It really makes you feel old when people you knew as young sprouts are retiring. Happy Retirement, Jennifer, if you are reading this!
Marc Heller of E&E News had a story today about people retiring and changing positions.
The most recent to announce their departures are Leanne Marten in the Northern Region, which covers parts of five states from Idaho to the Dakotas, and Jennifer Eberlien in the Pacific Southwest Region, covering California.
The retirements come as other reshufflings shake up the Forest Service in the new administration. Deputy Chief Chris French has been named acting associate chief — the agency’s second-in-charge — and Keith Lannom has left after serving as a deputy regional forester and associate acting chief for the national forest system, among other titles, according to a Forest Service employee familiar with staff moves.
I’ve heard of associate chiefs and acting associate chiefs, but never “associate acting chief for NFS.” Maybe someone can explain whether this is a new position, and what the role is, for us retirees and others.
But what’s really interesting about the story are the different views of folks about Regional Office reduction. Many of us have been there and done that, at least talked about it, on previous iterations. As I recall, the proposals always foundered on the shoals of local politicians wanting to keep the positions. But today, since Portland, the Bay Area, and Denver all have serious housing crises, maybe they would be happy to see fewer commuters on the roads?
At the Forest Service, that could involve paring back the Washington headquarters as well as staff at the nine regional offices, according to proposals circulating among agency employees and described to E&E News. Such a realignment would put more management decisions for national forests at the local level, an approach in line with the administration’s overall approach. Whether the administration and the new Forest Service chief, Tom Schultz, decide maintaining the regional forest setup fits the policy remains to be seen.
Regional foresters already serve that purpose in many ways, said Char Miller, an associate professor of policy and government at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, who’s studied Forest Service history. Without regional foresters, the power at the Forest Service would probably shift in the opposite direction the administration endorses — and toward Washington — Miller said. “Getting rid of the regional foresters would be a major example of that,” Miller said. Consolidating regions isn’t unprecedented, as Region 7 in the East was wrapped into two other regions in 1965. But that’s the most recent example.
In 2007, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) asked the Forest Service to estimate the cost of running regional offices. The agency at that time put the cost at $224 million a year, according to a paper by Andy Kerr, an environmental consultant in Oregon who runs the Larch Co. Kerr called for regional offices to be eliminated, which he said would put more control in still-more-local hands.
So Char Miller and Andy Kerr see it differently. If we go to Andy K’s paper.
Budget reductions have forced the Forest Service to share rangers and other staff between ranger districts and merge national forests for administrative purposes. Yet, no Forest Service regional office has been eliminated or merged since 1965. Forest Service regional offices should not be merged or preserved, but eliminated entirely. Little conservation good is generated out of regional offices. The private sector has essentially eliminated middle management. Necessary functions now performed by the regional offices could be transferred to the national forest level, Washington Office level or the Albuquerque Service Center.
Unnecessary functions currently assigned to the regional offices could be eliminated with cost savings used for other purposes—preferably on-the-ground management at the national forest and ranger district level.
I’ll just say that many employees’ experiences with various administrative centralization efforts at Albuquerque and elsewhere at the time did not make us want to say”more service centers, please!”
Here’s Kerr’s last paragraph:
Does getting rid of Forest Service regional offices also mean the elimination of regional foresters? It might or might not. A case can be made to retain regional foresters to coordinate national forests facing similar “regional” issues. However, existing regional boundaries have little to do with geography, ecology or politics. For example, the Northwest Forest Plan (covering an area that is approximately the range of the northern spotted owl) spans parts of two Forest Service regions. In this case, there is a benefit to regional coordination between national forests. These new regional coordinating relationships should be flexible and based on current and emerging ecological and political needs, rather than based on a tradition or arbitrary administrative boundaries.
I didn’t see a date on Kerr’s paper; I suppose it could have been written any time in the last 30 years or so.
What seems to be missing from th e E&E story are the views of anyone who has ever worked in an RO, or been a Regional Forester.
