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Last week a reporter contacted me for an article he was writing. Forest
Service Chief Gail Kimball had just announced she planned to cut
recreation and other programs by $300 million and to transfer that
money into fire suppression. The reporter asked for a comment and in
addition to what is quoted in the appended article, I explained how
this budget transfer was a "twofer." That line of reasoning didn't get
into the article and so I share it here.
Not only is Kimball moving money into a bottomless pit from which
private contractors will eventually receive the lion's share: in
further staving the recreation programs, Kimball could ensure that
local land managers would have no option other that to rely even more
heavily upon increased and more wide-spread recreation user-fees,
volunteerism, partnership and, of course, more commercialization.
With respect to the Forest Service, Congress is not primarily, or
uniquely, responsible for using the Reaganesque "Stave the Beast"
mechanism to destroy that agency's recreation program. It is the Forest
Service itself, thought a variety of mechanisms, that is gutting its
own recreation program.
Top brass within the Forest Service are minimizing the amount of
allocated dollars that get to the ground. The more conspicuously the
Forest Service does this, the more "inefficient" they are seen to be
and the more impetus there becomes for cutting the agency's budget.
Sadly, the current administration values those employees who exhibit
special competence in destroying their own agencies and showing to all
the world, that government does not work and should, therefor, be
privatized.
Scott
--- begin quoted---
November 2, 2007
Fire costs will again thin other budgets -
U.S. Forest Service to pull funds from recreation, forest health
by Keith Chu -
The Bulletin, (Bend, OR)
WASHINGTON — After another fire season that exceeded U.S. Forest
Service expectations, agency Chief Gail Kimbell said firefighting costs
will continue to burn up money for recreation and forest health funding
into next year’s budget.
Kimbell said the Forest Service spent $100 million more than it
budgeted for firefighting in the 2007 fiscal year. She told the U.S.
House Committee on Global Warming on Thursday that she already has
begun pulling money from nonfire programs to pay for an even larger
firefighting budget in the 2009 fiscal year.
Kimbell’s announcement likely means a continuation of cuts to
recreation budgets in Central Oregon and points to the need for more
forest thinning to prevent catastrophic and expensive fires, according
to House members and local trail advocates.
Congressmen at the hearing said the agency cannot continue to cut other functions to feed the growing maw of fire costs.
“You’re already cannibalizing the budget,” said Rep. Earl Blumenauer,
D-Portland. “You have to thin all of your activities (because of) this
exploding cost.”
Kimbell said the Forest Service spent $1.34 billion fighting fires in
the 2007 fiscal year and exceeded its budget, even after Congress set
aside $375 million in emergency wildfire funding.
Wildfires consumed nearly 600,000 acres of forests and grassland in
Oregon this year, ranking it sixth among states. The G.W. Fire
northwest of Sisters burned 7,500 acres, while the Egley Complex of
fires near Burns burned 140,000 acres.
Rep. Greg Walden, R-Hood River, said changes in forest policy are the only way to stop ever-higher fire spending.
“We had half-a-million acres burn in my state this year; this is
getting out of control,” said Walden, who represents Eastern, Central
and parts of Southern Oregon.
Walden advocated increased salvage logging after forest fires to
improve forest health and because young trees absorb the greenhouse gas
carbon dioxide, which dead trees do not.
“If you replant sooner, you’re going to produce forests sooner, and you’re going to sequester carbon sooner,” he said.
Scott Silver, of the Bend-based conservation group Wild Wilderness,
said he’s not sure what the Forest Service should do to attack the
increasing fire activity. But he knows throwing money at the problem
isn’t the answer.
“Fire suppression could use every dollar people want to spend on it,”
Silver said. “The question may be, is it appropriate to declare war on
fire and fight it as if it were a war, or is it more appropriate to
rethink our policy?”
When the fire budget is exhausted, the Forest Service initiates “fire
transfers” — loans from other programs to pay for firefighting costs.
Congress is supposed to reimburse local districts for those transfers,
but historically has repaid only about 80 percent of transfers,
according to a 2004 Government Accountability Office study.
In the 2007 fiscal year, the Forest Service pulled $731,000 from
Deschutes National Forest programs and $32,600 from the Ochoco National
Forest. In the Ochoco, most of that money came from recreation
programs, while in the Deschutes, it was pulled from a variety of
programs, including watershed enhancement, air resources and fire
preparedness, the Deschutes National Forest reported.
Volunteers who have already taken responsibility to maintain hundreds
of miles of trails are leery of even deeper cuts to recreation budgets,
said Kent Howes, president of the Bend-based Central Oregon Trails
Alliance.
“To us, they already told us they have no money, so how much less is
that?” Howes said. “I’m sure there will be a few more trailheads closed
somewhere, a few more privies that get locked up and don’t get pumped
out and that hurts everybody out here.”
The outlook doesn’t look any better in 2009, Kimbell said.
“In preparing the fiscal year 2009 budget, I’ve (had to) find $300
million from other projects to move into fire suppression,” Kimbell
said, in response to a question from Walden.
Locally, that funding shortfall has left volunteer groups like the
Central Oregon Trails Alliance to fill the gap. So far this year, the
group has spent 2,500 hours maintaining local trails, up from 1,700
hours last year, Howes said.
“If we don’t do something about it, they’re just going to get closed or
not maintained,” Howes said. “They’re going to go away, and no one
wants that.”
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- Land management 
