The traditional way logging happens in the Black Hills National Forest is through timber sales. The U.S. Forest Service designates areas available for logging, and companies bid for the right to purchase and harvest the timber.
On Saturday in Spearfish, there was a forestry roundtable discussion about the reduced levels of timber sales in recent years.
U.S. Rep. Dusty Johnson, R-South Dakota, invited two of his fellow congressmen, Doug LaMalfa, R-California, and Austin Scott, R-Georgia. Johnson also invited two Forest Service officials, Regional Forester Frank Beum and Black Hills National Forest Forest Supervisor Shawn Cochran. The panel was rounded out with timber industry representatives and the South Dakota state forester.
After introductions, the panel quickly turned to grilling the two Forest Service officials. I am familiar with LaMalfa from watching him in congressional hearings. He can come across as combative, and he was all of that. Scott was also aggressive. It is not clear to me why these two were on this panel. They have absolutely no familiarity with the Black Hills. It appeared that they were there to browbeat the Forest Service. Johnson participated in these tactics as well.
An audience listens to a roundtable forestry discussion March 2, 2024, in Spearfish. (Courtesy of the Office of U.S. Rep. Dusty Johnson)
At issue was why the Black Hills National Forest plans to sell only 63,000 CCF (1 CCF equals 100 cubic feet) of timber this fiscal year. The timber industry representatives said they need 120,000 CCF to survive as they exist today. Beum said that with budget limitations and 76 employee vacancies, 63,000 CCF is all the Forest Service can do. He also stated that to get to 120,000 CCF, the forest would need an additional $20 million of funding.
Much of the hour and a half revolved around blaming the Forest Service for not selling more timber and for being ineffective. This came from three members of Congress, which doesn’t exactly have a stellar record of getting things done. When will they pass a budget?
Repeatedly, panelists stated what the timber industry needs. Never was there any concern for what level of timber harvesting the forest needs. Only toward the end did the elephant in the room finally get discussed — that there are no longer enough sawtimber-size trees left on the forest to support the capacity of the timber industry as it exists today. (A tree big enough to qualify as sawtimber is one that’s at least 9 inches in diameter when measured at a point 4.5 feet above the ground.)
Large wildfires in the early 2000s, the mountain pine beetle epidemic and the associated aggressive timber harvesting to address it all led to a major reduction in sawtimber-sized trees across the forest. This has impacted how many trees can now be sustainably logged on an annual basis, and this will continue for a good while into the future. Acceptance of that is the key to finding solutions.
Beum explained that the Forest Service is conducting an inventory of the forest at a cost of $2 million with LiDAR, an aerial survey method that uses pulses of laser light to determine the presence, shape and distance of objects in great detail. Never before has this been done on an entire national forest. This will provide a 3D map of the forest down to individual trees, and give a very clear picture on how many sawtimber-size trees remain on the forest. This issue has been in dispute, because the timber industry discounts the numerous studies that show there is a problem.
At one point, Johnson thought the timber sustainability issue could be resolved with simple math. He asked Ben Wudtke, of the Black Hills Forest Resource Association, a timber industry group, about the growth rate of the forest. Wudtke said it’s 2.5%. Johnson did some rough math and declared that there is no problem with the timber inventory or sustainability. He failed to take into account the long-term average mortality (rate of tree death) of 1%, and also that the whole forest is not available for timber harvesting for a variety of reasons — including the presence of non-forested areas such as meadows, terrain that’s too steep and rugged, restrictive land designations such as wilderness and recreation areas, access problems, etc. He should actually read the Forest Service’s General Technical Report, which goes into great detail on these issues.
Beum said the Forest Service is subsidizing the rail transport of logs from California and Oregon to the Spearfish and Hulett, Wyoming, mills. Something like this has never occurred before. There was no appreciation expressed.
