County considers using state of emergency to take over federal forests management

From Jefferson Public Radio via Oregon Public Broadcasting: “Curry County considers using state of emergency to take over federal forests management.” Full text:

Curry County, Oregon, is considering taking over management of federal forests within its borders by applying a novel legal strategy used by a county in Arizona.

Curry County commissioners presented a draft proclamation on Wednesday to declare a state of emergency for the purpose of taking over management of public forests from federal authorities.

Those in support of the proposal say it is needed due to federal agencies’ failure to manage their forests for wildfire.

At the recent meeting, Commissioner Jay Trost claimed every major recent fire in the county occurred on state and federal land.

“The private timber industry is managing their land right,” said Trost.

The proclamation also claims that the forest mismanagement, along with state regulations for homeowners in high wildfire hazard zones, will impact county housing costs and supply.

“We’re not looking to be the owners of this federal land. The main idea is that we are going to be holding the agencies accountable to continue to do their jobs,” said Commissioner Patrick Hollinger.

Hollinger said the county isn’t trying to clear-cut forests or start strip mining. But, he said, their management would support industries like logging and biomass.

“[M]ultiple-use management, timber sales, mineral utilization and livestock grazing have been curtailed to the point of causing greatly diminished health on our forests and have created catastrophic health, safety, welfare and economic effects to Curry County,” according to the proclamation.

The proclamation alleges that federal authorities are not following legal requirements for cooperation and consultation with the county for public forest management.

Hollinger explained that the emergency declaration is modeled after a resolution used in Apache County, Arizona, to manage federal lands there. That Arizona resolution was championed by Doyel Shamley with Veritas Research Consulting who visited Curry County recently to discuss land management and the Constitution with commissioners.

The draft resolution wasn’t passed, but a public workshop on the proposal will be held next week.

This story comes to you from the Northwest News Network, a collaboration between public media organizations in Oregon and Washington.

This republished story is part of OPB’s broader effort to ensure that everyone in our region has access to quality journalism that informs, entertains and enriches their lives. To learn more, visit opb.org/partnerships.

Shred Act: If Keeping Fees Locally is Good For Ski Permits, Why Not Other Revenues?

Here’s a link to an article on the Shred Act. It’s comprehensive and has much historic perspective. 

It’s a bipartisan bill, and seems (perhaps unsurprisingly) to be supported by Congressfolk with ski areas in their district or State.

My question is: why would ski areas be special.. shouldn’t all recreation permit dollars, logically, go back to the Forest, or does it vary by kind of permit? Looks like NPS fees under FLREA are 80/20 local vs. other Parks and doesn’t go to the Treasury at all.  But maybe the other recreation permit fees are so minimal it wouldn’t matter? I found this page and got lost.  Then there’s the concessionaires, which according to our friends at the Western Slope No-Fee Coalition, is 10-15% of their gross revenue but paid in offsets, which effectively keeps the funding hyper-locally.

Of course, I guess that opens a broader question of “why not grazing fees or timber sale receipts?”  Maybe they already are going back to local units.  I think a table of different revenue sources and the proportion that stays local, goes to other similar programs, or goes back to the Treasury might be helpful in putting this bill in context. Maybe administering how the funds would go back to the unit is more work than it’s worth for smaller-dollar permits?

Colorado congressmen are taking another shot at keeping revenue from ski area fees in the local communities where resorts operate.

U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet, a Colorado Democrat, reintroduced the Ski Hill Resources for Economic Development, or SHRED Act, for the third time. Bennet was joined by co-sponsor Sen. John Barrasso, a Wyoming Republican, and several other lawmakers in bringing it to the U.S. Senate. Colorado Democratic Rep. Joe Neguse and Rep. Blake Moore, a Utah Republican, introduced the act in the U.S. House of Representatives.

“The SHRED Act ensures revenue generated by Colorado’s world-renowned ski areas stays in these rural and mountain communities,” Neguse wrote in an email, adding that the act would “keep ski fees local, reinvest in our national forests, and support the outdoor recreation economy and critical locally led initiatives.”

