andystahl

Add together the structures lost to every national forest wildland fire this year and their sum would be a rounding error compared to the more than 1,500 2,000 3,500 5,700 7,000 8,400 homes and businesses lost in the on-going Napa Valley fires.

Radical environmentalists are being blamed for the devastation: “White wine-swilling San Francisco liberal elites created the conditions that fueled these catastrophic fires,” explained a House Natural Resources committee spokesman.

Nearby federal wilderness areas remain unaffected.

[Satire alert!]

New Forest Service Chief Tony Tooke announced today that the Forest Service is unrolling “bold moves we will make throughout the agency to help our employees improve our ability to do more work on the ground, deliver more results and live up to our responsibility for sound land stewardship.” The new planning and analysis tactics will be announced next week at a Phoenix workshop attended by over 200 Forest Service leaders. These “innovations [will] demonstrate ways to significantly reduce costs and the time it takes for us to do this work, while delivering safe, high quality outcomes—with meaningful results that honor our stewardship responsibilities.”

The Forest Service’s Phoenix workshop comes at a time when some members of Congress believe that changes in environmental laws are needed. It appears Chief Tooke and his leadership team believe that the Forest Service already has the tools needed to get the job done.

Here is the complete text of Chief Tooke’s all-employees email:’

From: FS-Office of the Chief
Sent: Thursday, September 21, 2017 5:03 AM
To: FS-All FS
Subject: ***MESSAGE FROM THE CHIEF***Employees Invited to Participate via Live Stream in National Workshop on Environmental Analysis and Decision-making

Next week more than 200 leaders from around the country will convene in Phoenix, AZ, for a national workshop aimed at initiating Forest Service-wide reform of our environmental analysis and decision-making processes.

We invite you to join us via live streaming for the opening and closing sessions of the Environmental Analysis and Decision Making workshop, which brings together professionals from every level of the organization. It will result in bold moves we will make throughout the agency to help our employees improve our ability to do more work on the ground, deliver more results and live up to our responsibility for sound land stewardship.

The Workshop takes place Monday-Thursday, September 26-28. You can join 8 a.m.-noon Pacific Time Tuesday, September 26, for the opening session and 2:15-4:15 p.m. Pacific Time Thursday, September 28, for the closing session. (See instructions below)

The National Leadership Council and I will participate in portions of the session. Participants will draw on more than 30 years of experience of completing environmental analyses and making sound decisions. This includes learning from innovative efforts taking place in various units of these agency. These innovations demonstrate ways to significantly reduce costs and the time it takes for us to do this work, while delivering safe, high quality outcomes—with meaningful results that honor our stewardship responsibilities. Now is the time to apply these innovations nation-wide.

This gathering serves as a critical next step toward a collective shift for the Forest Service. The timing is right: A confluence of factors—including a back log of needed mission critical work, a need for increased employee capacity, land conditions calling for extensive forest restoration, and increased expectations for the agency to deliver services—have come together to create an urgency for change. To be successful, we will need support and commitment from all employees. I am asking you to participate in this change that will advance our commitment to citizens we serve and lands we steward.

I am personally committed to keeping this effort moving forward; I am working right alongside you to get it done. We look forward to your workshop participation—in person or live stream–and thank you for the commitment to our work ahead to improve results to sustain healthy, resilient and productive forests.

Live Steam Broadcasts:

Opening Session: 8 a.m-12 Noon, Pacific Time, Tuesday September 26
Closing Session: 2:15-4:15 pm. Pacific Thursday, September 28.

To connect to the live stream, please click on the link below:

http://fsweb.wo.fs.fed.us/nfs/live.html

Helpful advice:
· Because of bandwidth limitations, every unit should attend from a central location if at all possible.

· Confirm your system has the most recent version of Adobe Flash player appropriate for your computer.

Chief Tony Tooke

The Columbia River Gorge’s Eagle Creek Fire will be history as about 5 inches of rain are forecast to fall within the next several days. Tongue-in-cheek, we can calculate the ecosystem service value of rain by analyzing the avoided cost of an alternative delivery vehicle — the Global Supertanker.