Scott asked about the revenues generated by timber sales, and Cochran had to explain that since the Forest Service is now primarily using service stewardship contracts to help the timber industry find places to work, the Forest Service is not making any money. In fact, the Forest Service is paying private loggers to harvest timber in an area where the cost of logging exceeds the value of the timber. For example, the Topaz Timber Sale is costing the Forest Service $3.5 million to log 550 acres on steep ground that otherwise wouldn’t get logged south of Sturgis. The timber operator gets the logs at no cost, in return for some service work. Clearly, the Forest Service is doing some extraordinary things to assist the timber industry.
Instead of seeking solutions, it appeared that this roundtable was more of an ambush. The two Forest Service participants showed up in good faith only to be interrogated. What was the point of all this other than some people enjoying seeing the Forest Service get beat up? No solutions were found that I could tell.
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Dave Mertz
Dave Mertz retired from the Black Hills National Forest in 2017 as the forest’s natural resource officer. Over the course of his career, he was a forester, silviculturist, forest fire management officer and a fire staff officer.
26 thoughts on “We know what the timber industry needs, but what can the Black Hills provide? Commentary by Dave Mertz”
I had posted earlier about this opinion piece; maybe dumb luck, maybe quick action, but thank you Sharon for bringing this up!
Dave done a great job in his reporting on this, I know both FS folks very well, and can only imagine the uneasiness of getting clobbered for doing the right thing.
But, can you imagine, the FS paying to ship logs, by rail, from California to South Dakota? Remember a few years ago when the old BCAP (Biomass Crop Assistance Program) couldn’t find enough money to even be relevant?
This is playing out in real time, and it is absolutely shocking on how The Hills are being mined for volume…..
It’s some crazy stuff going on here Jim! When you were here, things were just borderline crazy, but it’s full One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest now! It’s almost impossible to find out how much the rail thing is costing taxpayers but it’s likely an outrageous amount. These are supposedly salvage logs, they can’t be worth much. The transport must be costing several times what the logs are worth. It’s hard to believe our politicians can solve big problems when they are devoid of objectivity. There answer is always just get a bigger hammer.
Dave, I’m surprised that you’re surprised by what politicians do. Spending taxpayer $ on various ways of supporting desirable industries is fairly common.
That is actually not what I am surprised about. True, there are federal subsidies to various industries all the time, some justified and some not. It is a little disingenuous with these politicians who constantly tout their conservative credentials, but are willing to put their finger on the scale for whom they feel deserve it (free market?) They hate handouts until it is for whom they favor. I am not naive; I know this is how it all works. Doesn’t make it right.
What I find more disturbing is that these politicians do little if anything to get all of the facts before handing out money. They only listen to the timber industry’s side. In this case, there is no longer enough standing inventory on the BHNF to support the current timber industry demand. Propping them up with federal dollars or demanding that the FS overcut the Forest (not following NFMA, and Act passed by politicians) is not a solution. It is putting band aids over band aids.
They parrot the story that if a mill closes, the Black Hills will burn to the ground. This is not true, other mills will remain. The real fire risk here is the hundreds of thousands of acres of doghair stands of young trees. Not the sawtimber. But sawmills don’t make money on doghair. And so it goes….
Logging out the basin for the Grizzly Gulch Tailings Disposal Project above Pluma and Deadwood in 1978 helped to launch this blogger’s love of the Black Hills. Homestake Mining Company that also operated the sawmill in Spearditch, hired a local contractor who gave a farm boy and School of Mines dropout a skidder job. I got good at it, too. So good, in fact, I saved enough money to take the timber crew to Pam Holliday’s Purple Door brothel in Deadwood before it was forced to close.
But after a century of fire suppression, a decades-long moratorium on prescribed burns, a lack of environmental litigators and GOP retrenchment the Black Hills National Forest has been broken for decades and the demise of the BHNF was forecast at least as early as 2002 when Jim Furnish was Deputy FS Chief.
Craig Bobzien lasted as supervisor of the BHNF for eleven years but retired in 2016 when the volume of spit hitting the fan just became too overwhelming. Now, West Virginian, Shawn Cochrane is its sixth different leader in 2023 and 11th in the past seven years.