Currently, ski resorts that operate on U.S. Forest Service land have to pay a permit fee that goes directly to the U.S. Treasury. The fees from the 124 U.S. ski resorts operating on Forest Service land total over $40 million annually.

However, there is no guarantee that these funds go back to the national forests bearing the brunt of the recreational activity, which is what the SHRED Act aims to change.

As drafted, SHRED would establish a framework for local national forests to keep a portion of these fees to offset increased recreational use by supporting local ski permit and program administration.

It would enable 80% of the fees to be used for needs in the forests where they’re generated, leaving 20% for other national forests with winter or broad recreation needs.

Within each national forest, 75% of the funds would support the ski area program and permitting needs, to process proposals for ski area improvement projects, visitor information and wildfire preparedness. The remaining 25% would be set aside for year-round local recreation management and community needs. This includes special-use permit administration, visitor services, trailhead improvements, facility maintenance, search and rescue activities, avalanche information and education, habitat restoration at recreation sites and workforce housing.

If passed, the act could bring in up to $27 million for national forests in Colorado, according to estimates from the Forest Service and information from Bennet’s office.

The majority, around $20 million, would come from the White River National Forest where Vail Mountain, Beaver Creek Resort, Breckenridge Ski Resort, Keystone Resort, Arapahoe Basin Ski Area, Copper Mountain Resort, Aspen Mountain, Aspen Highlands, Buttermilk, Snowmass and Sunlight Mountain Resort all operate.

New Tab for Agency Improvement Ideas

“Smokey Bear with hat with small wench near green Forest Service truck” OK then., Microsoft Designer.
Jon’s post about plan schedules reminded me that we should probably keep track of ideas for improvement for the FS and BLM.
Sure there are massive ones that the FS and BLM alone can’t accomplish (like fixing USAjobs) and that should be on the list, but also small ones that would make a difference. Good ideas from other agencies that the FS and BLM haven’t adopted are candidates, but not broader policy issues.

So anytime one occurs to you, you can post it as a comment in the new “Simple Fix” tab above. If we get enough of these we agree on, I’ll organize a formal letter making recommendations as we did for the employee directory and asking for signatories.

Paper: USFS “using threat of wildfires to meet timber targets”

Full title, from The Oregonian, Feb. 7, 2025, produced by Columbia Insight. “Columbia Insight’s mission is to inform and inspire readers with original, balanced journalism about environmental issues affecting the Columbia River Basin. We publish stories that highlight the connection between the environment and all the people who call this place home.”

Excerpt:

Internal documents show the Forest Service discussing — both internally and with the timber industry — how its various legal and policy “tools” and emergency authorities related to its wildfire prevention programs could be and have been harnessed to increase sales of board feet of timber.

The documents discuss how “barriers” to achieving these “timber targets,” including civil litigation from environmental organizations, might be overcome through “streamlining” environmental oversight by using legal exemptions to the National Environmental Policy Act.

For the Forest Service and the timber industry, “streamlining” means removing some NEPA red tape. It’s a necessary step, they argue, on the way to creating a win-win scenario that will help prevent wildfires, increase board feet of timber, and, in the process, grow rural timber jobs.

Critically, many of the preferred wildfire crisis tools also allow the agency and its partners to hold onto the timber revenue rather than send it to the U.S. Treasury.

2025 Forest Plan Revision Schedule – (A new quarter-century of forest planning?)

Ignoring for the moment that planning for anything in government right now is impossible, I’ve updated the spreadsheet that the Forest Service used to maintain to let everyone know the status of forest planning across the country.  (Maybe they still have one available internally, but it’s no longer on the website.)  Any way, here it is:  2025 planning status  

This is based on my review of the websites provided in prior years by the Forest Service (some of which were not valid, so I found another).  Feel free to correct anything.

Briefly, it shows 14 forest plans “in revision,” 30 plans that have never been revised, 63 plans that were revised under the 1982 regulations, and 18 revised under the 2012 Planning Rule.  78 plans are currently beyond the 15-year deadline in NFMA for being revised.

