Steve Wilent

This essay asks some good questions about trust-based management of federal lands. However, the Valles Caldera may not be the best example for evaluating such trusts. A trust on productive timberlands (say, here in Western Oregon), with a mandate to provide sustainable revenue to counties, could succeed, I think.

Article follows….

An experiment in privatizing public land fails after 14 years

By Tom Ribe/Writers on the Range

It is no secret that some state legislators in the West want to boot federal land management agencies from their states. They argue that agencies like the Bureau of Land Management and Forest Service cost too much and are too detached from local values, and that states could make money by running our vast open spaces like a privately owned business.

The Cato Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based libertarian think tank, is of that opinion and has developed models to replace federal agencies with private interests. What many people don’t know is that Congress implemented one of the Cato Institute’s ideas in 2000, on the 89,000-acre Valles Caldera National Preserve in New Mexico. For some critics of the federal government, this was the experiment in land management that would signal the end of the BLM and Forest Service in the West.

The Cato experiment in New Mexico, however, failed, chewed up by the friction between monetizing the “services” that landscapes provide — recreation, timber, grass, wildlife — and fulfilling citizens’ expectations for public access and protecting natural resources. For example, New Mexicans had very little tolerance for paying high fees to visit public property that had already been paid for using federal Land and Water Conservation Fund dollars.

The Valles Caldera experiment began after a Texas oil family expressed interest in selling its large property atop a dormant volcano near Santa Fe. A reluctant Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., agreed to federal ownership, but only if the property was not managed by traditional federal agencies. The Valles Caldera Preservation Act, which was passed in 2000, was designed to create an alternative model of management.

Under this act, the Valles Caldera National Preserve was managed by a “Trust” and mandated to become “financially self-sufficient” by 2015. The Trust was authorized to replace federal appropriations with income from recreation fees, resource extraction, and any other means that could be found. A mostly private-sector “board of trustees” made decisions and supervised the staff.

At first, Congress instructed the Trust to pay for all wildland fire operations at the preserve out of its own budget. A later congressional amendment made firefighting once again the responsibility of the Forest Service. Soon after, two large fires burned 53,000 acres in the preserve and cost the federal government $56 million dollars in suppression costs alone.

Despite the efforts of many trustees and the staff for 14 years, the preserve never managed to earn enough money from hunting, grazing and tourism to pay even a third of its bills. Heavy logging and overgrazing had depleted forests and grasslands well before the preserve became public land. High fees and restrictions on public access kept the income from recreation low, and to a large extent, the public continued to perceive the preserve as private land. Elk hunting paid well, but the preserve broke even on cattle grazing only by charging ranchers more than seven times what other federal agencies are charging.

Privatization supporters may say that if Congress had waived all federal natural and cultural resource protection laws for the Trust — as Sen. Domenici had urged back in 2000 — the staff could have been a fraction of its size, and the Trust could have made money developing lodges and putting thousands of cattle on the high-altitude meadows without public review or bureaucratic process.

Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., however, refused to excuse the Trust from environmental laws. The National Environmental Policy Act, for example, requires federal agencies to study the impacts of proposed development and to consult with the public before decisions are made. Complying with these laws may be expensive, but without them, publicly owned land is public in name only.

For more than a decade, the Trust labored at becoming solvent before it admitted to Congress that it would never achieve “financial self-sufficiency.” For many critics of the experiment, the statement was a long time coming.

“We just wanted to access our preserve without all the restrictions and fees and without being called customers,” said Monique Schoustra, who works with a group called Caldera Action.

Ultimately, many factors led New Mexico’s congressional delegation to dump the “experiment” last December and transfer the Valles Caldera National Preserve to the National Park Service. What have we learned from this failure of privatization? For those who want states to take-over federal lands, there are certainly questions that must be answered first: Will states shoulder the costs of fighting large fires? Will states obey the wishes of ranchers and continue to subsidize ranching? Will states charge the public to visit once-public lands, and will states protect and restore archaeological sites, watersheds and wildlife habitat?

Then there’s the real question: How will states manage the public frustration of Westerners who live in a region where our public lands are at the heart of our cultures and economy?

Tom Ribe is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a column service of High Country News (hcn.org). He is a writer, fire manager and outdoor guide based in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

This just in (Jan. 30, 2015):

FOREST-PLANNING-RULE: Forest Service releases final Land Management Planning Framework

Flores, Tanya E, [email protected]

I am pleased to announce  that the Forest Service has issued final Planning Directives. These Directives are a key set of agency guidance documents for implementation of the 2012 Planning Rule. Our intent is to ensure an adaptive land management planning process that is inclusive, efficient, collaborative and science-based to promote healthy, resilient, diverse and productive national forests and grasslands.

