An article about the El Dorado National Forest is interesting:
Change in the wind for U.S. Forest Service
Give an overview of the challenges the forest faces. For example:
Employing 250 permanent and 100 or more seasonal workers, with most of his budget spent on salaries and vehicles, Crabtree said there is very little flexibility to buy equipment such as a grader or backhoe. “On top of that we have an organization chart with about 40 vacancies and almost all of those are non-fire, so we are struggling.”
Also mentions a fuel break — nice map, too.
The Camino-Pollock Pines fuel break, a collaborative effort between the El Dorado County Resource Conservation District, Cal Fire and the Eldorado National Forest will expand and reinforce a major control line that was constructed during the 2014 King Fire along the ridge above the South Fork of the American River, north of Highway 50. Over 100 property owners are involved in creating the fuel break, which is approximately 600 feet wide and extends approximately 8 miles from the Union Hill area near Camino to the Pony Express Trail near Pollock Pines. This fuel break includes treatment on approximately 1,165 acres of private land and 1,000 acres of National Forest land.
There are other ridge-top fuel breaks in the area that have been around for decades.
“This past year timber sales for the Eldorado National Forest were $49,012, the highest of all the forests in the Pacific Southwest.”
Can that figure be correct? That isn’t enough to pay one or two person’s yearly salaries.
If timber harvesting is so ‘profitable’ for the Forest Service, then why are their timbermarkers all “Temporary Employees”, limited to working just 6 months out of every year? They talk about all those vacancies but, offer no reasoning why they aren’t filled. Sure, they can blame the budget but, that is a clear cop-out, due to the billions spent on wildfires in the last decade.
We need OPM to tighten up the rules on “Temporary Appointments”, to make sure those jobs are truly ‘Temporary’ in nature. For example, Temporary Appointments could be reduced to just 4 months out of every year. Or, they could limit Temporary Appointments to one year, with no way of filling that position the next year. Those ideas would surely fix the problems involving Temporary Employees, making sure that OPM’s temporary hiring authority would not be abused by the Forest Service, ever again. It would also improve the quality of the employees who actually select the trees to be cut (instead of hiring ‘warm bodies’ off the street).