NY Times: “Fear of the Federal Government in the Ranchlands of Oregon”

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Subtitle to this Jan. 18 New York Times article: “Two years after the standoff at the Malheur Refuge, many people in the region remain convinced that their way of life is being trampled.”

“In 1955, Joe’s dad took a job at the Edward Hines sawmill, which purchased a 67,400-acre tract of timber in the Malheur National Forest. Burns was a vibrant timber town until around 1973 when the mill started laying off workers, and the unemployment rate in Harney County reached 30 percent. The mill closed after the Forest Service restricted the cutting of old-growth forest in the mid-1990s. For-sale signs went up and people moved away. Cronin graduated from high school in 1968 with about 120 people in his class, and his grandson’s class will graduate with about half that many. The biggest employers in the region are now the Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management and other government agencies.”

The USFS is still the biggest employer in my area, just west of the Cascades, but there is ambivalence, if anything, over its place here. Or ignorance. The USFS owns half the county, and recreation on those lands is a big part of the local economy, but the agency is a quiet presence.

US Forest Service Finds 34 Cases Of Sexual Harassment After Internal Review: Daily Caller

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Some of us have wondered why the Daily Caller was the only media outlet to report on the Tooke affair. It turns out that they have reported on sexual harassment in the Forest Service previously, most recently only a few months agao, 11/20/17 here:

After decades of denying it, the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) has finally acknowledged it has systemic problems with sexual harassment.

“Since implementing an updated anti-harassment policy in September 2016, the agency has carefully reviewed and resolved over 400 cases of alleged harassment,” the USFS said. “Of the 400 cases, Forest Service has substantiated 83 cases of harassment including 1 sexual assault (that employee was removed); 34 cases of sexual harassment (employees were removed/terminated, suspended or received reprimands depending on the offense;) and 51 employees were found to have engaged in other, non-sexual harassment.”

The Daily Caller first exposed widespread sexual harassment at the USFS in February 2014, and since the issue was covered by the New York Times, Sharyl Attkisson and the Huffington Post, along with a 2016 hearing in the House Oversight Committee.

The story has examples:

Whitmer said she worked as a firefighter in the Bureau of Land Management, before moving to a hotshot crew at the National Park Service and then the USFS, experiencing harassment at all three.

“During work hours, while in travel status in hotels, and in many cases during after-hours partying on government compounds I felt harassed and pressured to have sexual relations with supervisors,” Whitmer said of the harassment at USFS. “To survive as a female, I knew early on I would be expected to accept the culture or leave. For years I did try to just do my job and ignore the negative aspects of the culture.”

“I recall on one of my first fire assignments I walked into my hotel room, we were in travel status and my squad boss had let himself into my room and was drunk on my bed inviting me to have sex. A few years later something similar would happen with a Captain, laying on a bed drunk in a hotel room, again requesting sex. I would turn down these requests and confront the person and it was never taken seriously.”

Worse than that, she told The Daily Caller she was raped by a superior while working at the San Bernardino National Forest in 2011, and then even after reporting the rape, was forced to report to her rapist while working on a fire.

And apparently in November 2017 (hard to believe it’s been almost 50 (!!!) years since women started working in these kinds of jobs), there is now a reporting center:

“The USFS has taken bold steps to address incidents of harassment and is committed to providing a work environment that stresses respect for individual values and appropriate conduct among all employees. The Forest Service doesn’t tolerate harassment in the workplace.” The USFS said in its most recent statement. “On November 6, 2017, the Forest Service launched the Forest Service Harassment Reporting Center to build upon the agency’s efforts to address harassment.”

I wonder if there are federal agencies or the military that have “best practices” that could be adopted, or whether all such groups are equally behind the power curve. I also wonder whether the fire organization is worse than the rest of the FS in terms of culture and whether that needs to be addressed at the level of the interagency fire organization, so that when people go on fires they are all reading from the same set of rules and expectations.

75% of Park Service FACA Committee Members Resign “In Protest”- Thinking About FACA Committees

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Tony Knowles, former D governor of Alaska, member of National Park System Advisory Board

Here is an interesting story about the National Park Advisory FACA Committee from NBC News. Maybe Interior is different, but in USDA, FACA committee members are approved by political appointees, which is one of the problems with FACA committees, in my view. If you need to be considered OK by an administration of a different color, what are the chances that the exact same people will be considered OK by the administration of the opposite color? Did NBC news leave this part out of the story, or did it not fit in with the narrative “Trump people do uniquely awful things”, or did they just accept it at face value because the sources said so and details of how the government works are too complicated to go into? Notice the”news” story includes a tweet from the League of Conservation Voters. Makes you wonder “whose tweets count as news?” and how do reporters decide? But the story made me think some more about FACA committees in general and whether they could work better.

