LANDER - The U.S. Forest Service will likely receive more than three-quarters of a billion dollars in emergency funding in the coming weeks, to help pay for the enormous costs of managing wildfires this summer.

Critics of the way the Forest Service is funded - including the strange bedfellows of loggers, conservationists and sportsmen - agree short-term aid is much needed. But they argue Congress is failing to fix a serious, long-term budget problem, which, if nothing changes, will likely worsen almost every year.

Congress is expected to soon pass what's called a continuing resolution, in order to avoid a government shutdown.

The resolution will be a stop-gap measure to keep federal agencies and programs funded at their current levels, until a new president and Congress are installed on March 6.

The plan, as approved by the House, contains supplemental emergency funding, including $775 million for the Forest Service, and $135 million for the Bureau of Land Management, to help cover this summer's wildfire costs.

In August, national forests throughout the United States were forced to transfer, in all, about $400 million out of their operating budgets into a collective kitty to help pay for wildfire management. States such as California, Arizona, Colorado, Mississippi and Georgia had costly fire seasons this year.

If the emergency funds are approved by the Senate and President Bush, the Forest Service should be able to give money back to the individual forests.

But Tom Troxel, director of the Rocky Mountain Division of the Intermountain Forest Association, a timber industry group, said the illogical way the Forest Service is funded forces the agency to steal, annually, ever-increasing dollars from important forest programs, just to pay for continuously rising wildfire costs.

And while funding for the agency has remained relatively flat in recent years, the cost of managing wildfires has increased, which means nearly every year a greater percentage of the agency's total budget has gone to fighting wildfires, Troxel said.

An extensive list of logging groups, sportsmen's organizations, conservation groups and former Forest Service chiefs have banded together on this issue, calling for Congress to fund wildfire management in a way that keeps it separate from the general Forest Service budget.

Cecilia Clavet, forest policy expert with the Wilderness Society, said her organization agrees with the timber industry on this point - a rare moment when the two camps have found common ground.

Unlike other federal departments that deal with disaster mitigation, such as the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the U.S. Forest Service cannot exceed its budget in times of crisis and then go back to Congress for reimbursement.

Every year, a greater percentage of money that used to go toward reducing excess fuels around communities, toward maintaining trails, roads, visitor centers, camp sites and buildings, now goes toward fire management, Clavet said.

"In addition to that, you have projects that take place where the Forest Service works with contractors and local businesses, and those relationships can be put at risk, and it also puts the forest at risk," Clavet said. "It affects hazard fuels reduction activities around communities, for example. When you are a community living in a high fire risk area, you want to reduce the fuel."

While it's helpful to get the money back at the end of the season, Clavet said, in some ways the damage has already been done because seasonal, summer programs such as the removal of excess fire fuels get deferred yet another year.

Troxel agreed: "It's helpful that Congress is repaying the funds. It's very helpful that they are appropriating additional money for fire suppression and hazardous fuel treatments They've taken some steps toward that, but they transferred about $400 million from other programs (this summer), and some of that money transferred means opportunities lost. And they either have to start over on the projects, or the timing is bad, and at the very least there are huge inefficiencies there."

Frank Carroll, spokesman for the Black Hills National Forest, recently said this summer's budget shortfall is just another signal that a new reality has emerged for a department that 10 years ago spent about 12 percent of its total budget on fire management.

Today the Forest Service is getting ever closer to spending 50 percent of its total budget just trying to protect homes and communities from wildfires.

It doesn't appear that the current Congress is poised to adequately address this issue, Troxel said, but he, like Clavet and others, will continue pushing legislators to come up with a long-term answer.

Environment reporter Chris Merrill can be reached at chris.merrill@trib.com or at (307) 267-6722.