As you know, Dave Mertz and I have FOIAd the Keystone Agreements and relevant SPAs and required annual reports. It’s possible that some of those bucks (as far as we know hundreds of millions have been obligated) have gone to communications people to provide info on where and how the funding is being spent.
Any Keystone grantee is free to send me any info they have generated. The grantees I’ve contacted have not been forthcoming, and have generally answered “ask the Forest Service.” Since I think it would be important to be accountable and transparent, so when the FS returns to Congress asking for more bucks, they will have a good case to present, the whole thing is a tad mysterious.
I did run across this one by NFWF; not sure that that the FS chunk of funding ($58 mill) is part of the Keystone agreement with NFWF, but it seems likely.
It seems like there’s a great deal of planning in this work, which is necessary, of course, but as we know litigation may delay implementation, so hopefully the grantees won’t need further funding to implement projects somewhere down the road. Because it seems to me that employees, especially temporaries’, work can be flexed as the FS needs change, and if there are grants but not employees, flexibility could be lost. Not that the FS intended to fund one and not the other, and we’ll see when appropriators get back to work.
Things are getting curiouser and curiouser. Good find on this with NFWF. This is actually just a small part of the puzzle. Will we ever get all that we requested with the FOIA? Who knows? I really have my doubts. I have experience with FS FOIA’s where they just blow you off. In those cases, I guess you have to get a lawyer’s help to make it happen.
It’s clear to me that they don’t want to be transparent on where all the money went with Keystone and maybe other grants. If they are proud of all that has been accomplished through the Keystone agreements, they sure aren’t getting that info out there. Now we see where they got the FS deficit down to $50 million from $750 million. Part of this occurred with Trust Funds. They are called Trust Funds for a reason. There is particular direction on how they can be used. They are not there to bail out bad decision making. How did this all happen and is this something that can stand up to scrutiny?
Litigation hasn’t been a big problem in the Sierra Nevada National Forests, regarding their ‘thinning from below’ projects. Will an increased “pace and scale” be part of a future lawsuit? I think it is likely, but also, likely to lose in court. Does the Forest Service have the personnel for more thinning projects? Probably not, with a limited amount of timber folks.
For the ignorant and curious (like me) – apparently the legislative authorities for this date back to 2005-1977, so what is new here? Just the amount of money?
I think what is new here is the unprecedented amount of money. NWTF has an agreement worth $50 million and NFF has something like $60 million. There are numerous other agreements, and we really don’t know how much money is involved. The FS has never had this kind of money to put into agreements like this. Combine that with an almost complete lack of transparency and an agency that is experiencing a serious deficit, and I guess I think the Agency is in uncharted territory. And, virtually no one in the press or in Congress seems to be the slightest bit interested.