Proposed Directives were released for comment in February 2013. The Secretary of Agriculture’s  Federal Advisory Committee (FACA Committee) recommendations, 16,000+ public comments, extensive regional input, advice from Washington Office staffs, agency-wide roundtables, and lessons learned from early adopter implementation were used to formulate the final Directives.

One of the Agency’s key goals is to make the planning process easy to understand in an effort to increase community involvement in protecting and restoring natural resources. The final Directives provide clearer direction and greater context for how the public can engage in planning activities. The revisions incorporated into the final Directives will support efforts to strengthen the efficiency and effectiveness of planning processes.

I want to thank everyone for their continued interest and involvement. Your input, experiences, feedback and relationships within our communities have helped shape these Directives.

A copy of the final directives, along with background information, can be obtained at http://www.fs.usda.gov/main/planningrule/home, or by calling (202) 205-1449.

Interesting take from two attorneys:

Equal Access To Justice Act: Why Prevailing On Only 1 Out Of 3 Claims In Oregon Forestry Case Can Still Be Quite Rewarding

” In Cascadia Wildlands v. Bureau of Land Management…, after prevailing on only one of three claims, and after the district court imposed a variety of reductions, the court awarded plaintiffs approximately three-quarters of the attorneys’ fees requested and 100% of the costs.”

The headline says it all”

Idaho’s federal lands panel stresses collaboration, no longer demanding public lands takeover

See also:

Utah’s federal land take-over plan stalls

Greenwire article, “Agency retreats from contentious $10M ‘branding’ initiative” — excerpts:

“The Forest Service abandoned a $10 million rebranding effort today after the proposal sparked opposition from some employees and a government watchdog group.

The agency had announced plans in November to hire an outside firm to help it achieve “strategic organizational transformation, identity clarification and social purpose branding and branding management, and multicultural engagement and outreach.”

The request for proposals, which closed just before New Year’s Day, offered up to $10 million over the next five years.

Some called it a smart investment that could have boosted employee morale, bolstered public trust and strengthened support from Congress.

Others called it a waste of money that could have been better spent restoring watersheds, building trails, thinning unhealthy forests or beefing up staff.

But the agency is putting the effort on the backburner, for now.

…

The presumed front-runner for the branding contract was Metropolitan Group, a Portland, Ore.-based “social change” firm that the Forest Service previously tapped to help its Pacific Northwest region “reflect on its roots and discover its future.”

The firm said it helped the region’s 3,000 employees in Oregon and Washington state “rediscover” the mission outlined by the Forest Service’s first chief, Gifford Pinchot: “to provide the greatest amount of good for the greatest amount of people in the long run.”

“We clarified the region’s core identity using the greatest good as a frame to unify and communicate a complex array of ideas and work,” Metropolitan Group said on its website. “From this foundation we crafted a new vocabulary, look, and feel that employees are already using to more successfully engage with each other and the public.”

A sample of the firm’s work can be found here.

Metropolitan Group has also been contracted by the Forest Service’s Intermountain region based in Ogden, Utah, and the Pacific Northwest Research Station to “foster a more powerful and shared appreciation of agency mission amongst internal and external stakeholders.”

The total value of its contracts is believed to exceed $1 million.

The regional efforts were a “starting point for an agency-wide undertaking to prepare its workforce to engage in a cultural transformation and identity clarification,” according to the Forest Service’s November RFP.

Metropolitan Group currently holds a $527,000 contract that runs through next month to help Forest Service leaders take the regional branding and identity effort nationwide.

Andy Kerr wrote this op-ed for the Medford, Oregon Mail-Tribune. Full text is below. Lots to discuss, but I have just a couple of points:

>> “Wildfire is not a threat to east-side Oregon ponderosa pine-dominated forests. Wildfire is either the continuation or rebirth of forests.”

Even the intense, stand-replacing fires that burn in areas where, as Andy writes, “fire exclusion has resulted in east-side dry forest stands that have too many small trees and not enough large trees.”? And if fire is not a threat, should we not attempt to suppress them?

>> “I don’t know of any credible conservation organization that says never another federal log.”

This is still Sierra Club policy, as far as I know — downloaded it today here:

“The Sierra Club support[s] protecting all federal publicly owned lands in the United States and advocate[s] an end to all commercial logging on these lands.” Adopted in the Sierra Club Annual Election, April 20, 1996.

