According to the Forest Service, the decision to cancel the contract was made after officials decided the current contract didn’t sufficiently meet the needs of industry partners, making it too risky to be successful.
In its most recent form, the contract included 520,000 acres that a company would be brought on to thin. But the Forest Service could not give companies the necessary assurances that they would be supported should something occur that reduced the total number of acres.
In this article there are some critiques of the process:
Worsley said a contract that would involve huge investments in new infrastructure on the part of industry partners, without the knowledge that the Forest Service would cover the cost if disaster struck or funding ran out, was the big issue.
But Worsley said it shouldn’t have taken this long before the Forest Service knew whether could make those guarantees.
“That’s something that they should have known upfront and should have either not started the RFP or ended it much sooner, before there was significant investment of time and dollars by those that bid into the RFP,” Worsley said. “So to me, if the Forest Service was never prepared to do that, to actually guarantee this, then this was a bit of a disingenuous process anyway.”
We’ve met Brad Worsley before on The Smokey Wire, as he wrote this guest post last summer. I’d have to disagree with Brad based on my own experience. With any large governmental organization, there are lots of moving parts. Sometimes you don’t really know until you ask, and then find out that that person really needs to ask someone else. Or that person leaves and a new person comes in with different views. Or what is agreeable in abstract and innovative, can run aground when it becomes concrete and specific. I can understand how that way of doing business (or not doing business, as sometimes can be the case) is very frustrating for external folks (as it is for internal folks, but they get paid the same no matter how convoluted the process is).
But Kohrman and other forest officials suggested that the Forest Service is open to moving forward in other ways depending on the feedback of industry partners and stakeholders.
“We know, lessons learned, that we designed this effort in kind of a black box mode and we don’t want to do that again. We want to design it in a very transparent, open way, where everyone can show up and offer what their needs are and their objectives,” Kohrman said.
That’s what Jim Zornes said in his comment on the previous post. He can’t talk about it due to the black-box nature of the FARS. Which makes it tough for any of us to see what the problem is, or to propose solutions. Should they give up on the contract and go another way?
That point was most succinctly voiced by Grand Canyon Trust Executive Director Ethan Aumack.
“The cancellation of the most recent RFP combined with the fact that we’ve seen less than 5 percent of the first contract treated with less than one year left in the contract provides us two very clear and convergent signals,” Aumack said, adding that he believed managed and controlled burns may be the best way for 4FRI to move forward.
While industry partners would always be part of the solution, Aumack said, he didn’t want that side of 4FRI to hold back forest treatments across the board.
“I believe our large landscape objectives restoration would need to be met will need to be met by using relatively limited, strategically placed mechanical thinning treatments and fire at a much more extensive level than we had originally planned,” Aumack said.
Assuming Aumack’s quotes are correct, I think the Forest’s point of view expressed yesterday is that many fuel treatments and prescribed burns are going ahead anyway. To embark upon such a change would require possibly a new EIS, and we all know how long those can take. Assuming people agree with the “more fire” approach and don’t sue..
I also wonder, though, whether “fire at a much more extensive level” is very practical given burn windows, possibly getting narrower due to climate change, and perhaps the need to do mechanical treatments in some areas before fire can run through (without killing everything). And of course there is more smoke and carbon released from burning in the atmosphere, so conceivably that strategy might be worse for climate change (mitigation and adaptation). There are also the concerns of neighbors about WFU and to a lesser extent, prescribed fire. Another interesting aspect of the current approach is that (if successful) the USG could make up for some costs with removing vegetation, including taxes at a variety of levels, whereas prescribed fire is an ongoing cost (and yes fire crews buy clothes, eat and pay income tax). But perhaps the USG is in a situation where ongoing costs are not a concern…just kidding.
To be clear, I’m not arguing against burning, I’m definitely an all-of-the-above person. I just think we will need all the tools in the toolkit, and then some.
Anyone who’s met worsley knows he’s got a knack for – politely – uh, rhetoric. On the other side of the line, and the politics of this being what they are, GCT is using this to advance the ‘strategic fire use’ line that CBD et al brought out during the end of the last EIS process. I won’t opine on that being good or bad, disingenuous or not, just interesting timing.
all this, the degree of unrealized planning in first EIS, now this, makes one think of how the promise of CFLRP and collaboration is perhaps overstated at times or at least not the panacea. Meaning, there seems to be a mismatch between the promise of 4fri and where implementation exists on the impacted forests. Relative to the scale of the planning efforts, it sure doesn’t seem like the 4fri projects end up being implemented in a promising way. Is that the fault of the planning efforts or something else? Do the collaborative solutions of CFLRP actually stand apart, in terms of results, from other planning efforts? Not being rhetorical here, I genuinely don’t know and raise the question.
