March 14th brought hurricane-force winds that kicked up dust clouds in the morning and smoke plumes from hundreds of fires by the afternoon.
Four people died in Oklahoma, and more than 500 homes were damaged, including a farmhouse in Luther owned by Gov. Kevin Stitt.
“I’m not blaming anybody for those fires,” Stitt said at a press conference weeks later. “What I'm frustrated with, like most Oklahomans, is this was a time to save property and save lives. And if we didn't have all of our resources there on those fires, that's frustrating.”
Stitt’s frustration culminated with State Forester Mark Goeller’s resignation, seemingly under pressure from the governor. But last week, the frustration went even further, and floated the idea of disbanding the Forestry Services.
“Why do I even have a Department of Forestry?” he said. “Let's just get rid of the whole thing.”
Forestry Services official baffled by Stitt’s comments
All 50 states have forestry services — so do D.C., Puerto Rico and 7 U.S.-affiliated islands.
“Even Kansas has one,” joked Oklahoma Forestry Services Assistant Director Craig Marquardt. “Sorry, Kansas.”
The Oklahoma Forestry Services are part of the state Department of Agriculture, Food and Forestry. The division has about 135 employees who fall under two branches: forest management and fire management.
Fire management gets a lot of the fanfare, but forest management is a big deal too. About a quarter of the state is covered in woodlands, but forest management can be applied anywhere.
“It's not just in what people think of as the timbered areas in the eastern part of the state, but all the way across, all the way to the end of the Panhandle,” Marquardt said.
The division fights back invasive species, improves Oklahoma’s commercial timber, helps private landowners manage their water quality and helps urban areas keep their trees healthy so they don’t fall on power lines or streets.
But they do fire management too. And Marquardt says the fire conditions Oklahoma saw last month were historic.
“That's a word that we don't throw around very often in the fire world,” he said. “March 14th was a day that we've never seen before. It was — I've been here 36 years, and I haven't seen a day like that before. I've seen some bad days, but not a day like that.”
The division had resources in place ahead of time, and Marquardt says they used everything available to fight the fires.
“We were fully committed that day,” he said. “Any additional requests for resources, we're just out, you know. We've done all we can do with everything we have.”
Stitt has said several times that Forestry Services held back resources during the fires. It’s been difficult to verify what resources he’s referring to. Stitt’s office bounced records requests to the Oklahoma Department of Agriculture, Food and Forestry, which hasn’t responded. And Stitt says he doesn’t actually know either.
“The fact that we can't get answers about where their assets were around the state is further proof that this is a deep-seated bureaucracy that are trying to protect their actions,” he said. “We still haven't been able to figure out where they were during that thing.”
The Forestry Services may not match what you picture when you hear "deep-seated bureaucracy." It’s one space containing maybe 20 cubicles, festooned with posters of Smokey Bear, kids' drawings of forests and comic strips edited to be about Oklahoma. Former Oklahoma Forester Goeller sat in the corner by some windows.
There’s also a conference room that becomes the division’s finance center during fire incidents. Snacks are piled up along one wall, and a huddle of people on laptops fastidiously track money spent on fighting fires.
The whole thing is less than half a mile from Stitt’s office at the State Capitol. Marquardt says they’re not hiding anything.
“I don't know where the base of his question’s coming from, you know?” he said. “We've been responding to the requests for information, and we have it pretty available. So we're trying to get it turned around quickly.”
State lawmakers back Forestry Services
Senate President Pro Tem Lonnie Paxton says he also doesn’t know where Stitt’s coming from, but it doesn’t really matter.
“The Forestry Department is set up by the legislature and funded by the legislature,” Paxton said at a press conference last week. “That would be our authority, whether we keep the Forestry Department or not.”
Paxton said he hasn’t heard any plans from lawmakers to eliminate Forestry Services, and he doesn’t care to.
“I don't know if that was just a comment that was said, if there's any actual plan to do that,” Paxton said. “But it sounds like a really bad idea to me.”
Across the rotunda, House Speaker Kyle Hilbert, R-Bristow, called the governor’s criticism an “insult not only to the Department of Forestry, but also to the fire service in general.”
Hilbert gathered lawmakers with firefighting experience to address Stitt’s comments. Among them was Majority Caucus Chairman Stan May, R-Broken Arrow, who was with the Tulsa Fire Department for more than two decades.
“They had to respond to 140 fires with 130 personnel,” May said. “So did they get to everything? No.… But without the state Forestry Service here, we could not cover and combat those wildfires — they moved too fast, especially in volunteer areas.”
In his call to get rid of the Forestry Services, Stitt mentioned sending the money allocated to the division to volunteer fire departments instead.
“Let's give it to our volunteer fire departments, the folks throughout the state that are actually already there doing this,” Stitt said. “Because the bureaucracy in Oklahoma City let our local folks down and, and I'm going to get to the bottom of it.”
The Oklahoma Forestry Service trains entry-level volunteer firefighters and provides resources and coordination between crews during big fire events.
Senate Democratic Leader Julia Kirt of Oklahoma City wondered how volunteer firefighters would fare if the Forestry Services abruptly disappeared.
“If we're going to suddenly transition everything to local leadership, how does that work when things cross county lines?” Kirt asked. “How does that work when things cross our municipal lines? And there has to be a transition plan. If we're talking about running our state like a business, we would do stakeholder analysis and actually look at who's being served. Right?”
May also emphasized how much volunteer fire crews benefit from the Forestry Services.
“They don't have the manpower, they don't have the equipment, and, quite frankly, it might bankrupt some communities if they didn't have that help,” May said.
The Oklahoma Forestry Services celebrated its 100th anniversary on Apr. 6, and Paxton said it shouldn’t be going anywhere.
“It is a very useful tool for fire departments in the state,” Paxton said. “It has been for the last 100 years, and we should keep it. We should make sure it's efficient, but we need to keep it in place.”
Lionel Ramos contributed to this report.
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