If you go to the National Park advisory board website here, you find out “Congress passed the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA) in 1972 to create an orderly procedure by which Federal agencies may seek advice and assistance from citizens. In general, any council, panel, conference, task force, or similar group utilized by NPS officials for the purpose of obtaining consensus advice or recommendations on issues or policies will likely fall within the purview of FACA.” And yet on the same page it has the Board expiring in 2007 (guess other agencies have trouble keeping up their websites also.) You can also see the folks appointed and their backgrounds, and the report the Board generated with the help of 120 outside folks.

I had the challenging experience of being the Designated Federal Official for the Forestry Research Advisory Committee, which required working with the Office of White House Liaison with USDA (at the time, don’t know how it is now). I’ve also been involved in recruiting folks for various USDA advisory committees.

To me, getting approval from unknown levels of unknown folks is really difficult and keeps these groups from being as effective as they could be. And which ones really accomplish much? Do more focused ones (like the Black Hills FACA committee) do better than the broader, national ones?

The Roadless FACA committee did stuff (at least those of us working on the state Roadless Rules had to pay attention), I am not so sure about the Ag Biotech FACA committee USDA used to have. What has the planning rule FACA committee done?

Should the FS have a national FACA committee?

When the State of Colorado worked on the Colorado Roadless petition, I believe it was Josh Penry’s (state legislator and wonk extraordinaire) idea to have the taskforce who worked on it composed of (1) some people selected by individual parties, (2) some people both parties could agree on. Maybe in this hyperpartisanized era we seem to be in, we could somehow engineer the partisan-ness out of advisory committees (Congress picks them? or would that be against the Constitution?.but if they are only advisory? How about Governors?).

I think it would also help if some outside groups (say, a cooperative effort of schools of Public Administration) regularly (10 years) reviewed each FACA committee according to some criteria of utility, and made suggestions for improving its value to the government. These could then be send out for public comment and discussion, including among thoughtful blogging communities like ourselves. And of course, ways for streamlining the process. But perhaps now that it is so easy to get people’s opinions, we could dream up another way to do what advisory committees do by involving a broader range of people in some more structured and online process. What are your ideas?

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on Conflict

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Sure, Dr. King was concerned about the great issues of the day, war and peace and civil rights. But some of the things he said about peace also relate to environmental conflicts. Things to think about.

(This is a repost from 2011)
In honor of our holiday honoring Dr. King, I selected some quotes that may be worthy of our consideration with regard to our daily “environmental conflict” lives.

We will never have peace in the world until men everywhere recognize that ends are not cut off from means, because the means represent the ideal in the making, and the end in process. Ultimately, you can’t reach good ends through evil means, because the means represent the seed and the end represents the tree.

Peace is not merely a distant goal that we seek, but a means by which we arrive at that goal.

Rarely do we find men who willingly engage in hard, solid thinking. There is an almost universal quest for easy answers and half-baked solutions. Nothing pains some people more than having to think.

We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.

We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.

Thank you, Dr. King.

Reducing Mountain Bike Access on National Forests: How Widespread?

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Photo thanks to Bitterroot Backcountry Cyclists

I’ve been researching access issues related to National Forests for outdoor recreation and other personal uses (think berry picking, or firewood cutting). In my efforts to give examples of the Forest Service reducing access, I found this piece by John Fisch in 2016.

Since I know many Montanans read and contribute to this blog, I’m especially interested in your opinions of this piece.

Anti-cycling forces have long used lobbying clout and legal action to close longstanding cycling routes to cyclists. Nowhere have they been as successful in doing so as they have in Montana, which has seen the loss of hundreds of miles of outstanding singletrack access to cyclists in recent years. In a state which already has Wilderness area totaling more than 3.4 million acres, including a single Wilderness complex as large as the entire state of Delaware, anti-cycling lobbies have teamed with sympathetic judges to remove quiet, human-powered, low-impact mountain biking from vast tracts of non-Wilderness land as well. The trend has carried over into recent United States Forest Service (USFS) travel plans governing non-Wilderness lands. The most recent losses come courtesy of the Bitterroot National Forest Travel Plan. The Bitterroot National Forest, which is already comprised of nearly 50% Wilderness, increases mechanized restriction to an additional 200,000 acres, all of which was previously accessible to motorized and mechanized travel.

