Stitt fires more forestry officials, House Speaker says Stitt ‘misinterpreting’ data
OKLAHOMA CITY (KFOR) — Governor Kevin Stitt is continuing to criticize Oklahoma Forestry Services’ (OFS) response to last month’s deadly wildfire outbreak, having several top officials fired this week, while state officials, including the Oklahoma House Speaker, say Stitt is misinterpreting data to justify these decisions.
Stitt defended his decision to fire State Forestry Director Mark Goeller during a news interview Tuesday morning.
“I fired a bureaucrat who refused to get those assets, who left them out,” said Stitt.
Stitt, whose own farm was destroyed in one of the March 14 fires, had previously ordered the Oklahoma Department of Agriculture, Food and Forestry (ODAFF) to conduct a full-scale investigation into OFS.
Firefighters across the state expressed frustration, with one department even calling for the governor’s impeachment.
“I feel like they felt attacked,” said Oklahoma Firefighters’ Association president Mike Kelley, who is also a Republican State Representative from Yukon. “I don’t believe that was the governor’s intention. But when you attack one, you attack all.”
Kelley’s organization sent a letter to Stitt this week urging him to reconsider eliminating OFS.
During his interview on Tuesday, Stitt said he would no longer pursue eliminating the agency but confirmed he had ordered several firings for what he called “insubordination.”
Stitt also claimed Forestry Services deployed only about half of its resources during the outbreak.
“I found out we had one forestry person in the Mannford fire that destroyed a bunch of homes, and yet we left 47 people in southeast Oklahoma,” Stitt said. “And that’s when I said, I’ve got to hold someone accountable as governor. This is unacceptable.”
Oklahoma House Speaker Kyle Hilbert (R-Bristow), whose district includes Mannford, said he helped coordinate the fire response there and believes the governor is misinformed.
“I called in to the Office of Emergency Management, and they talked to the director and was told there’s only one strike team available in the entire state,” said Hilbert.
That team, he said, was already two hours away fighting another fire.
“They couldn’t leave because they had to deal with a fire in their own backyard,” Hilbert said.
Hilbert said Mannford ultimately relied on a team from Rogers County, without needing to redirect OFS resources to Mannford.
“There were more fires in the state of Oklahoma than we had employees in the forestry service,” Hilbert said.
On Tuesday, Stitt also criticized OFS for staging crews in southeast Oklahoma, where no fires ended up breaking out.
“We didn’t have these fires in southeast Oklahoma,” Stitt said. “The fires were right here. 192,000 acres.”
As News 4 reported the week leading up to March 14, state officials had been warning fire conditions would be extremely high in all corners of the state, and every county in Oklahoma risked wildfires breaking out.
Hilbert said 23% of Oklahoma is considered woodland, and highly combustible during wildfire conditions like the state experienced on March 14.
He said most of the wooded land in the state is located in southeast Oklahoma, and believes it was smart and prudent that OFS staged resources there, in addition to everywhere else in the state, given those factors.
Hilbert said he believes Stitt’s claims that only half of OFS resources were deployed are based on a misreading of the data on Stitt’s end.
“I think it may be a misinterpretation,” Hilbert said. “When I look at the data, what I saw is over 50% of the resources were deployed outside of the traditional service area where forestry is. There were the rest of the resources were within the service area,” Hilbert said. “You cannot send 100% of your resources to a single location because if you do that, what happens if a fire pops up in the very location you just left, and now you don’t have anyone there?”
As for Kelley, he says his group, which represents 15,000 firefighters across Oklahoma, has had a hard time getting any answers from Stitt, ODAFF, or OFS about what is happening with OFS.
He wants the Oklahoma Firefighters’ Association to have a seat at the table for any discussions happening about the future of OFS.
“Part of our frustration is just the lack of information,” Kelley said. “We would love to be part of that conversation. We would love to be involved in any kind of investigation.”
News 4 has asked an ODAFF spokesperson to confirm the employment status of several top OFS officials rumored to have been fired this week.
Although state law clearly classifies that information as a public record, the department’s spokesperson has refused to provide it.
News 4 visited the agency’s building on Tuesday to submit an open records request. A receptionist said someone would come down to assist.
No one ever did.
A spokesperson has since provided a link to submit the request online.