How to Write a Prescribed Fire Ordinance in Pennsylvania

A landowner can have a written burn plan, a qualified prescribed burn manager, landowner consent, and the required 25-working-day notice to the Department of Conservation and Natural Resources and the Department of Environmental Protection — and still be told no. The reason is rarely Harrisburg. It is the local burning ordinance.

The Prescribed Burning Practices Act (Act 17 of 2009) opened a statewide path for planned fire. It did not rewrite township, borough, or city codes. Until a municipality puts prescribed fire into its own ordinance structure, Act 17 and the local fire code can talk past each other.

What Act 17 Actually Does

The General Assembly enacted Act 17 on July 14, 2009, as 32 P.S. §§ 425.1–425.11. Its stated purpose is to encourage prescribed burning for fuel reduction, ecological, forest, wildlife, and grassland management (Pennsylvania General Assembly, 2009). It is enabling legislation. It does not require any municipality to burn, and it does not create a local permit.

A prescribed burn under the Act is the planned, controlled application of fire to existing vegetative fuels, under specified conditions, in compliance with a written prescribed burn plan, and under the supervision of a prescribed burn manager (Pennsylvania General Assembly, 2009, § 4). That definition is the one local codes should borrow. It is not a backyard brush pile, a recreational fire pit, or a burn barrel.

Five provisions do the real work:

1. DCNR must maintain statewide standards for planning and conducting prescribed burns, developed with DEP, the Pennsylvania Game Commission, and other agencies (§ 5). Those standards now appear as the Pennsylvania Prescribed Fire Standards (Pennsylvania Bureau of Forestry & Pennsylvania Prescribed Fire Council, 2024).

2. The burn manager must notify DCNR and DEP in writing at least 25 working days before the earliest possible burn date and include the burn plan. Both agencies may comment no later than five working days before that date (§ 7).

3. A burn executed under a plan consistent with the standards is exempt from the state open-burning rules at 25 Pa. Code § 129.14(a) and (b). DEP keeps its separate authority under the Air Pollution Control Act (§ 8).

4. A burn conducted in compliance with Act 17 and the Air Pollution Control Act is deemed to be in the public interest and is not a public or private nuisance (§ 9).

5. Landowners, prescribed burn managers, and workers acting under a qualifying plan are not subject to civil or criminal penalty for damage or injury caused by the fire or smoke unless negligence is proven. Proof of compliance is admissible evidence that the duty of care has been met (§ 11).

The operating rules sit in Section 10: follow the standards, keep an approved plan on site, keep at least one prescribed burn manager on site, and obtain written consent from each property owner (Pennsylvania General Assembly, 2009).

That is a complete state framework. It is not a complete local one.

The Silence That Matters

Act 17 never uses the words municipality, ordinance, or preemption (Pennsylvania General Assembly, 2009). Section 8 lifts a compliant burn out of the state open-burning regulation. It does not lift that burn out of a township code that independently bans open burning.

This is the gap most people miss. A prescribed burn can be lawful under Act 17 and still violate a local prohibition that was written to stop trash fires, leaf piles, and construction debris. Those two things are not the same fire. Most local codes treat them as if they were.

The Pennsylvania Prescribed Fire Standards close some of the operational gap without touching municipal law. They require notification of local fire departments, county emergency management, and adjoining landowners in the burn plan, and they require the District Forest Fire Warden or designee to be notified on the day of the burn before ignition and again after completion (Pennsylvania Bureau of Forestry & Pennsylvania Prescribed Fire Council, 2024). District Forest Fire Wardens and fire chiefs are named as examples of an Agency Administrator, the person with final approval authority over a burn plan. Those are professional and emergency-service contacts. They are not a substitute for an ordinance that still says open burning is illegal.

Why Most Local Codes Still Block Fire

Many Pennsylvania municipalities copied, or came close to copying, DEP's model open-burning ordinance. That model lists nine exceptions: hazard abatement, firefighting instruction, disease and pest control, clearing and grubbing, agricultural commodities, limited domestic refuse, limited yard waste, cooking, and recreation (Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, n.d.). Prescribed fire is not on the list.

