|
It just so happens that the national forest which ends (or perhaps begins) a few miles from my house is frequently at the leading edge of the Forest Service's efforts to radically transform the management and delivery of outdoor recreation. It is a mere coincidence that I live at ground zero, but it is no coincidence that the Deschutes NF is in this unique position.
You see, our former Forest Supervisor, Sally Collins, has become the Associate Chief of the entire Forest Service. She is a very powerful woman. Unfortunately, Sally can all too frequently be found in the company of the American Recreation Coalition -- the folks who seem to run the recreation program for the USFS these days.
If you'd like to see a recent photo of Sally and ARC's President Derrick Crandall laughing it up together, the ARC has made one available at here. If you'd like to read of Sally and Derrick's upcoming (January 2007) Partners Outdoors meeting, you can learn more at here.
So with that introduction, I'd like to share with you the appended article published in my local alternative weekly. It is the first article to document a very nasty new USFS fiddle -- a fiddle first applied by the USFS right here on the Deschutes and which is now being applied to every forest in America. It's a fiddle that has undermined the multi-million dollar Recreation Site Facility Management Planning process and invalidates years of USFS planning. It is a fiddle so disingenuous that, I suggest, it would have been inconceivable, had not the leadership of the USFS and the ARC been working in partnership.
Scott
PS... the photo (above) is of Sally Collins taken at an American Recreation Coalition event. Sally is standing besides an automated payment machine similar to machines installed at trailheads in Arizona. If you look closely, you might see that the sign above the machine says "Welcome to the Great Outdoors".
--- begin quoted ---
December 6, 2006
The Big Lockout: When you go camping, will the campground be there?
by H. Bruce Miller
When you go to your favorite campground on the Deschutes National
Forest next summer to enjoy a few days amid nature, the campground
might not be there any more. Or it might be missing the amenities it
used to have.
That’s the potential end result of a process with the tongue-tying name
of Recreation Site Facility Master Planning, or RSFMP, which is being
carried out by every one of the more than 15,000 national forests and
national grasslands in the United States.
The Deschutes National Forest has completed its RSFMP and is scheduled
to put it into effect Jan. 1. Scott Silver of Bend, executive director
of the organization Wild Wilderness, has followed the process closely
and says it will result in the closure of more than 20 facilities.
“Probably more apparent for many people will be the shorter seasons,”
Silver added. “The season of operation is being cut for about 50 sites
and increased for 25 or so. … The cut in some of these locations is
more than 150 days – that’s five months cut out of the [camping]
season.”
Other campsites will remain open for what the U.S. Forest Service calls
“dispersed recreation,” which means they’ll no longer have facilities
such as water, fire rings and toilets.
The Forest Service says the purpose of RSFMP is simply to improve
efficiency and get the most recreation value out of the diminishing
number of dollars available to the agency.
Deschutes National Forest Supervisor Leslie Weldon said research
indicates half the people who use the forest for recreation come from
Deschutes or Crook County, and those people typically don’t camp
overnight.
“The key experiences that people come to the Deschutes for are day-use
experiences, and they do it year round,” she said. “For example, people
come for the fishing and then they go home at night.”
“We still have an extensive amount of overnight camping opportunities
on the forest,” Weldon continued. “Even where we’re not going to
provide water or fire rings, people still have access to those sites.
It just means they’re going to have to come more prepared for those
kinds of sites.”
Silver counters that closing campgrounds and shortening the season will
make the remaining facilities more crowded and degrade the camping
experience there. And taking away the toilets at some sites, he
predicted, just means “you’ll be seeing a lot more Charmin flowers
behind the trees.”
“The basis for the recommendations that we’re making are having the
Deschutes Forest focus more strongly on the nature of use from the
public that we’re seeing right now,” said Weldon. “It’s wise for us
from a business standpoint to pull back from some of those [camping]
activities to match the kind of use we’re seeing.”
But Silver charges the Forest Service in the end discarded its own
research findings and made its decision about which facilities to close
through a closed-door, arbitrary process.