I don’t see any mention of the ‘style’ of logging that happens in the Black Hills, Even-aged management has some blame to take, here. The logging industry has substantial investment into this unique style of logging, where log trucks load their own logs, which are almost all the same size and length.
If they had to go to thinning projects, where logs are all different shapes and sizes, they would have to make costly changes. A change to uneven-aged management would cause all sorts of economic changes, too. I’m sure that much has already changed, since I last worked there about 20 years ago.
Even-aged management is kind of in the DNA here and in my opinion, it has led, at least in part, to the problems today. For decades, thinning down to 80 BA was standard practice. Little overstory removal occurred over that time. This led to a scarcity of age class diversity. This type of management did not help with the mountain pine beetle epidemic, during which there was a transition to thinning to 40 BA. In 2018, and EIS was implemented that authorized 180,000 acres of overstory removal. This was a knee jerk reaction to not doing hardly any overstory removal for decades. So, the even-aged management continues. There has been some uneven-aged management over the years but there has not really been wide-spread acceptance of it. With the current state of the forest, there are fewer and fewer options of any kind to properly manage it.
Ain’t nothing wrong with even aged management Dave, there is something wrong with “departure” above ASQ for too many years. Also, (Sharon, you may have insight on this) in my time in the Planning shop, some of the longer-termed folks said the ASQ was set at an attainable level too high for non-declining even flow.
Even aged management has been the workhorse for Region 8 (USFS) for 60+ years, and Forests are still growing more than harvest levels; and that’s including mortality!
BHNF was cutting more than growth plus mortality, losing suitable and “standard” component acres, and those cumulative effects finally came home to roost! This should have been nipped in the bud in 2016, but the politics, industry tantrums and Agency egos just carried too much weight! And now, we have a mess…..
Here’s what I heard from (some) retired folks after I left.. the Forest was allowed (or whatever the right term is) departure (from ASQ, from non-declining even flow?) because they needed to thin out stands to make them more beetle-resistant, and also salvage BB trees (? don’t know if salvage counts in all this).
But the Forest never went back to the previous ASQ and didn’t adjust it to compensate for the departure. I don’t know why. Maybe Dave does.
Another thing I don’t know is whether the ASQ needed to be adjusted at all to harvest more, or they could just go above the ASQ anyway. Others around are more expert on this.
Here is how I remember what happened. For several years, we were cutting above ASQ to address the mountain pine beetle epidemic. We should have requested permission from the RO for departure of the ASQ, but that never happened. It was discussed, but we never actually requested that. Nobody from the RO ever questioned us on that either, that I remember.
Before my time, but after the Jasper Fire (80,000 acres on a 1.2-million-acre forest) there were some that were saying the Forest Plan should have been amended at that time to adjust the ASQ lower. Probably should have but it didn’t happen. The Jasper Fire area was the best timber ground in the Southern Hills.
Jim Furnish was deputy chief of the US Forest Service from 1999 to 2002 and believes all the fuel treatments in the area before the Jasper Fire were entirely ineffective in preventing the blaze.
According to Todd Pechota, a retired forest fire management officer for the Black Hills National Forest who responded to the Jasper Fire, the next megafire in the Black Hills is just a matter of when.
Pechota also said he feels a forest fire the size of Jasper will “probably be in September or the spring, not the months of June through August.” Citing several reasons for his logic about why we’ll see another Jasper Fire, his main point was that there are “a fraction of resources available in summer,” he said. Pechota also provided a historical perspective of the Jasper Fire that included a reminder that despite the Hell Canyon area’s “April 2000 blizzard of two and a half feet of snow, that summer’s hot and dry conditions set a deteriorating stage for, first, the July 2000 fire near Hot Springs that burned 7,000 acres, and then the Jasper Fire,” Pechota said. Pechota further clarified that the number of fire starts in the Hell Canyon area in the year 2000 jumped from a yearly average of 55 to 1,000 fire starts that year.