GUEST OPINION
Guest Opinion: East is east and west is west

By Andy Kerr
Posted Jan. 6, 2015 @ 12:01 am

Since the Mail Tribune’s editorial “Meeting in the middle keeps a mill open” (Jan. 2) mentioned my role in the general ceasefire between conservationists and the timber industry over Oregon east-side federal public forest lands, permit me to compare some differences with its west-side counterpart.

I challenge the editorial’s notion that “the key to breaking the impasse was a recognition on the part of environmentalists that wildfire posed as much of a threat to forests as logging. Wildfire is not a threat to east-side Oregon ponderosa pine-dominated forests. Wildfire is either the continuation or rebirth of forests. Wildfire is good; non-firesafe buildings are bad.

The triple-threat of livestock grazing, high-grade logging and fire exclusion has resulted in east-side dry forest stands that have too many small trees and not enough large trees.

A plethora of smaller young trees are out-competing the dearth of larger old trees for moisture, nutrients and light, which stresses old-growth trees, making them more vulnerable to native insects and diseases and dying centuries before they naturally would.

In the case of dry forests, judicious thinning of younger trees can restore ecological health.

Fundamental to achieving cooperation among the east-side interests was that, since 1995, Forest Service policy generally prohibits the logging of trees over 21 inches in diameter at breast height. In addition, since 2001, large roadless areas are generally off-limits to logging. There are no comparable protections on Bureau of Land Management (the so-called “O&C”) lands in Western Oregon. The approximately eight eastside Oregon mills have reinvented themselves to utilize smaller trees.

Another difference is federal revenue sharing. Traditionally, counties received a percentage of timber receipts. For national forests, it was 25 percent; for O&C lands it was 75 percent. The Forest Service has moved toward stewardship contracts, where timber revenues are retained by the agency and used for non-commercial forest and watershed restoration activities and developing more ecological restoration projects.

In contrast, BLM still envisions a return to the bad old days when the O&C counties were rolling in federal timber receipts. Such was only possible when over two square miles per week of Oregon old-growth forests were being clearcut.

Milling capacity on the east side is more closely aligned with ecological restoration needs. Since 1995 — the year the protections for the west side’s northern spotted owl and the east side’s big trees went into full effect — the number of wood products mills and jobs in Oregon have halved. Yet today, milling capacity (the appetite for logs) is one-quarter larger than it was in 1995. Far fewer mills and mill jobs, but the remaining mills are much larger and more efficient.

There are eight mills — centered in Douglas and Lane counties — that require very large logs from very large and old trees. Seven of these dinosaur mills actually modernized their equipment to more efficiently use large logs — like modern whaling stations that use every bit of the whale. Their business model requires large logs, now found only on federal lands and for which the social license to log has expired and won’t be renewed. The nearly 40 other west-side Oregon sawmills have moved beyond old growth.

More significant than forest type or geography are the differences between the Forest Service and BLM. The Forest Service now generally views logs as a byproduct of scientifically sound ecological restoration. BLM still generally views logs as the paramount purpose of O&C lands. The Western Oregon federal public forestlands managed by BLM are national forests; they just aren’t capitalized National Forests managed by the Forest Service.

Sen. Ron Wyden advanced O&C legislation in the Senate that would have protected more forests and also increased log supplies. There is a lot in his bill I did not like, but I supported it.

In contrast, Reps. Greg Walden and Peter DeFazio passed a bill through the House of Representatives that would effectively privatized 1.5 million acres of O&C lands to be logged like adjacent private timberlands.

Wyden’s bill died because Senate leaders didn’t have time to deal with a bill that they knew Walden would kill in the House.

The editorial concluded with “No one wants to go back to the unsustainable clearcutting that devastated forests in the 1970s and 1980s. But saying no to all timber harvests everywhere isn’t realistic either.”

I don’t know of any credible conservation organization that says never another federal log. I do know of O&C counties and west-side mills that still want to clearcut old-growth forests and refuse to scale their demands to those which are ecologically, economically and socially acceptable.

Andy Kerr (www.andykerr.net) advocates for the conservation of the public’s lands, wildlife and waters and splits his time between Ashland and Washington, D.C.

That fire is a threat to the NSO in not news to us here at NCFP. This article, “Another Threat To Spotted Owls: Fire,” from Jefferson Public Radio (Southern Oregon), looks at the issue on the east side of the Cascades.

“Since 2003, wildfires have burned up to 30,000 acres of habitat in the Deschutes National Forest, which has destroyed or fragmented much of the area’s best spotted owl habitat…. The Sisters Ranger District lost 21 breeding pairs after the fires. After the wildfires of 2014, rangers couldn’t find any.”