“[It] was supposed to be a process of ranking [each] site based upon
criteria that were developed,” he said. “There were 13 questions, some
of them quite complex. Each of those questions could yield a score.
This was the supposedly objective ranking criteria.”
But then, Silver claimed, “They came up with a fiddle for the
Deschutes. They went through this ranking process and then they got
{Recreation Program Manager] Mark Christiansen and other people in a
room and they decided which sites they wanted to decommission, and they
ranked them D [for ‘decommission’] and gave them a score of zero. It
was an arbitrary process.”
Christiansen did not return several phone calls from the Source Weekly asking for comment.
Silver and others also charge that the Forest Service uses fuzzy numbers to justify cutting back on recreation services.
Although recreation is “by far and away the most important activity for
the Deschutes National Forest,” Silver said, out of an annual forest
budget of more than $30 million, the whole amount allocated for
recreation was only $1.3 million. The bulk of the forest’s budget goes
for fire prevention and firefighting. After administrative costs,
salaries, maintenance and other overhead is taken out of the recreation
budget, less than $750,000 a year is left to develop recreation
facilities.
In an article written in September, Dick Artley, a former Forest
Service employee, charged that Forest Service headquarters in
Washington, DC is holding back money Congress has appropriated for
recreation.
According to Artley, in Fiscal Year 2006 Congress appropriated $386
million for recreation facility maintenance, capital improvements and
operations. Despite this, he noted, “the Deschutes National Forest’s
RSFMP five year plan claims to only have $149,000 in congressionally
appropriated funds to manage its 212 developed recreation sites, and
the Grand Mesa, Uncompahgre and Gunnison National Forest's … plan
claims to only have $138,000 to manage its 138 developed recreation
sites.”
If these amounts “were projected across the whole National Forest
system,” Artley continued, “the agency would only be allocating
approximately $22 million of [the] $143 million appropriation to the
individual forests for their developed recreation programs. So where is
the other 85% of the Forest Service recreation appropriation actually
going?”
The RSFMP process, critics maintain, is part of a broader Bush
administration strategy of turning as many government functions as
possible over to the private sector. This strategy has both a
philosophical and a practical basis: It coincides with conservative
dogma that business can do everything better than government can, and
it provides a practical way to reward campaign contributors and other
supporters.
“The starving of the [federal] agencies that began under Reagan is now
something we can see across the board, whether it’s the interstate
highway system or the Forest Service,” Silver said. “Pretty soon the
government will be able to say, ‘We have no money and we have no choice
but to go to privatization.”
Weldon of the Deschutes National Forest concedes that the Forest
Service increasingly sees private concessionaires as the best way to
operate some recreation facilities: “We want to have nice family
campgrounds that are well maintained and managed and do it as
efficiently as possible. We find we’re better able to perform those
services through the concessions.”
She added that the Deschutes National Forest also is looking at more
ways to partner with volunteer groups to improve and maintain
recreation facilities.
One of the biggest unknowns right now is what effect, if any, the
Democratic takeover of Congress will have in slowing or stopping the
march toward privatizing recreation on public lands.
“We have, I think, enormous support from the incoming chair of the
House Resources Committee, Nick Rahall,” a Democrat from West Virginia,
Silver said. “He’s not supportive of the fees [for camping, hiking and
other recreation uses] and I think he certainly would like to see the
forests managed differently.”
The House Resources Committee formerly was chaired by California
Republican Rep. Dick Pombo, widely regarded as one of the most
anti-environmental members of Congress. Pombo lost his bid for
re-election in November.
In the Senate, where the Democrats will hold a one-vote majority, Silver sees a mixed picture.
“In the Senate … there were some Western senators who I didn’t have a
lot in common with, but … they kind of understood from a recreation
standpoint the importance of access [to public lands], and they were
not particularly keen on the idea of restricting access or even paying
for it,” he said. “We may not find that now. [Democratic Sen.] Ron
Wyden has never been helpful on issues of the use of public lands and
fee demo and what not. He has looked at public lands as a revenue
raiser and an employment generator.
“So I don’t think we’re home free by any stretch of the imagination.”
|
- Land management 
