As wildfires rage across Utah and the West, governors of several western states are looking to better coordinate with each other and their federal partners. A perennial issue, wildfire prevention is of particular interest this year with record-low snowpacks across the region and several large fires burning.
“We've been talking about forest management,” said Gov. Spencer Cox on the opening day of the Western Governors’ Association annual meeting in Deer Valley, Utah. “We've been talking about what to do after the fires are burned … we need the federal government to participate more in those issues. That's kind of the breadth of things we're talking about.”
Cox said the group has been in discussions around technologies to help find new fire starts faster, as well as fire prevention. For U.S. Forest Service Chief Tom Schultz, there is no silver bullet for the issue in the West.
“We cannot just suppress fires and get out of this,” Schultz said. “It requires land management, it requires field treatments, it requires prescribed fire; all of this stuff goes together. We need to aggressively fight fire. We also need to aggressively manage the landscape.”
The complicating factor this year, he said, is the West’s drought and abundance of dry fuel that is ready to burn under the right circumstances. He said that it has complicated mitigation efforts like prescribed burns, with current conditions making it “neither the time nor the place for fire.”
“You're not going to put that fire in the landscape right now,” he said. “Those windows for prescribed fire are limited based on the conditions on the ground.”
Right now, he said, mitigation efforts are focused on mechanical treatments like mowing and chipping smaller trees and shrubs that can clog up forests and build up fuel to dangerous levels.
The Forest Service is also in the midst of a reorganization process and relocation to Salt Lake City. For Schultz, that is part of what he sees as the organization’s strategy to get forest management decision-making as local as possible.
“We're trying to get back to the model of decision-making where local people make decisions with local community members,” he said. “We're going to get better delivery on the ground. We're moving leadership and decision-making closer to the communities and landscapes that we serve; that includes relocating the headquarters to Salt Lake City.”
That move, along with an overall downsizing of the Forest Service, has come with criticism and scrutiny. An analysis from the Center for Western Priorities found that the Forest Service treated 35% fewer acres for wildfire risk in 2025 than the previous year.
While the budget for treating wildfire fuel has been flat, Schultz said the service has poured resources into hiring and, in his eyes, has not sacrificed commitment to preserving natural environments.
“We are not reducing environmental standards in the work that we're doing,” he said. “I'm worried about the environmental impacts of all that sediment [after a fire] dumping into the river system and clogging the water system … I'm much more concerned about the threat of catastrophic wildfire than any treatments that we put on the landscape.”
It’s a feeling shared by Cox, who said he visited the Cottonwood Fire and called it a “moonscape” that will take years to recover. He said the fire has done more to hurt the environment “than any gas burning, or you know, coal burning in the past 10 years.”
When it comes to the future, governors in attendance and Schultz agreed that more shared stewardship agreements between states and the federal government — like the one Utah has — will allow for faster fire mitigation and reforestation work on a bigger scale than before.
“Our interactions with the federal government and the shared approach to governing those resources is critical for our shared success,” said Colorado Gov. Jared Polis. “Today's agreements are more powerful than their predecessors. They have longer terms, expanded authorities, bigger project acreages; they're being used to improve many aspects of our public lands, recreation, grazing.”
For Schultz, recognizing a shared goal regardless of politics is the first step toward meaningfully addressing wildfire risk in the West.
“I don't hear anybody saying we shouldn't treat the landscape to protect communities, improve forest health and reduce risks,” he said. “We all want the same thing.”