[Custer County Chronicle]
It’s the view of this interested party that Janice Stevenson is a scapegoat for decades of land management failures endemic to South Dakota politics and to the Republican supermajority that coddles Jim Neiman.
Larry, With all due respect to Jim, he is not an authority on fuel treatments nor the Jasper Fire. One good thing about being retired is that we can focus on folks’ arguments and not on their formal positions, current or former.
Given some information I probably shouldn’t have known, the ASQ question was discussed between FS and industry, way before the MPB epidemic was in full swing. Industry and FS made a deal (most likely informally) on increasing ASQ until the epidemic started to wane. Everyone agreed, hands shook, then industry reneged on backing down ASQ. From what I understand, the Chiefs office was fully engaged (as they should have been) for the entire process. I could go on with some opinion but I’ll leave this here…..
So if we try to put your and Dave’s stories together.. there is a sense in which an ASQ can be raised in agreements with industry, but not formalized via any documents, either on the Forest or in the RO? So maybe it’s not a formal ASQ, but rather an agreement about timber sale volumes that is not formalized?
ASQ is a decadal figure, so year-to-year variation is expected. If what was discussed here was going over ASQ for a decade, that would probably violate NFMA unless there was a proper public process (probably a plan amendment). (I say “probably violate” because the departure provisions of NFMA apply to the planning process rather then scorekeeping afterwards, but did the Black Hills forest plan have a plan standard tied to ASQ that was violated?)
I always expected ASQ to be revisited periodically as part of monitoring, which would have allowed some kind of analysis of where things were for a decade, but I don’t think that happened often. I think most forestsI knew about were cutting less than their ASQ on a yearly basis so this didn’t really need to come up. The Lolo NF did attempt to do a plan amendment to reduce it’s ASQ based on new information, but they did not get support from higher levels to do so.
Yes, I am aware of the decadal factor. As I understand it, since the Forest Plan was revised in 1997, you go by decades from there. So, from 2007 to 2016, The BHNF did exceed ASQ. The point is, we knew we would but nothing formal was done about it. Truth be told, nobody gave two figs about the issue. I really don’t remember anyone expressing any concern about it, with the exception of the Forest Silviculturist. The timber industry said we owed them that extra for being below ASQ in the first decade.
I was not familiar with agreement that Jim discusses, however it does not surprise me. I was not in the loop on a lot of the higher up conversations. There were a lot of discussions that went on between the RO and the timber industry that left the Forest out.
Sharon, I think it was documented in some form, I don’t see those magnitude of agreements being “willy nilly”. There was some very interesting communications going on, I know the Forest was not involved in except for the Sup. I believe the political faction to manage (?) the situation caused the failure in supporting the original agreement. I never saw such agreement, but I told it did exist.
Be that as it may, the blame for the mess on The Hills is tied directly to industry backing out of their part of the bargain.
More volume, much more volume! Those mills underwent millions of dollars of upgrades to increase production. The old “I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine” hoodwink…..
Last year’s USFS Senate budget hearing (link below) suggests that the timber industry’s influence on politicians is nation-wide. And it’s not just timber–the politicians also want to help other commercial interests that exploit the national forests for subsidized profit. The hearing makes it clear that politicians, not scientists, run the USFS. Here’s the link:
Also: Politicians wrote most of the laws that they complain about today. Many politicians repeat the conspiracy theories they hear from their constituents, while dismissing site-specific conditions and legal realities.
Jake, why would you expect that “scientists” would run any government agency? They are part of the Executive Branch of government, and the leadership is from the party that wins the Presidential election. And Congress is also full of elected officials who do whatever.
How do you determine how much the Treasury should get to adequately compensate the FS for commercial use?
I see this becoming an issue in other places within the next 10 years. When I look at the 5 year plans for several dry western forests that currently have timber programs and access to mills, there isn’t much left. Staff have confirmed that they have only a few of viable projects left to plan across entire forests and then they are done. The loggers and industry wont disappear when these projects are done and you can bet your britches that they’ll be pounding their fists on the supervisor’s desk demanding more wood, just like they are in the Black Hills.