I’ve been involved in many kerfuffles between Forests and DC as a Regional Planning Director. I’ll just take one example, during the Obama Admin. The Bighorn had a shovel-ready project for ARRA funding to move some campsites in a campground, which got funded (hurray!). But it turned out later that other political entities at the FS were concerned about the fact that part of the rerouting (to protect the watershed) was in a roadless area (not so fast, Forest!). So it had to be reviewed. Of course the RO backed the Forest, and we wrote briefing papers that laid out the issue. Could the Bighorn have done the briefings themselves? Yes, of course. Conceivably the centralized Planning Experts Service Center could have helped them and reviewed it. Not every Forest could afford their own Roadless Geek. Did our Regional Forester (Rick Cables’) personal relationships with higher-ups make them listen to him more (or less? who knows?). Clearly, the Chief and Associates and Deputies can’t have the same kinds of relationships with 154 Forest Supervisors as they do with 9 RFs. It seems like perhaps having 154 Supes would make the recommendation of the relevant WO Director mean more to the Deputy Chief, but then many issues cross WO Directorships. Maybe there are other models out there somewhere?
Or a goal could be to harmonize with BLM and have State Directors, perhaps non SES, which could foster better “all lands” kinds of efforts and coordinate better with states. For example, Wyoming currently has to deal with two Regions of the Forest Service. Maybe BLM has some insights into the importance of that middle layer and how it works for them, of course, given that their organization is different and has a political director.
If the intention were to support local decisions (which our RO was in the habit of doing), can we think of a workaround with no RFs and functional service centers for the expertise? Ground folks have been concerned about the new budget system leading to decisions being made in the RO; with no ROs would the budget system have to be reinvented?
Please add your thoughts and experiences below. Finally, we are still interested in seeing and discussing those proposals currently circulating,
The regions once had, formally at least, a forest planning role, though that role has since atrophied. But in any event, someone thought regions were a good idea at some point. Who was that, and why?
(Steen’s FS history, or at least the index, makes no mention of the regions.)
There are a lot of under appreciated functions at ROs that make work possible on the ground. GIS data management, housing Lidar data, developing data collection protocols, data reports programs, certification programs, etc. These are all functions that don’t make sense on the individual Forest-level, and the service would almost certainly degrade if centralized at the national level.
The comparison to ABQ is a good one: no one likes how HR centralization went, so why would RO centralization be any different?
I do wonder about combining certain regions. Several functions are already shared between R1 and R4, for example. I could see merging 6 & 10, 1 & 4 (& 2?), 3 & 5, and maybe 8 & 9. This could potentially streamline/reduce duplicate positions, but we’d still have a more responsive local level to handle those middle-management functions.
And the other piece is seriously review each RO during a RIF and weed out the many people who ‘fail upwards’ into cushy, unimportant jobs. There are lots of stories of people with sexual harassment allegations or poor performance or just total lack of motivation who get moved into well-paid RO jobs because it’s easier to put them out of sight there instead of actually firing them. They of course are a small minority, but it makes sense for close scrutiny of middle management positions and ‘fail upwards’ people are a good place to start.
Your post made me think about many centralized functions that work well. Your suggestions about combining regions is worth more discussion. We’ll have some more posts to talk about this in depth.
Didn’t someone have to invent them in the first place? And does that reason no longer exist?
I’m going to reveal my ignorance about this organizational stuff, but I have wondered why not eliminate the SOs? Give all the public contact and field work to the districts and centralize the specialist, analysis and administrative support. RO support could be zoned to fit any circumstances where a group of districts warranted that. I suppose there’s the technicality that national forests have legally “proclaimed” boundaries, but is that a real-world problem? (I assume there’s a district office in every location where there is an SO, so nowhere would lose the agency.) No agenda here – just curious. (Full disclosure, I spent 3/4 of my career in an RO, so let ‘er rip you SO fans.)
