Colorado Lawmakers Press Forest Service to Speed Wildfire Mitigation Amid Low Snowpack

Colorado's entire Democratic congressional delegation sent a joint letter to Forest Service Chief Tom Schultz on March 4 warning that the state's snowpack, sitting at roughly 60% of median and its lowest level in decades, is setting the stage for a devastating wildfire season unless the agency moves immediately to accelerate fuel reduction work.

Sen. Michael Bennet led the effort, joined by Sen. John Hickenlooper and Reps. Joe Neguse, Diana DeGette, Brittany Pettersen and Jason Crow. The letter lands as Dolores County and the broader Four Corners region face the same thin snowpack gripping the Rocky Mountains, conditions that historically translate into an early fire season across the region's ponderosa and mixed-conifer forests.

"Snowpack conditions in the Rocky Mountains, particularly in Colorado, are deeply concerning," the letter states. "These levels point to an early and sustained drying of forests and rangelands, and could lead to a longer and more severe, and potentially catastrophic fire season."

The lawmakers called on Schultz to "accelerate strategic precommercial forest thinning, prescribed fire and insect/disease treatments, along with other appropriate science-informed fuel reduction projects, where they are safe and effective to reduce wildfire risk and improve forest health." Their letter also tied the urgency directly to personnel decisions at the agency, noting that staffing cuts had slowed mitigation work heading into last year's fire season.

"(The Forest Service's) lack of preparation last year puts communities across the West at risk," the lawmakers wrote. "The agency must take every possible action now to reduce the extreme danger we face going into potentially one of the driest summers on record."

The financial stakes are also explicit in the letter. "Colorado faces escalating risk and elevated suppression and reconstruction costs, but decisive action could reduce harm to Western communities," Bennet and his colleagues wrote. No specific cost figures were cited, and the Forest Service had not issued a public response to the letter as of the time of this reporting.

For Dolores County, where the San Juan National Forest borders communities throughout the region, the staffing and workload questions raised in the letter are not abstract. Prescribed burn windows in southwest Colorado are narrow, constrained by wind, humidity and fuel moisture conditions that rarely align outside of late fall and early spring. A delayed or underfunded mitigation program this spring could close that window entirely before summer heat arrives.

The lawmakers have not yet identified specific projects or acreage targets they want prioritized, and no Forest Service response to the letter has been made public. Whether Schultz and the agency will commit to accelerating work before the critical spring treatment window closes remains an open question as fire season approaches.