List of Forest Service Research Facilities to be Kept and Those to Be Closed

Within hours of the previous post in which I quoted Chris French using Stoneville as an example and Alex Friend agreeing..and my pointing out that it had been on the block intermittently for probably 30 years..

“as much as I think everybody loves the Stoneville research site in Mississippi, there’s 14 buildings there and we staff it with four people. I have to manage our facilities somehow. And unfortunately, R&D has more examples like that than others. I’ve got a district ranger office that is leased in that Stoneville site right up the road. We’re looking at it right now. Is it better to move that district ranger office to Stoneville and use the facilities there or invest in a better office for essentially the district ranger’s office and move the four people in Stoneville there? That’s what we mean by evaluating. “

someone sent me the list, and Stoneville is retained. Here’s what the Chief said:

Forest Service Chief Tom Schultz emphasized the closures and consolidations will not result in any forced staff reductions and that work will continue without interruption.

“This announcement reflects our commitment to retain the staff our mission requires while responsibly reducing our facilities costs. Local facility consolidation will help us put more of our funding toward mission delivery and cutting-edge research, rather than brick and mortar we no longer need. This puts us on a sustainable path, retains our employees, and ensures we have the right geographic distribution of labs and duty stations across the agency. And importantly, this produces more than $8.8 million in annual lease savings and more than $8 million in deferred maintenance savings – ensuring American taxpayers receive the maximum value for every dollar entrusted to us,” added Chief Schultz.

Here’s a link to the lists.

My question is, for example, Placerville has an SO, a nursery, and the Institute of Forest Genetics.  The plan (I think) is for a State Office to be there as well. Do we know what groups will be in what buildings yet? Does this table mean that researchers will continue to be located at research facilities and no matter how few employees are there the facilities won’t close, or maybe other people will move in? Maybe there’s another layer to all of this that locals would be interested in.

I’m assuming that we could probably infer from these closures and where other FS facilities are located within the commuting area, where these folks are likely to go. But again, it might be nice for the FS to publish where people are going.