The other issue with this is these forests rely almost exclusively on commercial to complete and fund fuels treatments. Their ability to plan and implement anything but projects dominated by commercial has not been demonstrated. This is why it is so important to get alternative fuels treatment methods planned now, as well as starting to actually implement the alternative methods at scale.
At one point, Johnson thought the timber sustainability issue could be resolved with simple math. He asked Ben Wudtke, of the Black Hills Forest Resource Association, a timber industry group, about the growth rate of the forest. Wudtke said it’s 2.5%. Johnson did some rough math and declared that there is no problem with the timber inventory or sustainability. He failed to take into account the long-term average mortality (rate of tree death) of 1%, and also that the whole forest is not available for timber harvesting for a variety of reasons — including the presence of non-forested areas such as meadows, terrain that’s too steep and rugged, restrictive land designations such as wilderness and recreation areas, access problems, etc. He should actually read the Forest Service’s General Technical Report, which goes into great detail on these issues.
I had posted earlier about this opinion piece; maybe dumb luck, maybe quick action, but thank you Sharon for bringing this up!
Dave done a great job in his reporting on this, I know both FS folks very well, and can only imagine the uneasiness of getting clobbered for doing the right thing.
But, can you imagine, the FS paying to ship logs, by rail, from California to South Dakota? Remember a few years ago when the old BCAP (Biomass Crop Assistance Program) couldn’t find enough money to even be relevant?
This is playing out in real time, and it is absolutely shocking on how The Hills are being mined for volume…..
Larry had sent a link on TwitX and you reminded me.
I meant “dumb luck” in my part, that’s normally how I roll….🤣
It’s some crazy stuff going on here Jim! When you were here, things were just borderline crazy, but it’s full One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest now! It’s almost impossible to find out how much the rail thing is costing taxpayers but it’s likely an outrageous amount. These are supposedly salvage logs, they can’t be worth much. The transport must be costing several times what the logs are worth. It’s hard to believe our politicians can solve big problems when they are devoid of objectivity. There answer is always just get a bigger hammer.
Dave, I’m surprised that you’re surprised by what politicians do. Spending taxpayer $ on various ways of supporting desirable industries is fairly common.
That is actually not what I am surprised about. True, there are federal subsidies to various industries all the time, some justified and some not. It is a little disingenuous with these politicians who constantly tout their conservative credentials, but are willing to put their finger on the scale for whom they feel deserve it (free market?) They hate handouts until it is for whom they favor. I am not naive; I know this is how it all works. Doesn’t make it right.
What I find more disturbing is that these politicians do little if anything to get all of the facts before handing out money. They only listen to the timber industry’s side. In this case, there is no longer enough standing inventory on the BHNF to support the current timber industry demand. Propping them up with federal dollars or demanding that the FS overcut the Forest (not following NFMA, and Act passed by politicians) is not a solution. It is putting band aids over band aids.
They parrot the story that if a mill closes, the Black Hills will burn to the ground. This is not true, other mills will remain. The real fire risk here is the hundreds of thousands of acres of doghair stands of young trees. Not the sawtimber. But sawmills don’t make money on doghair. And so it goes….
Logging out the basin for the Grizzly Gulch Tailings Disposal Project above Pluma and Deadwood in 1978 helped to launch this blogger’s love of the Black Hills. Homestake Mining Company that also operated the sawmill in Spearditch, hired a local contractor who gave a farm boy and School of Mines dropout a skidder job. I got good at it, too. So good, in fact, I saved enough money to take the timber crew to Pam Holliday’s Purple Door brothel in Deadwood before it was forced to close.
But after a century of fire suppression, a decades-long moratorium on prescribed burns, a lack of environmental litigators and GOP retrenchment the Black Hills National Forest has been broken for decades and the demise of the BHNF was forecast at least as early as 2002 when Jim Furnish was Deputy FS Chief.
