South Dakota Stock Grower Association leaders are questioning what they’re calling an unbalanced response of federal land management agencies to fires that burned public and private land. Stock Grower’s President Bill Kluck says the 2013 Paultre fire in South Dakota burned over 10,000 acres when a prescribed burn got away from the feds, hurting private landowners who weren’t compensated for the government’s negligence.

 

He says the feds who conducted the prescribed burn in South Dakota badly timed their actions.

 

Kluck says the federal response was different in a recent burn that occurred in Oregon.

 

Kluck says his group has written to South Dakota’s Congressional delegation as well as the U.S. and South Dakota Attorney General’s offices expressing their concerns regarding the fires and lack of compensation to South Dakota landowners for their losses.