At the heart of the debate over both federal land transfers to states and the idea of setting up trusts on public lands is the idea of turning a valuable and renewable resource, wood to dollars.
The premise is that the federal government is hamstrung by environmental appeals, litigation and red tape from doing anything on national forests except watch fires burn. Idaho lawmakers and Gov. Butch Otter want to take the management out of the 2,500 Forest Service employees in Idaho and hand I over to the Idaho Department of Lands.
The Forest Service and its allies in the timber industry, environmental groups, local governments and recreation groups point to the progress they are making in both cutting timber and restoring the land and waters through collaborative programs around the state. These programs are dependent both on direct federal funding and a creative tool called stewardship contracting.
Logs at an Idaho lumber mill (Idaho Statesman File Photo)
Stewardship contracting began in the 1990s as a way to take the proceeds from timber cutting and direct it locally to restoration and forest health projects. Jim Riley, a forester, consultant and lobbyist from Coeur d’Alene, is a strong supporter of putting the state in charge of cutting timber on federal lands.
But he’s also one of the people who created stewardship contracting. Without it, the collaborative programs that have brought loggers and environmentalists together may fail.
“It’s integral to every collaborative we’re involved in,” Riley said.
Authorization for stewardship contracting ends this year and its future is very much in doubt. Yet you haven’ seen any resolutions from the Idaho Legislature on this program. No one is declaring a stewardship disaster as it is for trail maintenance in the Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness.
For a generation the U.S. Forest Service had a remarkable tool for sustaining its programs without asking Congress for too much money known as the Knutson-Vanderberg Trust Fund. Congress established the fund in the early 1950s to allow the Forest Service to take receipts from timber sales and place them into the fund so it could spend the money on reforestation and watershed improvement projects.
Nationally production from private forests was dropping from its peak in part because most timber companies didn’t practice the sustained yield forestry used today. With 20 percent of the U.S. timber base, the Forest Service was ready to step up harvest to meet the needs of a post-war nation as private forests grew back.
The K-V Fund served its needs well and the programs it supported were expanded in 1976. But free market economists began documenting changes in the behavior of the Forest Service’s managers, especially as the public was becoming skeptical of among other things all the clear-cutting the agency was doing.
Oregon’s Randal O’Toole showed that since managers got more money for most of their programs by cutting more timber, they were pushing to do even more logging, even if it increased damage to watersheds and wildlife habitat. In many forests, including those covering much of Idaho, the timber value was not high enough to pay for the programs and the roads needed to access the timber.
Eventually it all came to a head and the timber harvest dropped by 90 percent.
The K-V Fund is still there but like its other funds, has been emptied by the Forest Service to pay for fire management. Traditional timbers sales are rising on national forests as trust builds between the former adversaries of the timber wars.
But stewardship contracting not only fits the needs of the collaborative groups better than traditional timber sales, the agency had the flexibility to do stewardship contracts for up to a decade, which gives timber companies and loggers the supply certainty they need to attract financing for mills and equipment.
One of the stumbling blocks to reauthorization is that the Congressional Budget Office “scores” stewardship contracting as costing the government and adding to the deficit. But that’s because the office does not score the improvements to the resources the contracts do, Riley said.
This program isn’t sexy and it doesn’t fit into anyone’s political ideology. But it has support from people on both sides.
Rocky, this is an OUTSTANDING article and outlines the fact that there are collaborative solutions to the issues that belong to the logging of federal forest land. That subject of stewardship contracting is fascinating and may have been applied to a restorative project up on the Selway Bitteroot ridge where the logging has produced exquisite results both visually and in other ways that relate to multi-use and good stewardship practices.
I feel this is an area of common ground where politicians could reap effective change by focusing on how the stewardship contracting could be better facilitated.
Thank you so much for staying on top of this issue Rocky, and helping all of us to learn better ways to deal with our forests rather than this concept mimicking Ken Ivory’s American Lands Council agenda.
If interested, visit http://idahopubliclandsummit.com where I’m dabbling with podcasting through audio interviews to bring about more awareness, better solutions and protecting the status of national forest lands in Idaho and the west.
What is up with all the repeated words in several of the headlines on this website?
““It’s integral to every collaborative we’re involved in,” Riley said.
Authorization for stewardship contracting ends this year and its future is very much in doubt. Yet you haven’ seen any resolutions from the Idaho Legislature on this program. No one is declaring a stewardship disaster as it is for trail maintenance in the Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness.”
The Frank is the largest wilderness in the lower 48 states, and is administered by three national forests(Boise, Payette, and Salmon-Challis). If the budgets of those three forests can’t provide enough money to clean up the trails, why does anyone think the state of Idaho can?
There is a simple solution to clearing the trails in the Frank: Volunteer! College interns do most of the trail work for almost free all summer, and there are groups that do trail work with volunteers. If you want it done, get out there and do it instead of complaining. All you need is a handsaw and strong arms.
“But stewardship contracting not only fits the needs of the collaborative groups better than traditional timber sales, the agency had the flexibility to do stewardship contracts for up to a decade, which gives timber companies and loggers the supply certainty they need to attract financing for mills and equipment.
One of the stumbling blocks to reauthorization is that the Congressional Budget Office “scores” stewardship contracting as costing the government and adding to the deficit. But that’s because the office does not score the improvements to the resources the contracts do, Riley said.”
They really help forest health when the FS pays to have slash removed for biomass, and the contractors abandon it when it’s unprofitable. Then, when the thinning units are burned, the FS has to pay money in firefighter wages to keep fire out of them on an otherwise low complexity burn.