One thing that has surprised me a bit is the sparse media coverage of planning, but maybe that’s just because not much has been going on.  Here’s a recent sample.

A couple of plan amendment stories:

This site provides information on BLM planning from June 2024.  (Thanks, BLM!)

 

Not in the Blue Bag nor the Red Bag: More Thoughts on TSW Moderation

I spent more time that you would think trying to get this right using AI but I couldn’t, explanation below.

Reflecting on the past week, it seems like it’s very difficult to separate the specific issue we’re dealing with from the overall perspective of this Admin and its intent (thought by some to be unequivocally bad). I don’t remember having the same problem in the past. We could disagree about, say, the Public Lands Rule, note that people as diverse as PERC and some ENGOs were against it, and yet didn’t dive into who funds either group, or back up to how that matches with the Center for American Progress’s policy agenda.

At the same time, funding of people who put out documents or research is interesting, and relevant, and we can’t not talk about it. And equally at the same time, we know that say, Headwaters Economics generally has a point of view different from that of, say, PERC. So it might get tedious to talk about that every time we mention the group that puts out a study or news release. Still, everyone who gets paid has some kind of angle, so there’s that.

Let’s take the climate website issue. Apparently the memo was leaked to some outlets, but we are unable to get a copy, so we actually don’t know what it said. We could trace the memo and the apparent reaction and whether it makes sense to us or not. I think we all pretty much agree that while it is a symbolic act of some kind, it’s not a good idea. So we could move on from there. It seems to me that we are going to have many of these in the future (ideas of questionable value from the new Admin) and if every time we go back to Project 2025 or the Federalist Society, it might also get tedious. Granted, yesterday that was partially my fault for posting that part of Andy’s interview. Mea culpa.

The way I look at it is that there are many ideas out there. It’s like the two bags in the graphic. Some ideas are currently in the blue Democratic bag, some are in the currently Republican bag. Who determines what’s in each bag? People with political power of various kinds, and we can safely say.. not us. Then there is the plain burlap, ideas from groups outside the current red or blue bags, and finally just ideas from the rest of us, think tanks, citizens and others. Of course, within each bag are different groups jockeying to determine which ideas are in and which ones are out. As an observer, I think the pundits have it wrong when they say that people in the blue sack have moved to the red sack. They have simply rejected the content of the blue sack and decided to make their own way. I could write more about that, but not here. Certainly what’s in and out of each bag changes through time, as do people.

Sometimes, and I like to highlight these, Ds and Rs in Congress agree. I like to see people with different views working together toward our common good. Nevertheless, without being cynical, sometimes bi=partisan simply means “you get your pork/grift and I get mine, and it all balances out.” To everyone but the taxpayer, of course, who are footing the bill for pork mountains. So there’s always a need to examine these deals closely as well.

In my view, the role of The Smokey Wire is to, within our relatively small area of federal lands and forests, examine all the ideas produced by anyone and try to figure out if we (individuals) think that they are wholesome grains or rocks or chaff that gums up the works. To change analogies, each of us gets to make our own necklace of policy choices and in many cases, these won’t fit neatly into a particular set of ideas that unknown parties have put in the red or blue bag. Our role is to highlight the pros and cons of picking that particular bead for our individual policy necklaces. The point is to inform, and to share views about specific topics. Not to lecture or to castigate, which I grant is partially a tone thing.

After some reflection, I notice that some people here seem to want to go farther and bring in Project 2025 or USAID. I wonder if that’s because people really want to hear other opinions and at TSW they know they’re privy to folks hearing news and views from all kinds of sources. Maybe people who are despairing about the election really want to hear from people who are not despairing because while we are not in the blue sack, we are not in the red sack either.

For me, I won’t let anyone else select things for my policy necklace. I would like to hear from readers, here in the comments or at my email sharon at forestpolicypub.com. Because, after this week’s experimentation, I’m going to tighten up a bit more for The Smokey Wire and return to the prior focus. If people really want to talk about the other stuff, and hear from folks with different views, I can host that discussion on my Substack. So that’s a possibility.