Loss of habitat due to timber harvesting is still a threat, “but it’s not as great a threat as habitat loss due to fire and things like the barred owl,” says Laurie Turner, a forest wildlife biologist for the Deschutes National Forest.

As far as I know, most of the harvesting on the Deschutes these days is aimed at reducing the threat of large, intense fires and thus stemming the loss of owl habitat.

On the other hand, Chad Hanson claims elsewhere that cutting snags on the Rim Fire in the western Sierras will harm “snag forests,” which are dandy owl habitat: “…current research shows that while spotted owls select unburned or low/moderate-intensity fire areas for nesting and roosting habitat, they preferentially select unlogged high-intensity fire areas for their foraging habitat. This is because these high-intensity fire areas, which create ecologically-vital “snag forest habitat” (also known as “complex early seral forest”), have an abundance of habitat structures, such as snags, downed logs, native shrub patches, and areas of dense natural conifer regeneration, that provide excellent habitat for the small mammal prey species upon which spotted owls depend.”

Could it be that owls, either CSO or NSO, react differently to fire, depending on location?

This Dec. 21 editorial in the Missoulian, “Make collaboration work for MT,” mentions a friend of the court brief filed last week in the Ninth Circuit by a group including The Wilderness Society, plus “two former Forest Service chiefs, three Montana counties, conservation organizations, the hunting and angling communities, timber industry officials, wildlife biologists, and Montana’s Departments of Natural Resources and Conservation and Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks” and others. The brief is here. An excerpt:

“In stark contrast to timber harvest practices of the past, the Colt Summit Project represents an entirely new and different approach to forest management. The project was developed with the input of collaborative processes that bring together diverse interests to help create forest management projects that benefit multiple goals, including the recovery of lynx and other threatened species. In keeping with this approach, the specific components of the Colt Summit project – 12 including the thinning and understory slashing and burning highlighted by the Plaintiffs – were designed in consultation with state and federal biologists who are arguably the world’s foremost experts on Canada lynx. The input of these expert biologists – whose work Plaintiffs themselves rely on throughout their own brief – is more than adequate to ensure that the project will significantly harm neither lynx nor their habitat in the short run, and will benefit both in the long run.”

See also The Wilderness Society’s press release.

The Colt Summit project has been discussed in the past in numerous threads here on NCFP, such as here.

The CEQ has released a new Draft Guidance on Consideration of Greenhouse Gas Emissions and the Effects of Climate Change.The link goes to a press release with a link to the new document (which, unfortunately, is a static document that you can’t searched or copy-and-paste from).

CEQ press release excerpt:

As part of an ongoing effort to modernize implementation of the National Environmental Policy Act and promote effective and transparent environmental reviews, the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) today released updated draft guidance for Federal agencies on how to consider greenhouse gas emissions and the impacts of climate change in their NEPA analyses, as well as final guidance on conducting programmatic NEPA reviews. These measures will increase the efficiency of environmental reviews and help agencies make informed decisions that are sound investments of taxpayer dollars and good for American communities.

NEPA requires Federal agencies to consider and transparently disclose the potential effects of their actions and decisions on the environment.  In many cases, Federal actions have the potential to produce greenhouse gas emissions, and also are at risk of experiencing impacts from a changing climate. The draft guidance, which will be available for 60 days of public comment, outlines how Federal agencies should describe these potential effects when conducting NEPA reviews to allow decision makers and the public to more fully understand the environmental impacts of proposed actions.  In turn, agencies will be better able to compare alternatives, and consider measures to reduce the impacts of climate change on Federal resources and investments.

Excerpt from an E&E News article (subscription):

Steven Weissman, director of the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law’s energy program, said it appears the guidance gives federal agencies a large amount of discretion and contributes to the impression that some effects of greenhouse gas emissions are acceptable.

Weissman pointed to CEQ’s guidance for agencies to focus on projects and actions that will release more than 25,000 metric tons of CO2-equivalent emissions on an annual basis. CEQ said a “quantitative analysis of greenhouse gas emissions is not recommended unless it is easily accomplished” for projects that emit anything below that amount.

That means smaller projects that emit less — but still contribute to climate change — may not get a close look, he said.

“Basically, they’re saying you could level over 160 acres’ worth of trees before you reach any level of significance, or burn 20 million tons of coal,” he said. “It’s all very interesting because there’s no particular number that’s magical here; this is just an effort to set a benchmark [to prevent] too much attention on projects that would have smaller effects.”

From the Bend (Oregon) Bulletin, a barred owl has replaced two spotted owls that died a few years ago.

“If you go to spotted owl habitat (in the woods) this is often what you see,” Goodell said.

In other words, it’s also barred owl habitat.