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An unprecedented coalition
of officials, environmentalists and timber company representatives met
this week to advance a bold plan to protect fire-menaced forest
communities by thinning millions of acres.
The group working on the
plan to use a reinvented timber industry to save the forest met in Pine
on Tuesday in the shadow of a ravenous 14,800-acre blaze near Flagstaff
that underscored the urgency of their task. As of Thursday night the
fire was 40 percent contained.
“We’ve got fire behavior up
there like our folks have never seen,” said Acting Coconino Forest
Supervisor Heather Provencio of the Schultz Fire, roaring through even
green aspen stands above 10,000 feet.
The uncontrolled blaze
triggered by an abandoned campfire on Sunday provided the perfect
backdrop for the 40 forest advocates and managers from across the region
to plot strategy for a creative effort to use a reinvented timber
industry to thin 2.5 million acres of badly overgrown Arizona forests.
The 4-Forests Restoration
Initiative (4-FRI) hopes to convince the U.S. Forest Service to offer
long-term contracts to thin 50,000 acres annually in the Kaibab,
Coconino, Tonto and Apache-Sitgreaves forests.
The group hopes to get
started with 10,000 or 30,000 acres within 18 to 24 months, which would
set a blistering pace for an agency notorious for its long studies and
slow decision-making.
Ironically, the rampaging
Schultz Fire has already consumed about 7,000 acres the group hoped to
include in its first timber sale. The fire has alarmed forest managers
by rushing through thick forests where the snowpack melted only six
weeks ago. The Forest Service has already spent nearly $3 million
fighting that fire.
Gila County Supervisor
Tommie Martin said only a massive thinning operation with costs offset
by selling the wood to small-diameter-log mills and power generation
plants can save forest communities surrounded by a tinderbox forest.
“We know it’s going to burn.
We know where it’s going to burn. We can hold those fires off for only
so long,” she said. “That’s why we have to get industry involved.”
She said a small fire
started in the forests near Payson several days ago, but fire crews
snuffed it out quickly by using water from big, portable water-storage
bladders bought as surplus from the military and posted strategically
throughout the forest.
The day-long meeting
involving a broad range of officials and forest advocates offered
daunting, cautionary tales focused on the mammoth task ahead.
The 4-FRI assumes that
high-volume, long-term contracts for the millions of small trees growing
in dangerous densities can convince timber companies to invest millions
in mills capable of turning spindly trees into plywood, fence posts,
pressed wood and fuel pellets. Such a reinvented timber industry could
reduce the $1,000 to $1,500 per-acre cost of thinning a fire-prone stand
to near zero.
The composition of the group
offers the first glimmer of hope for a consensus that would make such a
massive, long-term project possible. The key representatives include
both timber company officials and the Centers for Biological Diversity,
an environmental organization whose lawsuits helped block a previous
generation of timber sales focused on cutting down the last of the big,
old-growth ponderosa pines.
All sides involved in the
4-FRI effort have agreed that tree densities pose a danger to both
forest health and forest communities and the timber industry can play a
vital role in thinning millions of acres if loggers largely let stand
the old-growth trees bigger than 16 inches in diameter.
Problem: Getting the Forest Service moving quickly
Tuesday’s meeting in the
Pine Community Center focused on a problem potentially just as
intractable as getting environmentalists and timber company executives
to link arms and sing Kum Ba Yah: Getting the Forest Service to move
quickly.
The group listened to a
cautionary tale offered by a much smaller-scale effort to thin forests
near vulnerable communities in the White Mountains.
The Apache-Sitgreaves
Forests five years ago entered into a 10-year contract with a coalition
of local timber companies to thin some 150,000 acres. The contracts were
intended to provide financial incentives to revamp and re-open shuttered
mills, improve forest health and reduce the dire wildfire danger facing
communities like Show Low and Alpine.
Studies of that effort
suggest that it costs about $1,500 per acre to thin a forest where tree
densities have increased from about 50 per acre to about 800 per acre in
the past century. Initially, the Forest Service agreed to shoulder costs
of about $1,000 per acre, which includes the $500 per-acre cost of doing
the studies necessary to conduct the timber sales.
Backers of the plan hoped
that as the timber industry brought new mills and bio-generating power
plants on line, the value of the wood products would rise and the need
for a public subsidy would drop. The original plan called for starting
slow at about 5,000 acres per year and then scaling up to about 18,000
acres per year.
Discouraging progress
However, the project
launched just as the housing market collapsed, dramatically reducing the
demand for wood products.
Molly Pitts, executive
director of the Northern Arizona Wood Products Association, offered the
group a discouraging progress report on that faltering effort.
On the positive side,
private industry has responded to the flow of wood by investing millions
in new mills and power plants. Those new businesses have generated about
300 new jobs in the economically struggling region, she reported.
Moreover, the timber
companies have developed new markets for fence posts, poles, pressed
wood and other products created from the small-tree mills. As a result,
the mills say they could not use wood harvested from 18,000 acres per
year.
There’s just one catch — and
it’s huge.
The timber companies say
they still need the $500 per-acre taxpayer subsidy, plus the $500
per-acre administrative cost of preparing the sales.
As a result, thinning 18,000
acres annually would cost the Apache-Sitgreaves Forests $1.8 million
annually — money it doesn’t have.
The failure to reduce
thinning costs, resulted in the Forest Service telling the timber
companies that it would limit the program to 5,000 acres annually. At
that rate, the newly formed timber mills may go belly up, said Pitts.
“We’ve built infrastructure
that’s absolutely crucial,” said Pitts.
“If we lost that
infrastructure, the ability of those companies to get financing again is
just about zero. I really am beginning to question what I’m doing here.
We’re being told one thing, but actions are something else.”
Budget restrictions
Bob Taylor, on the timber
sales staff for the Apache-Sitgreaves Forests, said the budget
restrictions imposed by the national and regional offices have dealt the
program a blow.
“When money has to be
diverted from other programs (for the contract), they take a pretty
tremendous hit. Morale is pretty bleak right now, but we’re still trying
to bring the cost down so we can stretch to cover more acres.
Pitts said that based on the
White Mountain Restoration Contract, she worried both about the
long-term Forest Service commitment to a massive thinning effort and
about whether sales of the small trees to industry would ever completely
cover the cost of the thinning.
Still, the planning group
plunged ahead for the rest of the day — working on a strategy to hurry
the process along. The group hopes to convince the Forest Service to do
a general environmental impact report on an initial 750,000 acres, which
includes a broad swath of Rim Country.
Such an approach would speed
things up by allowing a much quicker, sharply focused environmental
assessment on smaller, annual sales — starting at about 10,000 to 30,000
annually.
Operating with the help of
First Congressional District Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick, the group has already
engineered two tours by top Department of Agriculture officials, who all
promised to push the project through as quickly as possible. The group
hopes to draw up contracts and put them out to bid within about 18
months, which would be light speed for the Forest Service.
By way of contrast, Gila
County Supervisor Tommie Martin has been trying in vain for several
years to get permission from the Tonto National Forest to create
emergency escape routes through the forest for a dozen fire-menaced Rim
Country communities with a single entrance into the development.
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