Conservative
Type 40
As the libtards will promptly ignore the link...
Very quickly, and to get this out of the way: the Online Left is babbling about supposedly-cut Texas firefighting budgets, mostly because they lack the research skills – or possibly, the native intelligence – to tell the difference between a $109 million Forest Service/Wildfire Fighting budget in 2010/2011, and a $196 million Forest Service/Wildfire Fighting budget for 2012/2013 (the 2012 fiscal year started at the beginning of this month). Fortunately, Battleswarm Blog can both think and do research – as seen here and here – which means that I don’t have to do any of the heavy lifting this time. Bottom line: never, ever stop just because you got the answer that you wanted.
And in that special legislative session, two separate bills were passed which increased forest service/wildfire fighting and prevention funding: SB2, which added an additional $40 million to the forest service for FY 2012 specifically to fight wildfires (with any rollover, of which I’m pretty sure there will be none, to be carried into 2013), and HD4, which allocated an additional $81 million for fighting wildfires in the 2012-2013 biennium. (This is most likely where A&M got the $81 million figure for.) All those bills (and thus the funding increase) were passed and in the books months before the FY2012 budget started on September 1.
So, in summary:
Total 2010-2011 Biennium Forest Service/Wildfire Fighting Budget: $109 million.
Total 2012-2013 Biennium Forest Service/Wildfire Fighting Budget: $196.2 million.
So the Texas legislature authorized, and Governor Rick Perry signed, an 80% increase in wildfire fighting and prevention funding for the 2012-2013 biennium. Not quite double the amount I had in my original post, but pretty close.
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