DEP tells municipalities they may not be less stringent than state air rules, and that they may be more stringent — including a total ban on open burning (Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, n.d.). After 2009, that note needed a tenth exception. Most codes never received it.

The result is a familiar conversation in southeastern Pennsylvania. A land trust, campus, or private woodlot is ready to restore oak woodland or reduce fuels. The burn plan is written. Then the fire marshal or codes officer opens the local chapter and finds no lawful box to check. The project dies as a code problem, not an ecology problem.

This is the same structural issue behind Fighting Fire With Fire: Why Pennsylvania Should Embrace Fire Use Over Full Suppression. The legal machinery for putting fire out is mature. The legal machinery for putting the right fire back in is still incomplete at the municipal level.

Three Places a Prescribed Fire Ordinance Can Live

There is no single Pennsylvania local-government form, so there is no single insertion point. The amendment has to follow the code the municipality already uses.

Standalone open-burning ordinances. Second-class townships often keep a separate burning chapter modeled on DEP's list. The cleanest fix is to add Act 17 definitions and a tenth exception for a prescribed burn conducted in compliance with the Act and the statewide standards. Tobyhanna Township already excepts prescribed controlled fire for the conservation and management of unique and natural areas and for the reduction of fuel loads (Tobyhanna Township Code § 68-3(D)(7)). That language recognizes the practice. Tying the exception to Act 17's plan, manager, consent, and notice requirements makes it enforceable and defensible.

Fire prevention codes. Boroughs, first-class townships, and cities often folded open burning into an adopted fire code after dropping a standalone burning ordinance. The International Fire Code, which Pennsylvania municipalities commonly adopt, already contemplates this work. It allows a fire code official to authorize prescribed burning to reduce wildland-fire impact, and it provides a permit path for recognized silvicultural, range, or wildlife management practices (International Code Council, 2018, § 307). Philadelphia's adopted code uses that written-approval path for silvicultural and wildlife-management fires (City of Philadelphia Fire Code § F-307.2). Where a municipality has this structure, the amendment belongs in the fire-prevention chapter and should name the fire marshal or fire code official as the local coordination point — not invent a second burning ordinance.

Park, open-space, and natural-lands chapters. Some municipalities will never want broadcast fire in residential districts and still need it on township open space, parkland, or conservation easements. A narrow authorization in the parks or natural-resources chapter can be the right first step. It should still use Act 17's definitions so staff are not inventing a local version of prescribed fire. In every case, the solicitor should also check the interaction with a declared burn ban. County and municipal drought bans are common. Millcreek Township's ordinance is one example of language that keeps prescribed burning available during a temporary ban when the fire code official authorizes it (Millcreek Township Ordinance 2018-2, § 40-33(C)). A prescribed-fire exception that is silent on burn bans will be the first question the fire chief asks.

What the Local Language Should Do

A workable prescribed fire ordinance Pennsylvania municipalities can actually use does five things. It does not need to reinvent the burn plan.

First, it adopts Act 17's definitions: prescribed burn, prescribed burn plan, prescribed burn manager, and prescribed burn worker. Local codes that invent their own vocabulary create conflict with the state standards.

Second, it carves a compliant prescribed burn out of the general open-burning prohibition. The conditions should be the Act's own conditions: an approved plan, a qualified manager on site, written landowner consent, and the 25-working-day DCNR and DEP notice.

Third, it adds a local coordination layer that Act 17 left blank. Notice to the fire marshal or codes official and the local fire company, plus day-of notice at ignition and at completion, belongs in the ordinance. The Pennsylvania Prescribed Fire Standards already expect local fire-department and District Forest Fire Warden notice. Writing that into the municipal code makes the expectation visible to the people who will answer the smoke calls.

Fourth, it preserves the fire official's authority to order extinguishment if the burn creates an imminent hazard to life or property. That authority is what makes the exception politically possible. It is also consistent with DEP's reserved air-quality authority under Section 8.

