Challenger blasts US Rep. Henry Brown on SC fire

CHARLESTON, S.C. (AP) _ Much of the heat in a South Carolina congressional race comes from four years ago — a battle over what started as a controlled burn on the farm of Republican U.S. Rep. Henry Brown that spread to a national forest.

Brown wants opponent Linda Ketner to pull an ad critical of the 1st District congressman, who fought a fine levied by the U.S. Forest Service for charring 20 acres in the Francis Marion National Forest in 2004.

The Brown campaign, in a letter to Ketner, called the ad “misleading and dishonest.“ The Democrat, making her first run for office, plans to continue airing the message.

Brown, seeking a fifth term in the district reaching from south of Charleston to the North Carolina state line, says the ad wrongly says he was told not to burn at his Cordesville, S.C., farm on a day when the state posted a red flag alert. The alert means burning is strongly discouraged, but not illegal.

Brown’s campaign manager Rod Shealy said Brown had a burn permit and the Forest Service was also starting burns. In both cases, the burns were designed to clear away underbrush that, if allowed to build up, could provide fuel for even larger fires. The alert wasn’t issued until late in the day when Brown’s fire was already ignited, he said.

Ketner has posted a whistleblower report from the U.S. Forest Service on her campaign web site that said a state Forestry Commission officer had told Brown earlier in the day that he should not burn, despite the permit.

The report also says Brown told U.S. Forest Service officials shortly afterward their programs might get more scrutiny if they pursued the fine. Brown is a member of the House Natural Resources Committee.

The dispute was resolved earlier this year, and Brown paid almost $5,000. The government also revised its policy on controlled burns.

Brown said he fought the fine because the law needed to be changed.

Under the old law, if a fire spread from Forest Service property to private land, landowners had to prove government neglect to get compensated. But fires spreading from private land to a national forest were automatically an offense, he said.

“We got that changed,“ Brown told Ketner during a debate last week.

But Ketner said that in the previous year 15 people were fined for fires spreading to the forest and all paid.

“It would have been so much better if you had done it on behalf of them instead of yourself,“ she said.