Craig Bobzien lasted as supervisor of the BHNF for eleven years but retired in 2016 when the volume of spit hitting the fan just became too overwhelming. Now, West Virginian, Shawn Cochrane is its sixth different leader in 2023 and 11th in the past seven years.
I don’t see any mention of the ‘style’ of logging that happens in the Black Hills, Even-aged management has some blame to take, here. The logging industry has substantial investment into this unique style of logging, where log trucks load their own logs, which are almost all the same size and length.
If they had to go to thinning projects, where logs are all different shapes and sizes, they would have to make costly changes. A change to uneven-aged management would cause all sorts of economic changes, too. I’m sure that much has already changed, since I last worked there about 20 years ago.
Even-aged management is kind of in the DNA here and in my opinion, it has led, at least in part, to the problems today. For decades, thinning down to 80 BA was standard practice. Little overstory removal occurred over that time. This led to a scarcity of age class diversity. This type of management did not help with the mountain pine beetle epidemic, during which there was a transition to thinning to 40 BA. In 2018, and EIS was implemented that authorized 180,000 acres of overstory removal. This was a knee jerk reaction to not doing hardly any overstory removal for decades. So, the even-aged management continues. There has been some uneven-aged management over the years but there has not really been wide-spread acceptance of it. With the current state of the forest, there are fewer and fewer options of any kind to properly manage it.
Ain’t nothing wrong with even aged management Dave, there is something wrong with “departure” above ASQ for too many years. Also, (Sharon, you may have insight on this) in my time in the Planning shop, some of the longer-termed folks said the ASQ was set at an attainable level too high for non-declining even flow.
Even aged management has been the workhorse for Region 8 (USFS) for 60+ years, and Forests are still growing more than harvest levels; and that’s including mortality!
BHNF was cutting more than growth plus mortality, losing suitable and “standard” component acres, and those cumulative effects finally came home to roost! This should have been nipped in the bud in 2016, but the politics, industry tantrums and Agency egos just carried too much weight! And now, we have a mess…..
Here’s what I heard from (some) retired folks after I left.. the Forest was allowed (or whatever the right term is) departure (from ASQ, from non-declining even flow?) because they needed to thin out stands to make them more beetle-resistant, and also salvage BB trees (? don’t know if salvage counts in all this).
But the Forest never went back to the previous ASQ and didn’t adjust it to compensate for the departure. I don’t know why. Maybe Dave does.
Another thing I don’t know is whether the ASQ needed to be adjusted at all to harvest more, or they could just go above the ASQ anyway. Others around are more expert on this.
Here is how I remember what happened. For several years, we were cutting above ASQ to address the mountain pine beetle epidemic. We should have requested permission from the RO for departure of the ASQ, but that never happened. It was discussed, but we never actually requested that. Nobody from the RO ever questioned us on that either, that I remember.
Before my time, but after the Jasper Fire (80,000 acres on a 1.2-million-acre forest) there were some that were saying the Forest Plan should have been amended at that time to adjust the ASQ lower. Probably should have but it didn’t happen. The Jasper Fire area was the best timber ground in the Southern Hills.
Jim Furnish was deputy chief of the US Forest Service from 1999 to 2002 and believes all the fuel treatments in the area before the Jasper Fire were entirely ineffective in preventing the blaze.
According to Todd Pechota, a retired forest fire management officer for the Black Hills National Forest who responded to the Jasper Fire, the next megafire in the Black Hills is just a matter of when.
[Custer County Chronicle]
It’s the view of this interested party that Janice Stevenson is a scapegoat for decades of land management failures endemic to South Dakota politics and to the Republican supermajority that coddles Jim Neiman.
Larry, With all due respect to Jim, he is not an authority on fuel treatments nor the Jasper Fire. One good thing about being retired is that we can focus on folks’ arguments and not on their formal positions, current or former.
Given some information I probably shouldn’t have known, the ASQ question was discussed between FS and industry, way before the MPB epidemic was in full swing. Industry and FS made a deal (most likely informally) on increasing ASQ until the epidemic started to wane. Everyone agreed, hands shook, then industry reneged on backing down ASQ. From what I understand, the Chiefs office was fully engaged (as they should have been) for the entire process. I could go on with some opinion but I’ll leave this here…..
