July 16, 2013 11:45 AM UTC

In Denver media foray, McInnis says Colorado was correct in not buying air tanker fleet

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• by: Jason Salzman

(Promoted by Colorado Pols)

Scott McInnis recently tiptoed into the shark-invested world of Denver journalism, where plagiarists are rooted out and hung up to dry.

In an exclusive interview, McInnis told KOA radio's Colorado Morning News that our state did the right thing by not purchasing an espensive tanker fleet to fight forest fires. He said Colorado should be concerned about the expense and that various options should be evaluated.

Siding with former-McInnis-enemy The Denver Post as well as Rep. Doug Lamborn on the matter, and butting heads with current gubernatorial candidate Greg Brophy, McInnis had this conversation with KOA co-host Steffan Tubbs @ 3:57 :

TUBBS: You’re clearly still on top of issues that go on here in Colorado… to some people it’s unfathomable that a state with so much vegetation, wooded areas, national forests, –like Colorado, that we don’t have an air fleet based here, in this state. Is that a mistake? And has it been a mistake in the past? And would you say you support – no matter where the money comes from, get the money and put a fleet of aircraft here that can quickly respond to the wildfire?

MCINNIS: No, I don’t think it’s a mistake. I mean, it’s easy to talk about putting an air fleet together, and you know, when you have a big fire and people want to a fire station on every corner. I mean, the reality of it is is that It’s very, very expensive and you’ve got a lot of political questions that need to be asked. For example, if we’ve got a fire going in Colorado Springs and we’ve got a fire going in Glenwood Springs, where do you send the fleet? And how many airplanes do you have? And what if our neighbor right next door, Wyoming – if we’ve got a plane up there in Wyoming, would a governor dare send a plane to Wyoming to assist our neighbors, even though we didn’t have a fire in Colorado, and all of a sudden a fire breaks out in Colorado and our aircraft are somewhere off –. I mean,there’s a lot of implications in this. And it’s not just a budget item, it is a huge budget item. Aircraft – I mean, you have to be working those aircraft all the time, and that’s why so many – the Federal government, that’s why a lot of those aircraft are so dated and so on, is because it’s very expensive to keep that up to speed. So, I know right now at the height of this fire and this horrible disaster we’ve suffered, the temptation is to buy more fire trucks, buy more air fleets, make all kinds of commitments. But we need to let it calm down, give it a few weeks, and then really ask the questions, “Okay, we have the airplanes. Now how do we decide who gets them? And how do we decide how many we get? And how do we decide what we do with the people – you know, those planes, they probably fly – I don’t know, what? — fifteen days a year, maybe thirty days a year. What do we do with the other eleven months of the year? I mean there’s a lot of questions.

McInnis also said on KOA that the reason for the "intense fires" is "we don't harvest wood like we used to harvest it."

He added,"They should have thought about this [fires] when we were so tough on the lumber companies that went up there."

"Musings on wood," was the response of @Copeakpolitics when I tweeted McInnis' remarks last week.