Anyway, we actually missed quite a bit of non-new Admin news. We also haven’t looked at some of the actions of the last Admin that deserve a closer look. So next week we’ll be back to that. Please let me know what you think!

New Firefighting Agency in Interior?

The Hotshot Wakeup and various others have predicted this. From Semafor. Note that this is bipartisan since Sheehy is an R and Padilla is a D.

Montana Sen. Tim Sheehy is teaming up with California Sen. Alex Padilla on a bill to organize wildfire response under a new National Wildland Firefighting Service within the Interior Department, according to details first shared with Semafor.

The bill would require the Agriculture and Interior secretaries to combine their wildfire operations under the new agency, with a specific budget and plans for a Senate-confirmable director.

Sheehy said the current bureaucratic organization under multiple departments had “failed” firefighters and led to towns being engulfed by wildfires: “The time is now to reshape our approach to American wildfire management and start fighting fires better, stronger, and faster.”

The GOP senator, who founded an aerial firefighting operation in Montana, is now on a half-dozen bipartisan fire-related bills — one of which, to improve wildfire forecasts, advanced through committee this week.

Will Someone Please Send Us a Copy of the USDA Climate Letter? News Gets Weirder

I wouldn’t be following this story but..here’s a story from an outlet called Newsbreak

In an email sent out on Thursday, USDA Director of Digital Communications Peter Rhee detailed the process, which required staff to “identify and archive or unpublish any landing pages focused on climate change” and “document it in a spreadsheet.”

Pages are separated by the tiers that their climate-related content falls under, “Tier 1” including pages dedicated entirely to climate change and “Tier 2” categorizing those where a significant portion of the content relates to climate change.

Website managers at the Agricultural Research Service received a separate email that emphasized the urgency of the request. Several websites went dark on Friday, including the United States Forest Service website. It has resources such as research and adaptation tools that provide vital vulnerability assessments for wildfires.

The bolded part was news to those of us who had been following it.

OK so the FS website did not go dark. But the vulnerability assessments did. But other very odd ones are also gone. Like this one for wildfire crisis landscape investments (???)

Click to access WCS-Second-Landscapes.pdf

And here’s one about climate change that’s still there as of now (10:32 AM MT).
https://www.fs.usda.gov/about-agency/features/economic-risks-forest-service-estimates-costs-fighting-wildfires-hotter.
(As of 11:41 AM MT I could see the content on Chrome but not on Firefox.. as if I couldn’t get any more confused).

I also ran a search on the Foreign Ag Service for climate change and there were 154 results including a Ghana Climate Change Report which sounds like it’s all about climate change.

https://www.fas.usda.gov/search?keyword=climate+change

So here are my thoughts.

1. Many things appear to be messed up at the FS in terms of links, regardless of what the memo says, outside of the climate biz. Like the Wildfire Commission report.
2. We still don’t know what the memo says.
3. It seems likely that the agencies are being told to do something, but that there is some fall down (unknown intention) between what they are told to do and what’s disappearing. We don’t know why other than systems are complicated and searches are complicated and don’t always work (I had this experience with FOIA searches they ran at CEQ during the Biden Admin).

We could impugn the motives and/or capabilities of anyone along the way from the writer of the memo to the IT folks, but we don’t know, so why add to the negative energies in the universe? It is likely to sort itself out.

Let’s now look at this media outlet who said the Forest Service website “went dark” Friday. Traditional uses of the English language and my browsing history would suggest that that is not true.
The source is called Upolitics. The editor says here it “delivers the news liberals need to know.”

It also said that “research and adaptation tools provide vital vulnerability assessments for wildfires”; I think they meant “for planning responses to wildfires” except that’s not true either. I don’t blame the reporter, our stuff is complicated. At first I thought it was AI generated, since often those write-ups sound plausible but don’t actually make sense.

