Tuesday News Roundup: Links, Insurance, Funding and Partners

Obviously there are many interesting things going on right now, not all of which can be covered here.

We’ll start with my favorite quote of last week, from Andy Stahl in an E&E News article about the Timber EO. Extra points for the Kohelet reference!

Stahl said he thinks the emergency designation is overblown.

“There’s nothing new under the sun happening out in the woods,” Stahl said. “Forests burn, insects thrive.”

Fixing Broken Links:
Last week I mentioned that the links to the projects websites from the SOPAs seemed to be broken. I contacted the Press Office (not knowing the address of the Tech Office) and they said
“Our system nationwide switched to a new platform this week, and we’re working on broken links. If you check back next week and they are still not working, please send us the links.” So please let me know of any broken links in the comments, probably best after Wednesday or so, to give them a chance to fix.

Wildfire Insurance

The Hotshot Wakeup interviewed Michael Wara of Stanford, an expert in the wildfire/insurance space.  Interesting interview, and Wara explains that that plethora of wildfire risk maps have to do with what exactly they are used for.

Idaho Forest Industry Web Map

Thanks to University of Idaho Extension!

Scott Fitzwilliams, White River National Forest Supervisor Resigns

These stories reminded me of when Scott first came to the Region from California. He was shocked by how little funding his forest got for their work, compared to California forests.  I’ve always wondered about that, and whether national cuts are always cutting from the Big Timber days, so Regions with formerly Big Timber programs still get relatively more bucks.   I wonder if anyone has ever taken the current roads, trails, campgrounds, ski areas, and dispersed use and looked across the country and seen the differences in funding (and wondered why that was so).

There were many articles, but I thought I’d pick this one from the Colorado Sun:

The White River National Forest — with its 11 major ski areas, eight wilderness areas and four reservoirs — regularly hosts more than 17 million visitors a year. The forest supports more than 22,000 jobs, with forest-dependent workers in its communities — like Aspen, Breckenridge, Carbondale, Eagle, Glenwood Springs, Meeker, Rifle and Vail — earning $960 million a year, according to the Forest Service’s economic analysis of its top 111 properties. The forest’s annual impact of $1.6 billion in its communities ranks as the highest in the agency.

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He recently began speaking up about the need to better fund a forest that produces so much for its communities, calling on federal lawmakers to pass the Ski Hills Resources for Economic Development Act — or the SHRED Act — which would allow forests to retain as much as 75% of the fees paid by ski areas in their boundaries.

The White River’s ski areas — like Beaver Creek, Breckenridge, Copper Mountain, Keystone, Snowmass and Vail — send the federal treasury more than $20 million a year as revenue-based rent for public lands. The SHRED Act would allow the White River to keep as much as $17 million of that, which would almost return the forest’s annual budget to where it was in the late 2000s, before wildfire costs ravaged the agency’s disbursements to individual forests.

“We see all this economic activity and money flowing out of the forest but none is flowing back in. This forest, it’s a machine and it’s a producer for us,” Fitzwilliams told The Sun in 2022. “It’s really taking care of us and it’s really giving us a lot. Maybe it’s time to give back.”

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This is a very interesting interview by Zeke Lunder of the Lookout, with  Tanya Torst, who was a partnership coordinator apparently hired to help with partnerships for fuel treatment projects. She has a fairly unusual background for a new hire, so it’s interesting to get her perspective.

 Tanya brought a unique perspective to her new job, trying to get things done within a large bureaucracy staffed largely by people without a business background.

Tanya has a MBA from Chico State, a Master’s Degree in Organizational Leadership from Gonzaga University, and a Bachelor of Science Degree in Business Management from Marylhurst University.

Here’s a sample:

Zeke Lunder 

Why is that? Why is why is the Forest Service lost so much capacity? Why is it so hard for them to get work done?

Tanya Torst 

Yeah, that’s a good question. Part of it is because Congress does not give them enough money to to hire and even pay our people last year because of the continuing resolution last fiscal year, fiscal year 24 there was, it was very it was a big struggle. We had to stop expense, any expenses. I. Um, we couldn’t do travel to do our work done. I’m not talking about fun travel. I’m talking about travel to get work done. We it. We just couldn’t pay our own bills. And with the continuing resolution of this year, we couldn’t even buy toilet paper. I mean, it’s ridiculous. And you know, we’re talking about forest supervisors, and everyone’s like, Well, looks like, you know, office folks are going to be doing cleaning toilets, and that’s okay, you know what? I think all of us are fine with doing that. We don’t have an issue with that. I, I was on a call with one of the forests, and the question was, how do we keep track of everything when we have four to five different jobs to do where one person is doing the work of four to five people or trying to they’re honestly, some of them are not getting paid over time. No one’s getting paid overtime. It’s like it’s so hard to get anything done. And then I’m gonna just bring it up. NEPA is challenging…

At the time, it sounds like the federal funding was stopped. But various partners are now hiring for positions formerly done by employees, so perhaps the taps are back on? For some but not all? What do folks know about this?