Now, a consortium of affected user groups has sought to challenge this trend in court by bringing suit against the USFS for their “arbitrary and capricious decision.” Not just a mountain bike issue, the suit is brought forth on behalf of seven recreation groups with total membership in excess of 13,000 individuals, including the Bitterroot Ridge Runners Snowmobile Club; Ravalli County Off-road User Association; Bitterroot Backcountry Cyclists; Montana Trail Vehicle Riders Association; Montana Snowmobile Association; Citizens for Balanced Use; and Backcountry Sled Patriots. IMBA opposed the decision and coauthored a letter of objection to the USFS, but has not chosen to be a party to the recently filed suit.

Fisch’s critiques of the decision are found later in the piece. I don’t really want to talk about the Bikes in Wilderness controversy here, but I’m interested in what you all know about this and other FS decisions (around the country) that have reduced mountain bike access.

Three Strikes

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Consensual sex between co-workers, regardless of their relative power positions, is not harassment nor employee misconduct under federal law and workplace rules. Perhaps the Forest Service should regulate its employees’ consensual sexual relations, but no rules do so now. The status quo is that only harassing, i.e., unwelcome, actions of a sexual nature are barred; consensual sex is not.

This matters when it came to the retired regional forester’s view of what should have happened in regard to Tooke’s consensual affair ten years ago. According to the RF (willieboat007), Tooke’s boss, the forest supervisor, should have “report[ed] this type of Misconduct to Regional Forester,” i.e., herself. She believes that “consent didn’t matter, the Forest Service doesn’t condone this type of conduct.” In fact, the Forest Service is silent when it comes to consensual sex, barring only harassing, “unwelcome” sex. Strike one.

According to the RF, having determined that “misconduct” occurred, an “investigation should have taken place to determine the facts.” Government is allowed to investigate only alleged wrongdoing. Government is not allowed to investigate in the absence of a credible allegation that a law or rule has been violated. In particular, government is not allowed to investigate an employee’s private, consensual sexual affairs. Doing so violates the Fourth Amendment’s right to privacy. If Tooke’s lover had said their affair was “unwelcome,” that fact would justify an investigation (USDA employee relations manual calls for misconduct investigation of “sexual harassment”). But, simply reporting the existence of an affair is insufficient to establish a probability of misconduct. Strike two.

According to the RF, had the investigation revealed consensual sex between Tooke and the “young lady,” the RF would have issued a “letter of warning, letter of reprimand with or without time off and/or removal from the supervisor position, or letter of termination.” In other words, she would have punished Tooke for something that broke no law or rule, based on an investigation that invaded Tooke’s privacy. Strike three.

Maybe the times “they are a changing,” as some have commented on this blog. But, until the law changes, too, government agencies and their managers are required to follow the law as written, not as they wished it were. There’s a reason Tooke received only a “verbal reprimand,” i.e., no disciplinary action at all. He didn’t break any rules.

Litigation Weekly – January 12, 2018

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Litigation Weekly Jan 12

A Freedom of Information Act case.  Documents created by contractors in conjunction with their preparation of an EIS for the Wolf Creek Land Exchange on the Rio Grande National Forest, but never provided to the Forest Service, were not “agency records” subject to release under FOIA.  (10th Cir.)

(New case.)  Reauthorization of livestock grazing would allegedly “impair the viability and recovery” of the federally threatened Spalding’s catchfly in the Hells Canyon National Recreation Area on the Wallowa-Whitman National Forest.  (D. Or.)

(Notice of intent to sue under the Endangered Species Act.)  Earthen berms used to close roads in the Pilgrim Project on the Kootenai National Forest fail to effectively prevent motorized access to protect grizzly bears as required by the forest plan’s access requirements, which results in unauthorized take of a listed species.

The Migratory Bird Treaty Act allows the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service to kill barred owls (protected as migratory birds) to determine whether that practice would benefit spotted owls listed under ESA.  (9th Cir.)

Plaintiffs did not have standing to sue USDA Wildlife Services for killing wolves in Idaho because a court decision would not stop the State from using other means to kill the wolves.

 

WSJ: “Are foundations running state energy policy without transparency?”

