Anthony Botello took the job as forest supervisor on the Flathead at the beginning of the year, and provided this extended interview to the Missoulian. This may be paywalled, but I’ve pulled out a few quotes related to things I tend to talk about.
Staffing of NEPA specialists is especially hard:
We have staffing challenges all across our workforce, but the one that pops to mind right now — because much of what we do revolves around very smart people who lead our ID (interdisciplinary) teams through our NEPA (National Environmental Policy Act) process, and those are folks that are in high demand and we have very limited numbers of them that are interested in our jobs.
For example, we have three interdisciplinary teams on this forest that do the work all across the forest, and we plan projects that then we go and implement. It could be timber, it could be fuels reduction, recreation. And we need team leaders — we call them environmental coordinators or team leaders — to lead those teams to get us through that legal NEPA process. And we’re struggling, not just this forest but the forest I came from was struggling.
Condition-based NEPA:
Some projects have a very focused purpose and need, they’re very focused in what we’re wanting to do, and so we have more of the traditional, our specialists go out there and monitor and look at conditions and then use that for our analysis to determine.
And then we have some places where we want to look at bigger landscapes, we want to look at more adaptive management, so we pull into this idea of, let’s make conceptual decisions and then when we go to implement we’ll do more of the site-specific look at things.
A new forest plan is a good thing:
We’ve got really good strong language in our forest plan. The forest plan that we have here is a relatively new plan. In my career I’ve worked on forests with 20-, 30-year-old forest plans. The Payette had a relatively new plan when I was there, the Wallowa-Whitman had a pretty old plan.
And this one, thankfully, has been redone as of ’18. In that, we worked very closely with some of our U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks partners to come up with the standards that are in there.
And our forest plan — through public involvement, through NEPA, through line officer decision — withstood all of those thresholds, which was good. And we’re implementing the forest plan. The forest plan does have some pretty good, strong, prescriptive language about all those things — about roads, about (recreation) sites, about grizzly habitat — it’s a very contemporary plan when it comes to that.
Litigation and policy decisions:
The role of a line officer is not to interpret any kind of court ruling, decision, etc. We wait for our agency to promulgate a rule or a regulation.
(Follow-up question)
Just to make sure I understand: In a situation where the forest plan or a project loses in court in a certain issue, any sort of reaction to that is not going to come from you as the forest supervisor, it’s going to come from higher-up in the agency with either a new rule or amendment to a plan? And then when that comes down, you simply keep following the plan or the rule?
Kind of, yeah. Litigation, obviously, can affect the way we manage. But there’s a whole bunch of steps between that and changing our forest plan. We have a legal staff that advises us on that, and until that happens we’re managing the way our forest plan has guided us to manage.
There’s a whole bunch of steps that would happen between some theoretical court case and us changing our management, and we’ll do that when it goes through the process that it needs to go through before it changes something that we’ve already adopted.
Thanks for posting, Jon! This is interesting, especially the shortage of NEPA folks. I wonder why there’s a scarcity.. seems like a good job, other than handling different personalities without line authority.. hmm. I’m curious as to what current employees think of this shortage and whether they’ve observed it.
Or maybe with that experience, the NEPA folks are all getting promoted to Ranger jobs?
A few observations from a limited but relevant perspective. Some mitigating factors for NEPA recruitment and retention are likely nationwide, others likely to be more R1-centric.
Retirement and movement to planning teams is likely one factor. Folks are aging out or seeking promotions and novelty by moving to the regional planning teams. Forest plan revision, for all its complexities, is likely far more interesting and rewarding that project-level NEPA.
Related: does the lack of recruitment in general have a downstream effect? NEPA was never the most appealing job and has a certain repetition / frustration factor that isn’t as readily offset by field time or a sense of professional identity that ‘ologists get. If overall recruitment has suffered then it might not be a huge leap of logic for less “enjoyable” or recognizable jobs to suffer to a slightly greater degree. Not to overly put down / satire the planning world, with which I am very familiar, but I’d hazard a guess that relatively few go into natural resources with a desire to be the often unpopular cat-herder with a side dish of getting yelled at by the same 6 interest groups on a biennial basis while churning out things nobody reads.
Appendix to the above: points like this were recognized to some degree in this document decades ago: https://www.fs.usda.gov/Internet/FSE_DOCUMENTS/stelprdb5172343.pdf. On a tangential note, this 10-volume critique of land management planning might be the finest set of planning-related publications the agency ever produced, before or since.
The regulatory churn / back and forth of recent years is, if not discouraging, at least unappealing for those involved.
R1 is the litigation hotbed of the entire NFS, or at least neck-in-neck with r5. Might drive down appeal if every project is so contentious. There’s something to be said for avoiding boredom out of mellow repetition, but still.
Western MT has had explosive property value growth in a way that likely precludes in-migration on gov’t salaries.
Thanks, A. It might be fun to go through the Critique again and see what aspects are still relevant..
And well said, this reminds me of my old job:
“relatively few go into natural resources with a desire to be the often unpopular cat-herder with a side dish of getting yelled at by the same 6 interest groups on a biennial basis while churning out things nobody reads. ”
I’d add..
1. bugging people who don’t work for you to do things they don’t want to do (specialists, write NEPA docs)
2. having people read your emails during discovery (kind of creepy)
3. being lectured by interest groups from their Moral High Ground
4. Reading snarky untrue things in appeals, objections and lawsuits .. and knowing you can never be snarky back..
5. conflict resolution when two specialists write different things about the same effects- way to get two people mad at you.. who then you have to ask to write stuff.. back to #1
I tried to get a national NEPA award going when I was in DC for some folks to get some recognition.. I hope those folks are appreciated locally.