Challenges:
I would also argue that one reason the agency is stagnating is due to the administrative burden from a pile of well intentioned but ultimately expensive and time consuming mandates, both from executive orders and from policy. The FS is forced to practice the most heavily scrutinized forest management on planet earth. Carbon studies, climate change studies, old growth studies, bat conservation strategies, transportation analysis processes, NEPA, NHPA, ESA, NFMA/forest planning rule…. well, it’s a long list. That administrative review burden has increased while our staffing has been flat or declining. We are asked to do more and more project level assessments but are not given the staff and the funding to do the work. So that’s less of a lack of decision making at the district and forest level, and more of a process paralysis where it takes several years to plan a set of statistically significant management treatments.
Hard to do prescribed fire in places, population density, continuity of fuels at FS/suburban boundary. People not accepting smoke in the air.
This reminds me of working on Process Predicament in the 2000s.. ? There’s no end to putting more layers on the plate without streamlining or taking anything off the plate.
Ideas:
- Steady, thoughtful shift of personnel and money back to the district level – budget centralization has placed both the money and power at the WO and RO levels, largely at the expense of the field-going units.
- Modernize the $2,500 service contracting cap. AKA the McNamara-O’Hara Service Contract Act of 1965 (!!!) established a $2,500 cap for spending without going through the contracting process. To keep up with inflation, in today’s dollars that would be a little north of $25,000! One reason our contracting processes are so fouled up and slow is that we’re clogging things up based on nearly 60 year old limits.
- While I hate charging the public fees to use public lands, the reality is that we don’t have the money to maintain them at current appropriations, so we need a new system beyond the RAC (recreation advisory committee) to approve sites as fee areas. People who use the National Forests for recreation are benefiting from below cost recreation – with no outrage from the environmental community as with below-cost timber sales.
- A CE category that would allow us to use herbicides. They’re cheap, effective, and when used legally, environmentally safe. We shouldn’t have to do an EA to do a hack and squirt treatment to restore native vegetation, control NNIS, release stands from grape vines, etc.
I’ve heard from a couple of different forests in different regions about CEs for herbicides. I also think that appropriate charging for recreation might be better than concessionaires charging. The concessionaires I deal with are all great folks and do nice work, but trying to get information can be difficult (write and never hear). Perhaps the “provision of recreation services” needs to be looked at and various options considered.
There are definitely issues with contracting that have led to the FS granting out contracting and inspection to NGOs. I don’t know whether the cap is the entire problem, I suspect there are more.
Other ideas?
Field folks who don’t want to comment here can email me at sharon at forestpolicypub.com.
Another couple items: where are all the local employees? Consolidations and downsizing have closed, or emptied, so many offices that once defined the FS! We have a local office here in Arkansas that was once a bustling activity that covered all disciplines. It is now only open to the public by appointment and has two employees. The local office in Colorado is now a shell of its former self, probably less than half the employees that were there ten years ago! Where’d everybody go?
The same thing as evaporating employees is the loss of these local RD’s; that was also a definition of the old FS and it may just be time to go back to actually serving the public.
LE&I: put them back to forest operations! Stop “policing” the highways, looking for dope or a bad guy behind every corner. Do more firewood checks, rec checks, put them in Wilderness areas for dog (and fire, and camping) compliance!
I like the idea of raising the purchase card limit to $25,000, sensible!
The biggest contracting success I’ve seen is the Land Management Integrated Resources (LMIR, pronounced ‘lemur’) contracting team. They’ve been awesome to work with, substantially faster, more risk-tolerant, and incredibly easy to work with compared to our usually contracting teams. Because of how their BPA is structured there is much more competition and lower costs than our usual IDIQ. They actually have a forester as their contract specialist which makes a huge difference since we all can speak the same language. But I think their biggest strength is the culture of their group—they’re actually focused on being productive, willing to accept some risk, and aren’t sticklers for every trivial detail/paperwork that normally bogs things down.
T. for those of us not familiar, what do they actually do? LMIR, that is. Find people or other organizations to do work? https://www.highergov.com/document/lmir-bpa-preadvertisement-pdf-8e277b/ I think it would be helpful for the rest of us to understand how it works. Thanks!