The Nevada Division of Forestry (NDF) provided more than $32 million worth of firefighting equipment and services to other states between 2020 and 2024 without billing for those services, according to a state audit of the division.

The audit found the division failed to bill for $32.7 million in fully reimbursable out-of-state fire incident expenditures because of “a lack of proper oversight.” 

With a budget of just $4.5 million, NDF relies on contingency funds and advances for ongoing operations and regularly requests funds from lawmakers. 

In 2023, lawmakers received a $15 million request from the division. They ultimately approved the request but expressed concern about the division’s finances and ordered an audit. Completed last year and presented to lawmakers in January, it showed high rates of turnover in the division’s billing department and confusing billing practices.

“Somebody needs to make a list and check it twice and pay the darn bills so that we get money in this darn state,” Sen. Marilyn Dondero Loop (D-Las Vegas) said during the January meeting. 

Simultaneously, the division requested a total of $44 million from the state between 2021 and 2024 to pay for firefighting expenses because of a convoluted system of who pays for wildfire fighting, and when. 

The division is addressing the issues brought forth in the audit, Kacey KC, state forester and fire warden, told The Nevada Independent in a February call, and a new billing system has solved a lot of the problems found in the audit. 

And, the division is seeking reimbursement for costs identified in the audit — during the last few months, more than $25 million in invoices have been issued to other entities and $1 million has come back in.

“They’re feverishly pushing things out over there,” she said.

Getting a handle on costs 

NDF starts each year with $4.5 million — $2.5 million in general funds and $2 million in county receipts — but the division spends about $24 million in an average fire year, KC told The Nevada Independent. Each year, the division asks lawmakers for advances or supplemental funding.

During the 2023 legislative session, Nevada Department of Conservation and Natural Resources (DCNR) Director James Settelmeyer submitted a request to lawmakers for $10 million for supplemental funds for the forestry division, which falls under DCNR’s umbrella, then upped that request to nearly $15 million.

But as the audit later identified, because the division commingled its in-state fire suppression costs with costs incurred by Nevada assisting with out-of-state fires, there was no way to identify how much money the state was spending on fighting fires in the state versus fighting fires in other states. 

During a Senate Finance Committee meeting in 2023, former Sen. Pete Goicoechea (R-Eureka) told Settelmeyer that, “What really bothers me is we’re not really figuring out what’s costing us on an annual basis … At some point we’re going to have to figure out what it is costing us in any given year and what is due us from the federal agencies or our out-of-state partners.

“We haven’t had a handle on it the last 10 years, but we’d sure like to get one.”

Who pays for wildfire services depends on the agencies involved in the incident, the fire’s point of origin and various other factors. 

When a fire burns in Nevada on state or private land, or land overseen by one of the 32 local cooperators NDF partners with, the costs fall to the forestry division. In 2013, the Nevada Legislature approved the Wildland Fire Protection Program to allow the state to provide financial and firefighting assistance to participating districts during a wildfire. In 2019, 1.06 million acres burned in Nevada — the following year, just 137,000 acres burned. 

When a fire starts in another state then burns into Nevada, such as the 2021 Tamarack Fire that burned nearly 69,000 acres across California and Nevada, costs are shared between the states and responding agencies and are usually split based on the percentage of burned acreage. These fires generally take the longest to finalize reimbursements because of their complexity.

When Nevada sends resources to fires burning in other states or on federal land, other state or federal agencies are responsible for reimbursement. Those fires can have the fastest turnaround time for repayment.  

Nearly every fire in Nevada is spread between multiple jurisdictions, KC told The Nevada Independent, estimating that between 90 percent to 95 percent of what Nevada has yet to collect is from the federal government.

Lawmakers ultimately approved the 2023 funding request under SB480, but with the caveat that an audit of the division be performed to better understand its budget. NDF was last audited about five years ago, according to Legislative Counsel Bureau (LCB) auditors, but that audit did not focus on billing practices. 

Audit findings and moving forward

In January, after completion of the audit, NDF again asked lawmakers for money — this time requesting a temporary advance of $11 million to fund fire suppression efforts from the Interim Finance Committee, which approved the request.

“This is exactly why last session I put in the audit information. I think it’s important if we’re going to support you, we have to know what’s going on,” Dondero Loop said in January. “We need to have some guarantee you’re going to start billing right away.”

NDF relies on a half dozen employees in its incident business unit to process bills and invoices. But the six positions in the business unit have seen significant turnover, and on average, those filling the six positions have lasted a year or less and aren’t familiar with wildfire billing, KC said. 

In December, the department had three vacancies — two of those have since been filled, but one remains open. NDF has brought in a contractor as well as transferred someone from another department to assist with the invoices.

“We’re not the only ones seeing turnover,” she said. “Everyone’s seeing turnover.”

Auditors found sweeping errors in the billing department. 

In invoices issued by NDF, some contained errors, while others did not bill for all allowable costs. 

In the case of fires where Nevada split costs with other states and issued invoices, nearly half of final invoices were calculated incorrectly, according to the audit, resulting in NDF underbilling other jurisdictions by approximately $614,000.

NDF also overpaid other agencies — auditors sampled 30 bills issued to Nevada from 2022 to 2024, finding that the agency overpaid by about $250,000. 

During the same 2023 meeting where lawmakers expressed concern about the division’s billing practices, NDF management stated the division was partway through issuing invoices for that year. However, the audit showed, and NDF confirmed, that none were processed, in part because of the division’s shift from a paper to an automated billing system.

For years, NDF’s billing department relied on a paper billing system, with some bills numbering thousands of pages. In 2023, NDF switched over to a computerized system, but that system wasn’t capable of issuing invoices until October of 2024 — part of the reason NDF fell further behind on billing.

“The new system solves a lot of the problems in that audit,” KC said.

KC said the division is aggressively working to address issues discovered by the audit, which contained 13 recommendations, such as developing certain policies and procedures and revising its five-year budget calculations.

In a Dec. 31 letter to the LCB’s audit division, KC wrote that NDF “has made strides over the last year to address them and achieve the recommended efficiencies set forth in this audit.”

The division has updated its policies and procedures, she told The Nevada Independent, “so everyone is working off of the same sheet of music with the new automated billing system.”

NDF’s 60-day plan for corrective action is due April 14. A six-month report on the status of the recommendations is due Oct. 14.