I’ve been a Recreation and Wilderness program manager on a district for 22 years in R4. I can’t recall a time when I or many of my immediate colleagues had anything positive to say about many of the Regionals. Oh, individually I’ve had many solid working relationships that seemed to function as intended but the majority of the time it has seemed like the RO’s just been a major interfering pain in the ass. For the past 15 years now it’s gotten worse, with unresponsive, non-supportive staff at the RO doing who knows what, the Regions taking their cut of the budget for pet projects and doling out pittances to the Forests for budgets. For example, GAOA! One RO engineer got it in his head he wanted to be the guy with the big dollar prize project so he and he alone slapped a concept together for all of the back country airstrips in the region to get a massive upgrade. He operated in a black box of his own design, somehow got the funding then got in touch with the folks on the ground who actually managed and maintain many of these airstrips. Turns out not every single airstrip needed high dollar work like his project called for. Three years later we’re still attempting to sort out his mess and a year after this reality hit he left the Regional Office and handed his problem off to the next person up who ended up being some guy on a Forest within the Region.
We often say that the role of the Region is to facilitate the work on the Forests but in practice it seems more like roadblock due to power mongering or due to pet projects or interference due to egos who want credit or fear driven agendas masquerading as priorities such as the wildfire crisis strategy, which is now being wordsmithed.
Every few years the new Admin with help of the WO/RO rolls out a new shiny ball priority with an unfunded mandate for Recreation. Think 10-year Wilderness Stewardship Challenge. There has never been a well funded, direct focus on Recreation in my entire career. A few years ago Recreation seemed to be getting it’s due with a National program called Recreation as a Priority…we had hopes this would provide more manpower and more funding. It didn’t get a good rollout and a few years in many of us hadn’t heard bupkus, then things started to happen. We were standing up the temp to perm concept when it got entirely subsumed by every other resource area and before you knew it there was a massive hiring effort occurring forest service wide.
However due to it being wide open and less focused on recreation, it turned into a massive financial crisis.
The simple fact that the RO staff and budget officers didn’t draw a line in the sand and instead willingly walked the agency into this situation still blows my mind. Zero accountability.
The RO has played a pivotal role in setting all the Forests priorities including how fleet is administered. But now fleet eats 75% of my forest budget!! We can’t even right size rigs to programs because fleet is what we’re told by the RO. Its enough to make one sick. Now we currently face the new administration and the slapdash directives, terminations/reinstatements of the boots on the ground and a freeze on all external communication. Forest level EAs are being briefed all the way up to the WO and Dept level in order to determine if “controversy” exists and the project is alignment with the administrations goals. Insanity has peaked and I can’t see how the Regional Office does anything but make matters worse. They are currently tight lipped and not sharing any information about the coming RIF either.
I’m certainly not advocating for the dissolution of the Regional offices, but a hard look at performance and steering new expectations and standards would be welcome. I’m all for fixing what’s broke and solving problems, I’m a recreation practitioner, that’s what we do! But I don’t support a bull in a china shop approach either.
If it is anything like the research side, the RO has no input into the RIF or if they try it is rebuffed, literally don’t tell us about this or we’ll need to take it into account. My read is that the RIF is being handled solely at the WO, agency or DOGE level with little to no input from below. That
RO supports the field and can provide guidance to ensure consistency, where appropriate, in addressing regional issues. RO also provides services that aren’t practical at local levels, like broad scale monitoring, training, and strategy.
Could you give more specific examples? For example, I don’t remember any “broad scale monitoring.” I’m suspecting that different Regions may operate differently in terms of what they do, and their “handsoffishness” where Forests are concerned.
A “broader scale monitoring strategy” is required of RFs by 36 CFR §219.12(b). (Post-my career and I don’t think I’ve seen anything labeled this.) The Planning Rule also requires RFs to designate species of conservation concern.
Maybe the FS should look at “regulations we’re not actually doing” and try to get rid of them. They got rid of the RPA Program (when I worked there) and no one complained and that was required by Congress..
ROs provide coordination, broader perspective and representation and increased efficiency of shared resources to address phenomena that is expressed across broad geographic scales and time intervals. For example, individual forests are not equipped to implement assisted migration. The production and procurement of the appropriate seed supply across multiple forests needs to be coordinated at the regional to national level. This is just one example of the function that ROs provide.