Five inches of rain delivered across the Eagle Creek Fire’s 48,387 acres is 6.6 billion gallons. The Supertanker can dump about 20,000 gallons per sortie, and, if a sufficient airfield is nearby, can perform about seven sorties per day at a daily rate of $250,000 (note that these calculations are for dumping water, not retardant, which would add a couple of bucks per gallon to the cost). It would take the Supertanker about 47,000 days to dump the equivalent of 5 inches of rain at a cost of $10 billion and change.

Ahh, blissful, beautiful, cheap free rain!

Regular readers know that the U.S. Forest Service’s firefighting expenses just keep going up. Some believe that a dramatic decline in federal land logging over the past 30 years is the reason. Others say long-term cycles of drought, while some blame increasing number of wildland/urban interface homes.

If federal land logging policies are to blame for rising firefighting costs, why have Cal Fire’s costs skyrocketed, too? Cal Fire provides fire protection services across 31 million acres in California, including over 7 million acres of private timberland, e.g., Sierra Pacific’s timberland holdings. Cal Fire doesn’t pay the freight for federal land fires.

On September 1 31, the federal government’s fiscal year clock turned over from FY17 to 18. The numbers year-to-date are now in.

The Forest Service spent $1.75 billion of its regular $1.89 billion firefighting appropriation. No FLAME funds spent. No borrowing.

What? How is that possible? Turns out that when the boss says “we ain’t gonna borrow no more,” the can-do FS figures out how to get the job done.

Which is a good thing. Should there ever be another regular appropriation (the government is running on a continuing resolution, as it has seemingly forever), there may not be the “fire funding fix” that some western legislators covet. Hurricanes may stretch Congress’ tolerance for disaster funding to its max.

Will up-date after 9/31!

Cross-laminated timber (CLT) technology makes large construction panels from low-value lumber. The panels can be used to build floors, walls and roofs for buildings up to about 16 stories, which is substantially taller than possible using ordinary lumber and plywood. The Forest Service has been shoveling money to study CLT properties and uses, hoping to create a market for national forest small-diameter wood, of which the Forest Service has a lot.

A recent Forest Service-funded study throws some cold water on the agency’s CLT bullishness. The “CLT Demand Study for the Pacific Northwest” authors are experts in econometric modeling, building codes, and wood products technology.

Two take-aways from the study. First, CLT, at best, will take a couple of decades to penetrate its narrow market niche. Second, even at full build-out, its use won’t make a dent in the available timber supply: “The predicted demand for softwood lumber to manufacture CLT panels represents less than 1% in the annual Pacific Northwest timber harvest.”

Today, a federal appeals court ruled that the U.S. Forest Service is liable for toxic waste clean-up costs from mining on national forest land. The appeals court remanded the case back to the district court to determine how much the Forest Service would have to pay of the $1 billion in clean-up costs associated with a single molybdenum mine in New Mexico. The case is the first to conclude that the 1872 Mining Act, which gives mineral claimants the right to mine federal land, does not relieve the Forest Service from its CERCLA (“Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act”) responsibility as landowner for the cost of cleaning up toxic wastes.

The unanimous opinion by Reagan, G.W. Bush and Clinton appointees, scolds the Forest Service for dereliction of its duty to regulate mining to avoid spendy clean-up costs:

There is no dispute that the United States held fee title to relevant portions of the Questa mining lands during the time of hazardous substance disposal, part of the area that today comprises the Questa Site. We do not doubt that it could have exercised greater powers, regulatory or otherwise, over the lands if it wanted to do so.

This decision could be a game changer. No longer can the Forest Service and BLM hide behind the 1872 Mining Act and ignore the environmental costs of the mining operations they approve on public lands. Just the existing liability for past mining waste could put a big dent in the Forest Service’s budget, which has a sum total of $0 appropriated for CERCLA clean-up costs.

From here on out, when the Forest Service approves surface occupancy plans for 1872 mining act claims, it had better look carefully at its clean-up liability. Under some scenarios, the Forest Service, as landowner, could be stuck with 100% of the clean-up costs.

In a case brought by FSEEE, a federal district court judge ruled that forest fires are emergencies; and, as such, firefighting actions are exempt from any form of NEPA documentation. FSEEE filed the case in response to concerns raised by Wenatchee national forest employees that a 30-mile long fuels break logged through spotted owl critical habitat and riparian corridors was unnecessary. The fire stopped six miles from the logged line when rain and snow put it out.

FSEEE will appeal.

