Montana's $30 Million Wildfire Protection Subsidy for Landowners
Summary
A Montana Legislative Audit Division review of the Department of Natural Resources and Conservation's Fire Assessment Program found the state spent $41.1 million on wildfire protection in fiscal 2023 while collecting just $4.3 million in landowner fees. Auditors estimate the resulting subsidy to landowners at more than $30 million a year -- and trace the cost-share formula behind it to a national study from 1958 that Montana has never recalculated against its own fire data.
A formula that predates Montana's own fire data
The one-third figure did not come from Montana. It traces to a 1958 study by the Battelle Memorial Institute, commissioned by the U.S. Department of Agriculture to estimate a national cost split between state governments, private landowners, and the federal government. Montana adopted that national split -- public responsibility of at least two-thirds, private no greater than one-third -- as its own, and never replaced it. The study's own authors warned that its proportions were based on national fire-start and cause data and did not apply to individual states. Auditors tested that warning against Montana-specific numbers: using National Interagency Fire Center data from 2020 to 2023, they found 82 percent of fires on land under DNRC's direct protection, and 92 percent of fires statewide, started on private land. If landowner responsibility tracked that share instead of the 1958 estimate, the fee would be collecting closer to nine times what it collects today.
View data as table
| Current practice | 10.5% | $4.3M in FY2023 fee revenue against $41.1M in total wildfire protection costs |
|---|---|---|
| Statute as written | 33.3% | Up to one-third, per the 1958 Battelle Memorial Institute national study Montana's formula still rests on |
| Auditors' estimate | 92% | 82% of fires under DNRC direct protection, and 92% statewide, started on private land (2020-2023 federal fire data) |
The fee is capped, and hasn't moved since 2015
The wildfire protection assessment fee -- charged to owners of classified forest land inside one of Montana's 33 wildland fire protection districts, the first formed in 1911 and none ever dissolved -- has two components, each capped by statute: no more than $50 per owner per district, and no more than $0.30 per acre for land over 20 acres in a district. DNRC already assesses both at their statutory ceiling; the last time it asked the legislature to raise those ceilings was 2015. Auditors also found the legislature has historically applied the landowner-responsibility proportion only to DNRC's $13.7 million fire readiness budget -- itself funded by the fee ($4.3 million), the General Fund ($8.7 million), and federal grants ($0.7 million) -- rather than to the $41.1 million statute actually references as "total wildfire protection costs." Applying the proportion to the smaller number shrinks what landowners owe twice over: once by using an outdated cost-share estimate, and again by applying it to a budget line that excludes suppression spending, which averaged $31.9 million a year between fiscal 2013 and 2022 and swung as high as $79.1 million in a single year.
View data as table
| Wildfire protection assessment fee | 4,300,000 | Paid by landowners in classified fire districts, capped by statute since 2015 |
|---|---|---|
| General Fund | 8,700,000 | State taxpayer appropriation covering the majority of the readiness budget |
| Federal grants | 700,000 | Smallest of the three funding sources |
What the department concedes, and what it doesn't
DNRC's written response, included in the audit, "partially concurs" with the recommendation to rebase the fee on Montana-specific data applied to total protection costs. It does not dispute the auditors' math. Its objection is practical: folding statewide suppression costs -- which the department says have ranged from roughly $20 million to $80 million a year -- into a multi-year base budget would make the biennial appropriation process nearly impossible to plan around, since suppression costs cannot be reliably projected two to four years out. The department also flags that meeting even one-third of that appropriation through higher fees would mean a substantially larger bill for landowners than they pay now. Separately, and with less ambiguity, auditors found DNRC's own fee-assignment software and procedures deviated from statute in ways that produced incorrect fee assignments or bills for more than 980 properties -- split parcels, tax-exempt open-space land, and local-government property the statute does not clearly address. On those operational findings, the department concurred without qualification.
- Montana collected $4.3 million in wildfire protection fees from landowners in FY2023 against $41.1 million in total state wildfire protection spending -- a 10.5% share, versus the roughly one-third the state's own 1958-derived cost-share formula implies landowners should pay.
- Auditors estimate the resulting general-taxpayer subsidy to landowners in high fire-risk areas at more than $30 million a year, and separately calculate that landowners started 92% of wildfires statewide (2020-2023 federal data) -- a share auditors say the fee doesn't reflect.
- An illustrative alternate fee structure the auditors modeled, applying that 92% figure to total costs, would raise about $37.8 million a year -- roughly 8.8 times current collections -- but is presented as one example, not a formal recommendation to the legislature.
- DNRC 'partially concurs' that the cost-share formula needs updating but warns that including volatile, hard-to-forecast suppression costs (which ranged $20M-$80M a year) in the base budget would complicate the state's two-year appropriation cycle. Separately, the department concurred without reservation that fee-assignment errors affecting over 980 properties need fixing.
The audit's own subsidy estimate is a floor -- 'over $30 million' -- not a precise figure, and this piece reports it as such rather than manufacturing false precision. The $37.8 million alternate-structure figure and the Table 1 fee estimates built from it are the auditors' own illustrative model applying a single statewide 92% responsibility estimate; the audit is explicit that a more refined, geographically differentiated structure would produce different numbers for different areas. The 92% figure measures private land's share of where fires started, not necessarily its share of protection costs -- the audit treats fire-start share as the best available proxy for cost responsibility given current data, and recommends DNRC develop better cost-tied data going forward.
Sources(1) ▾
- Montana Legislative Audit Division (Legislative Auditor Angus Maciver), Modernizing Montana's Wildfire Assessment Program — Department of Natural Resources and Conservation (Performance Audit 23P-06) (2025-04-01) — The Montana Legislative Audit Division's April 2025 performance audit of the Fire Assessment Program, administered by DNRC's Forestry-Trust Lands Division, is the sole source for every figure in this piece: FY2023 total wildfire protection spending and its mitigation/readiness/suppression breakdown (Chapter I, p.1), the wildfire protection assessment fee's statutory caps and FY2023 collections (p.2, Figure 2), the estimated $30 million-plus annual subsidy and 92 percent Montana-specific landowner-responsibility estimate (Chapter II, pp.7-10, Figure 5), the illustrative alternate fee structure modeled in Table 1 (p.19), the 980 improperly assessed/billed properties (Chapter III, p.25), and DNRC's written response to each recommendation (Appendix A). archive.legmt.gov · original document
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A claim worth testing on its own arithmetic: Montana's wildfire protection program asks private landowners to cover roughly one-third of the state's cost, and general taxpayers cover the rest. A Montana Legislative Audit Division performance audit⧉ of the Department of Natural Resources and Conservation's (DNRC) Fire Assessment Program checked that claim against the state's own numbers and found it does not hold. In fiscal 2023, Montana spent $41.1 million protecting private and state land from wildfire. It collected $4.3 million from the landowners the fee is supposed to charge -- 10.5 percent of the total, not the one-third the statute's underlying formula implies. Auditors put the resulting subsidy, funded by general taxpayers, at more than $30 million that year alone.