Fifth, it says what it is not. Local notice should be coordination, not a second discretionary permit that can quietly veto an Act 17-compliant burn. The ordinance should not be construed to strip the Act's nuisance protection or qualified immunity. And it should not override an active, lawfully declared burn ban unless the governing body has made that choice in writing, the way Millcreek did.

Those five pieces will look slightly different in a DEP-style burning ordinance than they will in a fire-prevention chapter. The legal job is the same: stop treating a planned, staffed, notified restoration burn as if it were an illegal trash fire.

Two Paths, Not One

Not every project can wait for an ordinance amendment. Where the adopted fire code already lets the fire code official authorize silvicultural or wildland-fuel reduction burns, a single property can often proceed now under written approval, provided the Act 17 plan, manager, consent, and state notices are in place. That is the short path. It is case-by-case, and it depends on the official who holds the pen.

The long path is the amendment. It is the only way to make prescribed fire a recognized land-management tool instead of a one-off exception. The process is ordinary municipal law: committee review, solicitor draft, advertisement, public hearing, and a vote of the board or council. The technical lift is matching section numbers to the existing code and deciding whether the municipality wants notification-only coordination or a local permit. Notification-only is cleaner. It keeps the professional standard at the state level, where the training and the immunity already live, and it keeps the local role where it belongs — awareness, smoke response, and the ability to stop an imminent hazard.

Either path still requires the field work. A prescribed fire ordinance does not replace a burn plan, a qualified burn boss, smoke management, or the Forest Fire Warden network that Pennsylvania has used for more than a century. It simply stops the local code from being the reason a sound plan never leaves the desk.

Why This Matters Here

Southeastern Pennsylvania's remaining oak woods are fragmented, heavily browsed, and well along the path of mesophication. Prescribed fire in upland oak is one of the few tools that can reopen those stands. The ecology is not the bottleneck. The code often is.

Act 17 already says a compliant prescribed burn is in the public interest. Municipalities do not need new science to believe that. They need a short amendment that says the same thing in the chapter their fire marshal actually enforces.

Brandywine Forest works with municipalities, landowners, and conservation organizations on prescribed-burn planning and on the ordinance language that makes those plans legal to implement. Michael B. Dunn, RCA | BCMA, is a Pennsylvania Forest Fire Warden and Mark Adams an RXB2 burn boss with a 30 year career in complex fire operations in over 30 states.If your township's burning chapter still reads as if 2009 never happened, that is a drafting problem with a known fix.

References

City of Philadelphia. (2014). Fire Code § F-307.2, Approval required. https://codelibrary.amlegal.com/codes/philadelphia/latest/philadelphia_pa/0-0-0-269795

International Code Council. (2018). International Fire Code, § 307, Open burning, recreational fires and portable outdoor fireplaces (Pennsylvania). https://up.codes/viewer/pennsylvania/ifc-2018/chapter/3/general-requirements

Millcreek Township. (2018). Ordinance 2018-2, Open burning, § 40-33(C). https://www.millcreektownship.com/DocumentCenter/View/1187/Open-Burning-Ordinance-2018-2-PDF

Pennsylvania Bureau of Forestry & Pennsylvania Prescribed Fire Council. (2024). Pennsylvania prescribed fire standards (rev. January 23, 2024). https://paprescribedfire.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/PennsylvaniaRXFireStandards-012324.pdf

Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection. (n.d.). PADEP model air pollution control ordinance — Open burning. https://files.dep.state.pa.us/air/AirQuality/AQPortalFiles/GeneralInformation/openburn/docs/modelburnord.pdf

Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection. (n.d.). 25 Pa. Code § 129.14, Open burning operations. https://www.pacodeandbulletin.gov/Display/pacode?file=/secure/pacode/data/025/chapter129/s129.14.html

Pennsylvania General Assembly. (2009). Prescribed Burning Practices Act, Act of July 14, 2009, P.L. 76, No. 17, 32 P.S. §§ 425.1–425.11. https://www.legis.state.pa.us/WU01/LI/LI/US/HTM/2009/0/0017..HTM

Tobyhanna Township. (1998/2023). Code § 68-3(D)(7), Burning regulations; permit; exceptions. https://ecode360.com/9517033