying here to protect what’s here, which I can because I have the resources of solid water and green pastures that will be safe.’ I feel like our house will be safe, easy, and defendable.”
In part that’s because of his ranching practices.
Tornare uses regenerative farming, a practice that bolsters soil health and moisture and favors native, often wildfire resilient grasses in his pastures that surround his stucco, metal-roofed house.
“We’ve had a pretty dry spring up here, where the snow has been going out of the field in March, which doesn't usually happen. So we could potentially have a pretty dry summer,” Tornare said. “What we’ve been doing for the last three, four years, should really help us keep us green.”
The Pitkin County Sheriff’s Office, however, urges evacuation if a mandatory evacuation order is put in place. They can’t, however, make people leave.
According to Parker Lathrop, sheriff’s office deputy of operations, in the right conditions, it doesn’t matter how your house is built or what resources you have in place to defend your property.
“We try to tell people, if everything else, house, cars, belongings, that stuff can be replaced,” he said. “It’s the lives that can’t be.”
Plenty of people, however, likely don’t have healthy green pastures surrounding their wildfire resilient houses. The communities in the valley are often dense, and building codes don’t include everything that needs to be done to make houses as resilient as possible.
“All of our communities here in the valley are quite close together,” Davlyn said. “When one home is on fire, it puts all of the homes around it at risk. So any home within 60, 70 feet of another home has a high likelihood of burning down.”
According to Davlyn, that’s most of the neighborhoods in the valley. Almost the entire valley is surrounded with high burn intensity forests, many of them are primed for a wildfire.
“I think every single home in our entire valley, Aspen to Glenwood, should treat it as if it’s at a high risk of a wildfire, and should do everything they can to improve their home,” Davlyn said.
Despite the inherent risk, the evacuation system in the valley is rudimentary compared to the complexity of the neighborhoods.
According to the Wildfire Risk Viewer, many neighborhoods have poor egress and ingress, making it difficult to evacuate on short notice as well as difficult for first responders to make it to you. According to a City of Aspen Public Service Announcement, it could take up to 15 hours to evacuate the town, a much longer time than it took the Marshall fire to burn over 1,000 homes and businesses.
“A challenge with that is not just getting the people out, but sometimes getting the people in to help notify an evacuation,” Lathrop of the sheriff’s office said. “Also in those same areas, we have those one way in one way out areas, we often don’t have cell phones (numbers for inhabitants).”
Because of this, it is important that WUI inhabitants have wildfire awareness and defendable properties and egress routes, say others who focus on the issue.
According to Connor Coleman, the owner of Resiliency Lands, an organization that promotes ecological resiliency, people who recently moved to the valley have an obligation to become aware of the local wildfire environment.
“To be a successful member of our community, people need to ask how they can play their part in being a member of the solution,” Coleman said.
One problem that still requires a solution is the intensifying wildfires and wildfire seasons that are plaguing the West.
“There’s no question that weather patterns are shifting, that our fire seasons are getting significantly longer, more volatile and unpredictable,” Coleman said. “Without a doubt, we can say things are changing … the reality is things are changing, and regardless of the cause, we need to be aware of it.”
For information on your property, visit RFVwildfire.org, firewise.org, or aspenfire.com to request a mitigation assessment.
A version of this story was originally published in The Aspen Times on April 11, 2025.
You’re reading Burning Questions, a newsletter produced out of the Colorado College Journalism Institute with support from a National Science Foundation grant. Students produced some editions in their class “Reporting on Wildfires” in the fall of 2023 and the spring of 2025. Learn more about this newsletter here. 📬 Enter your email address to subscribe and get Burning Questions delivered to your inbox each time it comes out. You can reach us with questions, feedback, or tips by emailing burningquestionscc@gmail.com.