So if we try to put your and Dave’s stories together.. there is a sense in which an ASQ can be raised in agreements with industry, but not formalized via any documents, either on the Forest or in the RO? So maybe it’s not a formal ASQ, but rather an agreement about timber sale volumes that is not formalized?
ASQ is a decadal figure, so year-to-year variation is expected. If what was discussed here was going over ASQ for a decade, that would probably violate NFMA unless there was a proper public process (probably a plan amendment). (I say “probably violate” because the departure provisions of NFMA apply to the planning process rather then scorekeeping afterwards, but did the Black Hills forest plan have a plan standard tied to ASQ that was violated?)
I always expected ASQ to be revisited periodically as part of monitoring, which would have allowed some kind of analysis of where things were for a decade, but I don’t think that happened often. I think most forestsI knew about were cutting less than their ASQ on a yearly basis so this didn’t really need to come up. The Lolo NF did attempt to do a plan amendment to reduce it’s ASQ based on new information, but they did not get support from higher levels to do so.
Yes, I am aware of the decadal factor. As I understand it, since the Forest Plan was revised in 1997, you go by decades from there. So, from 2007 to 2016, The BHNF did exceed ASQ. The point is, we knew we would but nothing formal was done about it. Truth be told, nobody gave two figs about the issue. I really don’t remember anyone expressing any concern about it, with the exception of the Forest Silviculturist. The timber industry said we owed them that extra for being below ASQ in the first decade.
I was not familiar with agreement that Jim discusses, however it does not surprise me. I was not in the loop on a lot of the higher up conversations. There were a lot of discussions that went on between the RO and the timber industry that left the Forest out.
Sharon, I think it was documented in some form, I don’t see those magnitude of agreements being “willy nilly”. There was some very interesting communications going on, I know the Forest was not involved in except for the Sup. I believe the political faction to manage (?) the situation caused the failure in supporting the original agreement. I never saw such agreement, but I told it did exist.
Be that as it may, the blame for the mess on The Hills is tied directly to industry backing out of their part of the bargain.
I’m confused, what was industry’s “part of the bargain”?
More volume, much more volume! Those mills underwent millions of dollars of upgrades to increase production. The old “I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine” hoodwink…..
Last year’s USFS Senate budget hearing (link below) suggests that the timber industry’s influence on politicians is nation-wide. And it’s not just timber–the politicians also want to help other commercial interests that exploit the national forests for subsidized profit. The hearing makes it clear that politicians, not scientists, run the USFS. Here’s the link:
https://www.fs.usda.gov/inside-fs/delivering-mission/excel/chief-moore-testimony-april-18
Also: Politicians wrote most of the laws that they complain about today. Many politicians repeat the conspiracy theories they hear from their constituents, while dismissing site-specific conditions and legal realities.
Jake, why would you expect that “scientists” would run any government agency? They are part of the Executive Branch of government, and the leadership is from the party that wins the Presidential election. And Congress is also full of elected officials who do whatever.
How do you determine how much the Treasury should get to adequately compensate the FS for commercial use?
I see this becoming an issue in other places within the next 10 years. When I look at the 5 year plans for several dry western forests that currently have timber programs and access to mills, there isn’t much left. Staff have confirmed that they have only a few of viable projects left to plan across entire forests and then they are done. The loggers and industry wont disappear when these projects are done and you can bet your britches that they’ll be pounding their fists on the supervisor’s desk demanding more wood, just like they are in the Black Hills.
The other issue with this is these forests rely almost exclusively on commercial to complete and fund fuels treatments. Their ability to plan and implement anything but projects dominated by commercial has not been demonstrated. This is why it is so important to get alternative fuels treatment methods planned now, as well as starting to actually implement the alternative methods at scale.
Can you be more specific about where you are talking about? I don’t see that happening around here.