The story came to me via via Newsbreak, which is the “nation’s leading local news app”. But that particular news is not local and it appears to have originated at Medium? Oh well, it turns out the reporter appears to be Angela Schlager from Medium. Below is her info.

Here to explore ideas represented through diverse stories in the entertainment industry. From all things literature, to cinema and videogames; I plan to to look into the psychological and sociological components of storytelling that make these displays compelling.

I hope that I can share my opinion and collaborate with others who share similar views–or learn from those who have different ideas! As a journalism student, I will often times aim to be an informative source. However, I also wish to use this platform to simply talk about how I feel on a matter and start a conversation with others.

Even more puzzling.

I hate to think we have to do DIY journalism around here, but sometimes that appears to be the case. At least we can be transparent and accountable.

Andy Stahl on “Fork in the Road” Resignation Offer via Wyofile

I mostly agree with what Andy has to say in this piece, except for what I think is a broad extrapolation at the end.

However, as a member of NAFSR (Forest Service retirees), I think it’s interesting that Angus (the reporter) chose to interview the  head of the “former agency group” for the Park Service but not the Forest Service nor BLM.  Or maybe he did but didn’t use their quotes.  The piece isn’t paywalled, so you can read all of it, but I’ve excerpted what Andy said.  I agree with many of the things he says.

There’s “uncertainty throughout the Forest Service,” said Andy Stahl, executive director of Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics. “The fear is palpable.”

An implication in the “Fork in the Road” memo is that “the next [offer] may be less generous,” Stahl said. “It may be ‘give us your keys, you’re out of here.’

“Everybody in the Forest Service,” he said, “is just hunkered down waiting for the next axe to fall.”

*****

As the Republican agenda advances, it’s clear whose necks are first on the chopping block, Forest Service supporter Stahl said.

“If you’ve got [Diversity, Equity and Inclusion] in your title the Trump administration has made it very clear you should either get a different job or leave the government entirely,” he said.

But “I doubt the Trump administration is going to can the firefighters,” who make up about half the USFS workforce, Stahl said.

“At the end of the day, somebody’s going to have to replace the toilet paper in the campground restrooms, process the permit for the Boy Scout 20-person campout, go out and mark the small trees that will be thinned in a fuels reduction project,” he said.

************

But of course those are things temps do, that wouldn’t have been funded anyway. I hope the new Admin fixes the temp situation post-haste.

Here are the things I don’t agree with..

As Stahl sees it, Trump’s goal is to get the U.S. Supreme Court to declare the Civil Service Reform Act unconstitutional, a violation of the separation of powers. The act created the modern-day civil service, the phalanx of 2.2 million government workers who carry out congressional laws, executive directions and court rulings.

Adopting that perspective, Stahl pointed out that the president doesn’t tell Barrasso who he can or can’t hire for his staff. Trump can’t tell Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas who can be his clerks.

“Why can Congress tell me who I can hire?” Trump might ask, according to Stahl. For Trump, “that doesn’t seem fair,” Stahl said.

The notion of a civil service beholden only to the president has support from conservative scholars in The Federalist Society, a legal organization that is “ramrodding this return to constitutional literalism and the original intent of the founders,” Stahl said.

“They read dusty old manuscripts [and would] return to our nation to 250 years ago when the president only employed five people,” Stahl said. “That’s the end game.”

I think that’s a bit of an overreach or extrapolation.  A more simple explanation is that they want to cut employees and this is a way to do it, not unlike what happens in the private sector.

I also think it’s worth considering how quickly stories can go from content of the story, to intent of those doing the work in the story (usually only under certain kinds of Admins).

****************

But Wyofile regularly assures me, especially when they’re looking for donations, that they are unbiased. So there’s that.

Update on the USDA Climate Change Memo

Thanks to Anonymous who linked to this Politico piece which seems to answer the questions raised yesterday about the Wildfire Commission Report link.

Agriculture Department employees have been ordered to delete landing pages discussing climate change across agency websites and document climate change references for further review, according to an internal email obtained by POLITICO.

