Red card holders look to assist local fire districts

In the event of a wildland fire, fire-qualified responders can volunteer to be called upon from across the nation to respond to an incident. 

Now, in the wake of mass firings, resignations, retirements and court cases across federal agencies, those qualified responders— commonly known as “red card holders” —  have years, sometimes decades of training but no agency to utilize their expertise in all positions that respond to wildfires. 

Some red card holders are reaching out to local fire districts to trade their skill for the opportunity to keep up their credentials and potentially respond to wildfires in the region and beyond, a path that can be administratively burdensome for the districts. 

Former employees who took deferred resignation, also known as the “Fork in the Road” program, or were fired probationary employees hired back on administrative leave, are still on the federal payroll through Sept. 30 — and there are “specific prohibitions against dual compensation for federal employees,” a U.S. Department of Agriculture spokesperson said. Because of those prohibitions, local fire districts will be limited in using those qualified workers when an incident occurs.

A red card, officially termed as the “Incident Qualification Card,” is a federal interagency certification that proves a person is qualified to do a job when they arrive on a wildfire incident. Red card qualifications are divided into a work capacity test, which measures fitness level, and a Task Book, which is job- and responsibility-specific. 

Not just axe-wielding wildland firefighters are red card holders. Roles like biologists, public information officers, agency administrators, logistics specialists and more can seek red cards, moving up in seniority and responsibility through experience in real life-incidents through paths laid out in the Task Book that corresponds to their roles. 

These roles and the corresponding expertise in the Incident Command System support firefighters and ensure responses go as well as possible, said Scott Fitzwilliams, former White River National Forest supervisor, who took the “Fork in the Road” earlier this year.

National estimates put the loss of federal workers across the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management in the thousands. The Forest Service is an agency within the USDA.

“Those positions that provide the foundational support for the incident command teams are not there. Then you go into a fire without a full team,” he said. “Those people are gone. We’ve lost thousands of those people across the agency who no longer can fill in on those teams.” 

Twenty-six of the 44 people who have left, retired or were fired from the White River National Forest were fire-qualified, according to Fitzwilliams. 

He and former Deputy Supervisor Heather Noel took the deferred resignation offer in February. Fitzwilliams’ Forest Service career spanned 35 years and he held the supervisor role since 2009. 

Aspen-Sopris District Ranger Kevin Warner said at a recent Pitkin Board of County Commissioners work session and at a local land management meeting recently that the WRNF will be down to 102 employees by the end of May, compared to 146 at the end of 2024. 

In an email response to the Aspen Daily News, the USDA spokesperson said the Forest Service remains “operationally ready to support wildfire response efforts in support of our state and local partners” and noted that the agency is working on a way to get red card holders back on the resource during wildfire season. 

“The Forest Service is developing a process so that federal employees who have ‘red cards’ or fire qualifications and took the deferred resignation program can come off administrative leave and be deployed to an incident to support wildfire response,” the statement read. “Employees who choose to do this will get paid the same as all federal employees while deployed to an incident.”

Forest Service Chief Tom Schultz published a “Wildfire letter of intent” on May 21, in which he highlighted the importance of managing wildfire risk and efficiency.

“Active forest management, coupled with our continued focus on prevention, and continuing our crucial hazardous fuels reduction efforts, will make the difference needed to restore resilient landscapes, especially in high-risk areas,” Schultz wrote.

U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke L. Rollins and U.S. Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum on May 20 signed ajoint memo on wildfire preparedness, signaling cooperation between the two agencies during wildfire season.

Fitzwilliams called the Trump administration’s actions “random” and without forethought. 

“It’s not like [the Forest Service under the Trump administration] said, ‘OK, we need to keep these people because they have these fire qualifications or these resource specialties,’” he said. “There’s no plan. I don’t care what anyone says. There was no plan. There was a plan to get rid of us, period, and dismantle the agency. That’s the plan.”

Sponsoring red card holders locally

Jake Andersen, current deputy director of operations and incoming fire chief for the Aspen Fire Protection District, said he’s fielded interest from more than five former or soon-to-be former federal workers since January. 

As of May, the Aspen district has officially sponsored one federal worker who “took the Fork.” The worker has been involved in fuels management prescriptions for Aspen Fire’s wildfire division. The district also sponsored another auxiliary volunteer who used to work for the feds, but that predated the Trump administration, Andersen said.  

Within the volunteer/career firefighter makeup of Aspen Fire, the auxiliary volunteer program seems to be the best fit for these former federal workers. It’s a type of exchange-of-services arrangement, with volunteers agreeing to contribute something related to their specialty to the fire district, and Aspen Fire facilitating keeping the volunteers credentials — like the red card — up to date. Aspen Fire red cards every firefighter, career or volunteer, so that they can respond to federal fires. 

It’s also a less rigorous qualification process than Aspen Fire’s volunteer firefighter program and with fewer commitments, which Andersen said is attractive to folks well into their career who don’t want to go through a fire academy. 

