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The recent
whirlwind Rim Country tour by U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack
boosted prospects for several key job-creating efforts in Rim Country,
where unemployment remains stubbornly high, say officials.
Local
officials arranged the rare visit of a top level cabinet secretary to a
county where the federal government owns about 85 percent of the land in
hopes of enlisting the agriculture secretary’s support in both reviving
the timber industry and pushing through a massive, underground copper
mine near Globe.
First
District Congress-woman Ann Kirkpatrick in a congressional floor speech
this week said “as we face the challenges of a stalled economy and a
record debt, it is critically important that we find ways to create jobs
without spending millions of federal dollars.”
Kirkpatrick has been pushing both the Copper Basin Mine and the
so-called Four Forests Initiative as job-creation moves.
Payson
Mayor Kenny Evans, who played a key role in convincing the secretary of
agriculture to visit, said the tour both educated Vilsack to the
economic possibilities here and impressed the local Forest Service
managers with Vilsack’s interest.
Rim
officials seek support of water, road projects
Evans,
Gila County Supervisor Tommie Martin and other local officials have been
trying to enlist the support of Tonto National Forest officials on a
variety of projects, from building the Blue Ridge pipeline across forest
land to improving emergency escape routes for landlocked communities as
part of an overhaul of roads throughout the national forest.
Now,
Kirkpatrick has linked Forest Service policies to job creation, in a
region where reductions in the unemployment rate have lagged behind the
rest of the slowly recovering state.
The Four
Forests Restoration Initiative calls on the U.S. Forest Service to
negotiate long-term contracts with timber companies willing to build a
new network of mills and power generation plants that can make use of
the small trees that form dense stands across some 2.5 million acres of
forest between Flagstaff and Alpine, which encompasses most of Rim
Country.
One recent
study estimated that timber companies could harvest nearly a billion
850-million board feet of timber and 8 million tons of brush and wood,
even without harvesting trees more than 16 inches in diameter.
Thinning
just half the land in the region from perhaps 1,000 trees per acre to
the historical average of about 50 trees per acre would produce 13,000
jobs and $1.1 billion in wood products, according to recent estimates.
Vilsack’s
visit also focused on moving forward on a giant copper mine near Globe.
The Copper Basin Mine would use robot drills and earth movers to follow
a rich vein of copper ore deep beneath a scenic landscape of oaks and
boulders near Globe. The roughly 40-acre Oak Flats area near Apache Leap
is now used by hikers, campers and rock climbers and also reportedly
sacred to some Apache groups.
Critics
worry the mine could cause destructive subsidence in the scenic area
above the mine and perhaps pollute groundwater. Supporters maintain it
would yield billions of dollars in ore with minimal environmental
impacts, since the drills would follow the ore veins deep underground
and most of the tailings would go back into the tunnels at the end of
the project.
The
federal government is currently doing an environmental impact statement
on the proposal.
Kirkpatrick estimates that the copper mine would create 1,000, well-paid
jobs and the Four Forests initiative would create at least 600 jobs.
By
contrast, last year’s federal stimulus jobs spending created an
estimated 1,100 jobs in the First Congressional District, which includes
Rim Country. Those stimulus grants included more than $10 million for
Payson’s Blue Ridge pipeline and millions more to pay for forest
thinning to protect fire-menaced communities.
Stimulating job creation
Kirkpatrick said the federal government can’t afford to create jobs
solely through federal spending, but must give priority to federal
actions that can stimulate job creation by private industry.
“These are
great examples of how we can get our economy back on track without
spending millions of dollars,” she said.
The Four
Forests Restoration Initiative could provide a national model for
reversing a century of forest mismanagement. Tree densities in Arizona’s
ponderosa pine forests have increased from maybe 50 trees per acre to
perhaps 1,000 trees per acre as a result of grazing, logging and fire
suppression.
A slew of
lawsuits helped shut down the timber industry throughout Arizona in the
1990s, but a series of massive wildfires revealed the danger of the
thickets of parched trees that covered millions of acres.
The Four
Forests initiative attempts to scale up two small-scale restoration
efforts to cover a much larger area.
The 2004
White Mountains Stewardship Contract was intended to induce loggers to
thin 150,000 acres of forest at minimal cost.
However,
the lack of enough mills and developed markets for the fuel pellets,
pressed-wood and other products made from small diameter trees, limited
the ability of the Forest Service to offset thinning costs. As a result,
the Forest Service has been paying the timber company an average of $420
per acre — much cheaper than straight hand thinning, but still too
expensive to apply to millions of acres of overgrown forest.
At that
cost, it could cost the Forest Service $63 million to thin the proposed
150,000 acres — or perhaps a billion dollars to thin a million
dangerously overgrown acres in the four-forest region.
Rare
partnership
A rare
partnership between environmentalists and a timber company in Northern
Arizona provides a perhaps more affordable model.
The Center
for Biological Diversity and the Grand Canyon Trust back in April struck
a deal with Arizona Forest Restoration Products to help it harvest small
trees for its “oriented-strand-board” (OSB) processing plant in Winslow,
which will produce what amounts to ultra-strong plywood and other
products.
The Grand
Canyon Trust and the Center for Biological Diversity not only agreed not
to oppose Arizona Forest Restoration Product’s timber contracts, but
vowed to actually work on behalf of the company to resolve any conflicts
and clear away delays. In return, the company pledged not to cut trees
greater than 16 inches in diameter.
The plan
calls for the company to harvest small trees on about 30,000 acres each
year, all at no cost to the taxpayer. In the process, the facility could
provide 600 jobs annually and inject $200 million annually into the
regional economy.
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