The directive from USDA’s office of communications, whose authenticity was validated by three people, could affect information across dozens of programs including climate-smart agriculture initiatives, USDA climate hubs and Forest Service information regarding wildfires, the frequency and severity of which scientists have linked to hotter, drier conditions fueled by climate change. And it is reminiscent of moves made during the first Trump administration to remove references to climate change from federal government websites.

The email sent Thursday afternoon calls on website managers to “Identify and archive or unpublish any landing pages focused on climate change” and “Identify all web content related to climate change and document it in a spreadsheet” for the office to review. It set a Friday deadline for handing over titles, links and “your recommendation on how the content should be handled.”

Interesting that Politico did not post the actual leaked memo.
First, we have to imagine that both the leaker and Politico are being accurate. So I guess we have to trust both of them on this, for now. Stories and reality will be changing by the day, the week and the month.

As reported, the email talks about “landing pages” and not all pages. Which would explain why we can go to any USDA agency, search on climate change, and find many links. Then  it says “identify all web content related to climate change and document it in a spreadsheet for the office to review.” So let’s imagine ourselves tasked with this. Since folks had to claim some relationship to climate change to get funding,  there is a climate mention in probably all the programmatic documents and many of the administrative ones (at least for grants, and many positions). They are going to put thousands (or millions?) of documents in a spreadsheet by Friday?

What is likely to happen, based on my experience, is that agency/Department career folks will come back and say “here is a sample, is this what you really want?” and the criteria will be refined. Perhaps this refinement will also be leaked, so we can keep up with it?

But I don’t know. So maybe the thing to do is wait and see what happens. If we believe the email has been correctly leaked and reported , and if the Wildland Fire Report was taken down intentionally, then the agency is not following the email. So that’s confusing.

For those of you who haven’t observed this, there’s a thing that happens – particularly in R Admins because most federal employees are Ds. It’s what I call “intentional overreaction.” What happens is that new politicals will send an email or otherwise order agencies to do something. Some people in some agencies overreact (it’s always fun to watch how a Department will send a memo and see how different agencies react or overreact) and shut down things beyond what the memo actually calls for. Sometimes the employees then contact cooperative media outlets and then media outlets interview affected people, but we never get to see the actual memo.

So this climate change memo at USDA is interesting, because we actually have the memo (if we trust leakers and reporters) and can compare it to any actions.

Since the 90’s or so, anything technical we wrote at the FS  had to have some reference to climate change, just to assure people we had considered it and were not asleep at the scientific wheel.  Since the IRA megabucks were supposedly directed at climate action, then anyone who wanted bucks would definitely make some kind of climate connection, even if it was a stretch. Here’s a fairly stretchy example but probably not unusual.

This one’s actually an EPA grant for $20 mill for a “climate-focused” grant for a community center.

A new community center intended to be a hub for southwest Denver is set to bring food stalls, a coffee shop and sweeping mountain views to the Loretto Heights campus by 2026 — with help from a recent $20 million federal grant.

Loretto Heights, a former college campus known for its sandstone clocktower, is under a major redevelopment after Westside Investment Partners purchased the campus for $15.8 million in 2018.

The new community center, which will be operated by a nonprofit group called Commún, will also offer a wide swath of services, including a donation-based grocery store, a child care center and a community market.

“Think of a food hall,” said Margaret Brugger, executive director of the nonprofit. “It’s lively, there’s coffee, you can get a meal and it has beautiful views. So who wants to come there? Everybody that feels like they belong.”

While the Loretto Heights Community Center will provide some services for lower-income residents, it’s intended to be a space for anyone in the community to connect with their neighbors, Brugger said.

The $20 million grant was awarded by the Environmental Protection Agency in a climate-focused program. It will only partially fund the remodeling of the 1950s-era building known as Machebeuf Hall — a 45,000 square feet structure that formerly operated as a cafeteria. The full project’s budget is $41 million, with other funding coming from the Colorado Trust, the Gates Foundation, the Sisters of Loretto and some government tax credits.

My point being that climate is everywhere, whether or not landing pages are taken down.