Aspen Fire’s interest in bringing on former federal workers as auxiliary volunteers predates the second Trump administration. Andersen once worked as a federal wildland firefighter, and in his role with Aspen Fire he wanted to capture people phasing out of their federal careers for the district’s benefit.

For about two years, the program has spread on a kind of word-of-mouth basis, with renewed interest since January. Andersen said the intent has always been to keep the program small, recruiting people with whom the fire district already has a relationship.

“We definitely don’t want to turn people away if there’s a way that we can benefit the community,” he said. “But if we ended up with a large influx of folks wanting to participate in that program, we’d have to have some really serious discussions about what that could look like functionally.”

Aspen Fire comprises about 80 personnel; it’s a relatively small fire district with minimal administrative staff. Auxiliary volunteers can be administratively burdensome with workman’s compensation, a small benefits package and paperwork if they’re called up on a resource order for a wildfire incident.  

“It’s offset by the fact that instead of paying an instructor 500 bucks a day to come here and teach a high-level aviation operations class, we have these folks to do it,” he said. “We’re allowing them to retain the red card through us and then we’re gaining that knowledge and bringing it into the organization to train the rest of our people.”

But there’s a financial risk in sending local volunteers or career firefighters out on resource orders because reimbursement can take months or even years. Andersen said it’s Aspen Fire protocol to pay their people out of their own budget and wait for state reimbursement when they leave on resource orders, but that can leave a hefty imbalance in the budget.

For Roaring Fork Fire Rescue Chief Scott Thompson, the administrative and potential financial burden is just too great to sponsor these former federal workers. But RFFR has not fielded much, if any, interest from them.

Concerns over workmen’s compensation costs and the financial web of paying them to go on resource orders and waiting to recoup those funds is hard enough with their own personnel, he said. 

“People going out this year still haven’t been paid for last year’s fires,” Thompson said. 

Still, Thompson said that Roaring Fork Fire wants to prevent losing firefighters and fire-qualified personnel. The federal cuts have resulted in the loss of access to a WRNF handcrew, a team of firefighters that works in challenging terrain during wildland fires.

“Locally, when we needed a handcrew that’s who we called for efficiency and cost,” he said. “If we can reestablish that through a fire department somehow, that would be wonderful.”

Those who respond to resource order calls are compensated through their home fire agency or the state Division of Fire Prevention and Control, which establishes base and overtime reimbursement rates according to the National Wildfire Coordinating Group’s position classifications. That’s based on the corresponding Federal Administratively Determined class, which, put simply, sets pay rates for positions. 

DFPC reimburses fire departments and requests reimbursements from the federal government, said Tracy LeClair, wildland fire management section public information officer, in an email. It’s meant to ease the financial burden on fire departments, as federal reimbursements can take up to a year or two.

DFPC makes “every attempt” to pay within 90 days of submission of a complete and accurate billing packet, but any edits from the fire department return the packet to the bottom of the queue. 

“The 2024 fire season saw an abnormally high number of reimbursement requests, so some reimbursements took longer than normal to process,” LeClair wrote in an email. “The number of requests was exacerbated by an unusually high number of corrections being required, or reimbursements missing required documentation, and fire departments that subsequently experienced a delay in resubmitting the reimbursement packet.”

Andersen said Aspen Fire has no reason to believe that they won’t be paid back, but added that the process is “cumbersome” and “complicated.”

The USDA spokesperson said the department’s policy is to issue payment within 30 days. 

Unavailable this summer

When there’s a wildfire in the U.S., local fire departments are usually the ones to carry out the initial attack — the first few hours and up to the following 48 hours of a wildfire. 

Auxiliary volunteers limited by the dual compensation prohibition can respond to those local incidents, Andersen said, because that’s work within their capacity as a volunteer of Aspen Fire. Once the incident command turns over to a federal agency — which it would if the fire is burning on federal land — then that’s when the locals return to their usual duties and the feds take over and send out resource orders.

Nearly 90% of land in Pitkin County is owned by the federal government — most of it falling within the WRNF. Any local wildfire is all but guaranteed to be on federal land. 

Resource orders for things like a helitack crew or engines or a single resource order for one person (and their expertise) are filled through dispatch centers nationwide, prioritizing proximity. 

Any red card holder who took “the Fork” and wants to be available for resource orders needs to wait until the end of their resignation payout period through the end of September — or for the Forest Service to change its regulations. 

“They have a date that they have to wait for until they can go on federal assignment,” Andersen said. “They won’t put themselves as available as a resource to be ordered until they can, so they’re not currently available.”

That applies to all red card holders who may have listed themselves for resource orders, not just the local ones, potentially impacting the larger response capacity throughout the country.

Fitzwilliams said because of the low snowpack in the Western Slope and recent constraints on federal agencies, everyone should be concerned about what could happen this fire season. 

“If [the firefighters] don’t have the foundational support, things can go wrong,” he said. “I’m not saying they will, but we’re definitely going into the fire season in a totally different situation than my 35 years.”