Yesterday USDA Secretary Sonny Perdue made an unprecedented and necessary appearance before the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Interior, Environment and Related Agencies (the Forest Service is a “related agency”) to explain the Forest Service’s proposed FY 2018 budget. “Unprecedented” because never before had a USDA Secretary appeared before this subcommittee. “Necessary” because never before did a new administration have only one USDA political appointee in place by budget time.

Here are my takeaways from the hearing.

1) Secretary Perdue is glib and personable. He’s also an experienced and crafty politician who is not above fudging the numbers. When committee members challenged him on proposed steep cuts in the Forest Service’s budget, he replied that money to manage the national forest system would go up 16%. What he didn’t say is that this increase is due entirely to shifting over $350 million in fuels treatment from the wildland fire account to the national forest system account. Compared to FY 2017, the national forest system budget actually takes a 7.5% cut, as shown below:

2) Chief Tidwell will be looking for a new job. If Perdue’s body language towards the Chief wasn’t enough of a hint, a committee member thanked him for his years of service at the hearing’s end.

3) Senator Hubert Humphrey is feeling unsettled in his grave. Humphrey, the key architect of the National Forest Management Act, exhorted in 1976 that “The days have ended when the forest may be viewed only as trees and trees viewed only as timber.” Perdue said national forest trees are “crops.”

4) Congress doesn’t understand why or how the Forest Service got into its profligate wildfire spending mess. “Why” is because timber money dried up 25 years ago. “How” is because it can. The bureaucracy needs fire money to pay the agency’s overhead, aka, “cost pools.” Does Perdue get it? No. So far, he’s parroting former Secretary Vilsack’s plea for even more firefighting dollars.

The take-homes from Trump’s first Forest Service budget suggest a significant shift in how this administration views the Forest Service.

Timber sale levels will go down modestly. With the Forest Products line item funded at a no-change level of $360 million, I predict sale levels will remain below 3 billion board feet (notwithstanding a stated “target” of 3.2 bbf) and the increases under the Obama administration (from 2.5 bbf in 2008 to 2.9 bbf in 2016) will reverse due to cost inflation.

Former Secretary Vilsack’s “all lands” approach is dead. “All lands” called for “using all USDA resources and authorities, in collaboration with NRCS, to sustain the entire matrix of federal, state, tribal, county, municipal, and private forests.” Trump’s vision is narrower. To justify zeroing out Urban Forestry, Open Space Conservation, Forest Legacy, and the Collaborative Forest Restoration program, USDA’s “focus will be on the maintenance of the existing National Forest System lands.”

Law enforcement,, which is small potatoes in the Forest Service, is the only program area that sees a budget increase (2%) over last year. Most everything else (e.g., fish and wildlife, livestock, minerals) faces an 11% cut. Forest planning will slow even further, hard as that is to believe, as planning not only faces the same 11% cut, but has to fight with inventory and monitoring functions (which spend almost four times as much money) for its piece of a smaller pie. Insofar as planning makes policy, don’t expect any new ones anytime soon.

Hazardous fuels treatment faces a 7% cut and a sharper focus to treat “priority areas near communities that reduce risk to communities and firefighters and increase resilience of forests to catastrophic fire.” It’ll be interesting to see if managers get the message to stop wasting money treating fuels in the backcountry.

Whatever rebuilding the nation’s infrastructure may mean to Trump, the Forest Service isn’t going to have a seat at that table. The budget calls for a 73% cut in capital improvement and maintenance, including zeroing out the Legacy Roads and Trails program that pays for replacing fish-blocking culverts. Trail maintenance will drop from $77 million to $12 million, so visitors should be prepared to scramble over downed trees and be proficient with maps and GPS as disappearing trail signs are not replaced.

As for roads, which are slated for a 56% funding cut, the budget’s nostalgia for the good-old-days envisions timber sales, salvage no less, paying for road up-keep. Maybe the reimposition of tariffs on Canadian lumber will boost Forest Service stumpage prices, but I wouldn’t bet my house on it.

Last, but not least, Forest Service research is slated for a 16% budget cut from FY 2017 levels. The only logic to the specific cuts I can see is that the Forest Service will spend a little more on counting things like trees, i.e., inventory, and a lot less on basic science.

In sum, this budget narrows the Forest Service focus to taking minimal care of its own land. The Heritage Foundation is happy. Is anyone else?