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This Wall Street Journal article ($) adds a knotty twist to recent greenhouse gas proposals in Washington State. The first article is disturbing, regardless of the aims of the parties involved. Two other recent articles show how forest management (though not USFS lands, I think, at least directly) comes into play….

Climate of Unaccountability
Are foundations running state energy policy without transparency?

“An environmental nonprofit, the World Resources Institute, actually hired Washington’s state government as a contractor last July.

“Under this remarkable arrangement, the state agreed to perform a “scope of work” for the nonprofit that includes “activities and deliverables” to advance a green agenda. The special-interest tail is officially wagging the democratic dog, given that the contract provides the job framework for Mr. Inslee’s senior policy adviser for climate and sustainability, Reed Schuler.

…

“In other words, he holds an influential policy position. And it’s funded through a grant from the World Resources Institute, which reimburses Washington for Mr. Schuler’s salary, benefits and expenses. Under its contract, Washington State sends progress reports alongside its $33,210 quarterly invoices to the nonprofit.

“Tara Lee, the Governor’s spokeswoman, says Mr. Schuler is “a Washington state employee with the same scope of work, review process and accountability as any other state employee. The only difference is the funding source.” She adds the World Resources Institute’s largesse amounts to “general support for expanding the Inslee Administration’s work to combat climate exchange,” but that “they do not decide or dictate the details of this work, nor do they have input on any employee’s work plan.” And she says such arrangements are “not unusual.” “

The only difference is the funding source? The WSJ notes that, “Substitute the Koch brothers for the World Resources Institute, and the outrage would be predictable.”

Dots to connect:

Seattle Times, Jan. 9: “Gov. Jay Inslee Tuesday urged Washington lawmakers to embrace his ambitious plan to tax fossil-fuel emissions in Washington state.”

“Inslee’s proposal would levy a $20-a-ton price on carbon emissions, said Reed Schuler, an Inslee policy adviser. That price would rise over time.

“The billions of dollars raised would support clean-energy projects, work to improve floodwater management and reduce risks of wildfires, and assistance to offset the tax’s impact on low-income communities.

“The state would start collecting the revenue in the 2020 budget year, with $726 million generated that year. The tax would raise a total of $3.3 billion over four years.

On Jan. 5, also in the Times:
Washington state lands commissioner urges legislators to target carbon pollution

“That could put her at odds with fellow Democrat Gov. Jay Inslee, who next week is expected to unveil a carbon tax or fee that could be used partially to replenish a state reserve account he would like to tap to meet a state Supreme Court mandate on paying for public-schools improvements. Franz’s proposal wouldn’t allow carbon money to be used that way.”

…

“Smart carbon policy would focus on several areas, including reductions in wildfire danger and improving forest health, she said. The department and Legislature have committed to treating 1 million acres of forest with thinning and prescribed burning over the next 20 years.”

Study blames pot farms for poisoning spotted owls

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“Researchers from the University of California, Davis, and the California Academy of Sciences tested 10 northern spotted owls found dead in the region. Seven of the owls tested positive for rat poison, used by pot farmers to keep rodents away from their irrigation systems and crops.”

“California officials argue that legalization will allow them to increase oversight and regulation of cannabis farms in fragile forests.”  Is there an opportunity here for California to work with Attorney General Sessions on federal lands since they have a shared interest?  Could the revived “war on drugs” lead to more money for the Forest Service?  (This is slightly tongue-in-cheek, but …)

(Another opportunity … for those cut-over private timberlands to improve their cashflow?  Not that this would be any better for the spotted owls, though rat poison would also work on barred owls attracted to the clearcuts.)

Chetco Bar Fire salvage – agreement?

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“The U.S. Forest Service is planning on salvage logging later this year in about 8 percent of its acres burned in last year’s 191,197-acre Chetco Bar fire in Curry County, a move timber advocates welcomed and one conservation group called “something we can live with.””

George Sexton, conservation director for the Ashland-based Klamath-Siskiyou Wildlands Center, said a sound plan to get sellable timber from the fire would be to continue focusing on commercial logging of hazard trees as well as previously logged plantations within the study area.

The forest also should add fuels-reduction timber sales immediately around communities to ensure public safety in these areas eyed for salvage, Sexton said.

“I could see that as a project that sails through pretty quickly and gets out a decent amount of volume,” Sexton said. “That’s about the best they can do and I think it will produce a fair amount of volume.

The Southern Oregon Timber Industries Association said:  “Getting some rather than not getting any out,” “That is what we’re hoping for.”