WASHINGTON -- A key House committee easily approved a bill Thursday that would create a special federal fund to pay for fighting the largest wildfires, taking the burden off the U.S. Forest Service's budget.

"I believe this is necessary because agencies of the Interior Department and the Forest Service are having to rob Peter to pay Paul by borrowing funds from other agency accounts to cover the escalating costs of fire suppression," said the chairman of the Natural Resources Committee, Rep. Nick Rahall, D-W.Va., who wrote the bill.

"The overall mission of the agencies is being undermined, everything from trail maintenance to necessary construction activities," he added.

The House Agriculture Committee is considering a similar bill. Rahall did add some provisions from that measure to his own bill at the request of Alaska Rep. Don Young, the top-ranking Republican on the Resources committee.

Those provisions would make an annual report on the fund available to the public, require a review of any wildfire that cost more than $10 million, notify Congress if the money in the fund fell to two months' worth of expenditures or less, and provide firefighting grants to local communities.

But Rahall did not include other provisions from the Agriculture bill, saying they could slow or stop his bill by miring it in controversy over agency management practices. The Agriculture version would create "good neighbor" partnerships with states for projects reducing hazardous fuels in national forests.

Although he supported the Resource bill, Rep. William Sali, R-Idaho, said it only addressed the accounting side of the problem and not the underlying causes of increasingly expensive fire seasons.

"I believe this is inadequate," he said.

Sali tried to add an amendment allowing the Forest Service the ability to bypass some environmental analysis for projects reducing hazardous fuels on public lands adjacent to non-federal lands.

Rahall agreed with Sali's concerns and said the issue should be addressed in the future. But he ruled the amendment outside of the scope of the narrowly focused bill and therefore not eligible for a vote, because it would amend the Healthy Forest Restoration Act, which is not otherwise addressed by the bill.

"This exercise is about financing firefighting," Rahall said. "We need to keep our eye on ball, we need to be focused."

The panel accepted an amendment from Rep. Henry Brown, R-S.C., that would allow for federal land managers to cooperate with neighboring private landowners to carry out controlled burns.

Committee members and outside experts agree that too much of the U.S. Forest Service's budget -- now 48 percent -- has been eaten up by ever-growing fire suppression costs, to the detriment of its other programs.

The bill would create a separate fund to pay for the less than 2 percent of fires that spread into giant fires and take up almost 85 percent of fire suppression costs.

The Western Governors Association, the National Association of State Foresters and five former chiefs of the Forest Service all support the bill.

Rahall and the heads of the relevant subcommittees introduced the Federal Land Assistance, Management and Enhancement Act, or FLAME Act.

The amount of money in the "Flame Fund" would be based on the average amounts spent by the Forest Service and Interior Department to suppress catastrophic fires over the preceding five fiscal years.

Last year, the Forest Service spent $741 million more than budgeted and Interior spent $249 million more than budgeted for emergency wildfire suppression, or a total of nearly $1 billion.

Congress would have to approve the money for the fund each year. It would be separate from the regular budget for the agencies, which also is approved each year. The anticipated, largely predictable amounts for fire suppression activities by the agencies would continue; the Flame Fund could only be used for catastrophic fires.

The secretaries of the departments would have to declare fires eligible by issuing an emergency declaration based on the size, severity and threat of the fire.

The act would also require the Interior and Agriculture secretaries to submit a report to Congress one year after enactment containing a cohesive wildland fire management strategy.

That would include a system identifying the most cost-effective means for allocating fire management resources, a system for assessing the level of risk to communities, an illustration of plans to reinvest in nonfire programs, a description of use of appropriate management response, and a system ensuring that the highest priority fuels reduction projects are being funded first.