I mean, pessimistically, think of this turn of events. Industry doesn’t see enough guaranteed $$ on the horizon, process gets shaky, enviros immediately push for less industry in solution (raising questions about the durability of agreement produced, seems like the relative power of groups shifts and that changes the collaboration dynamic, raising questions about how much it’s collaboration versus forcing them to play nice while the balance is similar), industry lambasts FS not helping them enough (how much should the FS help industry?), legislators slap FS cerimonially upside the head for the process falling through (what does this accomplish when it appears that industry pressed for the cancellation more than anyone else). Acknowledging how much work goes into these is true, but that just makes the failure of results to materialize all the more disheartening.
There’s a separate thing here along the lines of what sharon had in a recent post acknowledging the difficulty of a position like that of 4fri. The process pieces are there in one sense, but then look at one place where thinning and burning gets accomplished at scale in Arizona, the Apache-Sitgreaves, with largely traditional smaller NEPA processes not involving formal collaboration or much of the novel solutions that have been tagged on to legislation in recent years. (though many of the operations are funded in part with CFLRP and fit into the 4fri umbrella, the actual planning took place under local unit process years prior).
Like the questions above, Why the mismatch between the flagship planning efforts and the projects that actually get implmented, does it all come down to where industry still exists? What actually produces results, decent funding, collaboration, both?
maybe a much larger question, about the underlying land management laws and public participation (law is too complex, public too confused by it, collaboration slapped on top doesn’t really change that, the policy aims too unclear or too muddled and apt to produce contradictory aims in the agencies), but that’s probably for another thread
Great take on the politics and positioning, anonymous, my only change would be to point out that White Mountain Stewardship (WMS) on the A-S treated 72,000 acres with mechanical thinning.
In fact, after the 4-FRI contract was signed in May, 2012, all WMS work was then counted as 4-FRI accomplishment! That stung a bit; especially after the A-S was cut out of the additional funding provided from the Region for sale prep. I will never forget being told “there just isn’t any funding left after funding 4-FRI”! Of course that was the Regional Forester telling me, during a break at the RLT…..
4-FRI #1 had great promise but ended up a dud. 4-FRI #2 has/had a chance but looks like it will never have a chance to “shine”….
At least 13 years of planning shot down the hole….
A- I think there have been several reviews of CFLRP by different groups.. don’t have a list.
I think it would be interesting to break it down by different aspects of CFLRP.
More money- always good
Required collaboration- good
Some people feel that acres treated isn’t a good metric, so what is success?
Given that, is there some magic that happens with CFLRP beyond money and collaboration?
If so what is it? And can we spread that around?
Is CFLRP at a stage where the lessons learned should be wrapped up and the $ spread more evenly now across all forests?
At this WGA panel https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d4iOtyfisYE the CFLRP folks are asking for more money to pay for administering collaboratives, but does more money to CFLRP increase the divergence between capability of CFLRP beneficiaries and the rest of the forests.
All this seems like really important stuff.
I worked with Ethan, too, in the collaborative. Ethan has a point, but scale and risk will make Rx, and managed fire too big of a bite. That country burns, and it is not at all uncommon to have 50-70 mph winds come up unexpectedly.
Mechanical treatment, followed by burning is THE only way in a large part of 4-FRI. Find a “valid” use of biomass and you got’ta shot at true management.
So here I am again; I am a bit reluctant to post this (actually, I tried to post it, but somewhere in the translation those electrons got lost in the ozone). ?.
So biomass, the big outlier of a successful restoration effort of 4-FRI. However, there is a solution; for any biomass end user there has to be a metric on cost. The stuff is really worthless, unless you find a legitimate use.
Brad Worsley’s 27 Meg power plant is a fantastic fit. But, anything over a 50 mile radius from any user puts economics into the red. During the old BCAP (Biomass Crop Assistance Program), the Feds subsidized hauling of all kinds of biomass, Brad was a recipient of that “good will”, but the funds were very limited.
Enter the solution: there are approximately 3 million homes in the great State of Arizona, with probably another million renters. A Megawatt of power will feed around 650 homes. If the Arizona Corporation Commission were to add a surcharge of say, 50 cents per electric bill, that would be 2 million dollars per month, times 12 months is 24 million dollars per year.
50,000 acres per year needs mechanically treated, is right at $500/acre for biomass transportation.
Will it work? Well, if the FS would commit to a 20 year contract, power providers enter into Participating Power Agreement (PPA) with State oversight for biomass transportation, and the PPA requires burning biomass in their power plants. It just might. And, this model could be replicated across the West!
As for more Rx fire and “managed” fire, I see either an outright prohibition in Arizona, or some sort of crippling constraints. The Supremacy Clause could come into play, but Arizona has had it with (reckless??) managed fire and large scale burnout operations…..