Timber Tension

ong-serving Forest Service employees can remember a time when a background in forestry was the most useful tool a forest supervisor could have. Today, a degree in sociology or conflict resolution might be better. No other federal agency is so embroiled in the conflicting passions that define America-a nation whose voracious consumption of natural resources has no peer, and whose commitment to protecting the environment is codified in law.

From the coastal plains of Florida to the panhandle of Idaho, Americans are straining public lands to an unprecedented extent. The expectations of the wealthiest Americans, with their recreational demands and luxury homes, are running headlong into those of some of the poorest Americans, who eke out a living in rural communities dependent on federal land for sustenance. At the same time, the timber, mining, natural gas and electric utility industries vie with environmentalists for political and public support on land-use de-cisions. Add to that a host of complex environmental laws, the competing demands of sportsmen and the litigious nature of Americans, and you have the embattled atmosphere in which the Forest Service must operate.

When the conservationist Gifford Pinchot became the first Forest Service chief in 1905, he championed a "wise use" philosophy that balanced resource production with resource preservation, a view that prevailed until World War II, when timber harvesting became critical to the war effort and the building boom that followed. The agency's home in the Agriculture Department reflects the fact that forests have been viewed as assets to be nurtured and harvested, not simply sustained for their own sake.

As the 1960s dawned, so, too, did concerns about the environment. In the Forest Service, those concerns led to the 1960 Multiple Use Sustained Yield Act, designed to ensure the long-term viability of timber, water, grazing lands and other forest assets. Congress expanded on that principle in the 1976 National Forest Management Act, which remains the legal foundation for forest management today, despite a significant shift in the role of the forests from commodities production to recreation and environmental protection. "We operate under the Multiple Use Sustained Yield Act principle, which is very discretionary-but it basically says you try to provide all these things in perpetuity," says Robert Cunningham, a special assistant to the chief of the Forest Service. "Obviously, as uses start going up, the balancing act gets much more complex."

It's a balancing act played out in all 155 national forests across the country. Nancy Ross, a planner in the recently merged George Washington and Jefferson National Forests in southwestern Virginia, maintains a mailing list of more than 3,000 people representing businesses, interest groups, state and federal agencies, state lawmakers, members of Congress and concerned individuals who have a stake in how forest resources are sustained. The list of business and interest groups reads like a compendium of American pastimes and vocations-the American Fisheries Society, the Virginia Horse Council, the Nature Conservancy, the Appalachian Trail Club, the Sierra Club, Virginia Forest Watch, the Southern Environmental Law Center, Mountain Lumber Company, Pocahontas Development Group, the High Country Mountain Bike Association, Virginia Deer Hunters Association, American Chestnut Cooperators' Foundation, Trout Unlimited, the Ruffed Grouse Society, American Electric Power and Westvaco-one of the largest paper manufacturers in the world.

"Those are just some of the people," says Ross. Things get really complicated when you factor in the needs of endangered species. "What's good for the grouse isn't necessarily good for the spotted salamander, and so on," she says.

Nightmares

Even when solutions to land-use problems are clear and uncontested-which is rarely the case-implementing them can be a bureaucratic nightmare. When officials at the George Washington and Jefferson National Forests, working cooperatively with the Appalachian Trail Club of Virginia, tried to build a footbridge across the James River to get hikers off a busy highway bridge, it took 10 years. Not only did the bridge have to be designed and built and grants awarded to fund it, but environmental impact studies had to be prepared and permits obtained from a dozen federal and state agencies, including the Virginia Marine Resources Division, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the Army Corps of Engineers. The Virginia legislature even had to pass a law to give the Forest Service the right of way for the river bottom.

"It was quite a project," says Patricia Egan, the ranger in whose district the bridge was built. "Nothing is ever as simple as it would seem." Any project that involves any sort of ground disturbance requires an environmental analysis, and often involves permission from other state and federal agencies. Environmental degradation is only one of many factors that affect decisions in the forest. At the George Washington and Jefferson forests, for instance, managers have to consider how activity will be viewed-literally-from the Shenandoah National Park, which lies to the north of the forests, and the scenic Blue Ridge Parkway, which runs through the park and the forests. Maintaining the vistas for hikers and tourists visiting the park and driving along the parkway has become a critical factor in forest planning.

In the West, the stakes and emotions surrounding land-use decisions are even higher. In Idaho, where 40 percent of the state is national forest land, forest managers have a huge impact on the economic and social fabric of the state. The protracted nature of forest planning, the time-consuming and costly litigation that inevitably follows controversial decisions, and the delicate balancing act federal land managers play have created feelings of distrust among forest users. "The current processes of federal land management have resulted in uncertain decision-making, destabilization of resource-dependent communities and deterioration in environmental quality on federal lands. In short, the system is broken," a federal lands task force convened by the Idaho State Board of Land Commissioners reported in a 1998 study, "New Approaches for Managing Federally Administered Lands."

Dave Rittenhouse, supervisor of the Boise National Forest in Idaho, points to a two-foot-high stack of regulations and guidance that govern decision-making on the forest. It's not just the regulation-heavy planning process that makes forest management difficult, he says. "It used to be that you could sit down with four or five groups" and reach an accommodation on land-use decisions. "Now, you have competition between different groups of skiers; two-wheel versus four-wheel vehicle users; snow machines versus backcountry skiers-they all have different concerns. There are six or seven environmental groups we work with and they all have different agendas. It's become a lot more challenging to find consensus solutions."

Shifting Values

The Forest Service manages 191 million acres of public property-an area equivalent to the size of Texas. The 155 forests and 20 grasslands that comprise the National Forest System are divided among nine regions; regional foresters coordinate planning and activities and allocate the budget to the forests. The forests themselves are subdivided into ranger districts, which carry out day-to-day management and coordinate activity with local interests. The service also has a research branch, which provides scientific and technical support to forests through its network of forest and range experiment stations and a forest products laboratory. In addition, a state and private forestry arm of the service works with state and local forests and private landowners to improve forestry on non-federal land and to facilitate cooperative fire management.

Under the National Forest Management Act, each forest is required to produce a forest plan every 15 years. The plan is intended to be the prescription for using the forest while balancing competing needs. The planning process itself is highly prescriptive and can take years-the Boise National Forest, for example, has been working on a revised forest plan for almost five years now. Crafting a plan involves numerous environmental assessments, coordination with dozens of federal, state and local agencies that play regulatory roles in land management and public hearings to air the concerns of interested parties and to build consensus for decision-making. "The dirty little secret is these forest plans are almost useless," says one manager in a California forest. "We're accused of spending all of our time planning and not doing anything on the ground-and that's not far from the truth."

Anyone who thinks Americans have become disengaged from their government should talk to Forest Service officials. When the agency released a draft of new forest planning regulations in late 1999, officials recorded more than 10,000 comments from people worried about the planning process. It was an astonishing number, considering that a draft four years earlier had generated a few hundred comments. A few weeks after the agency released the draft, the White House issued a notice of intent to dramatically restrict road building in the national forests-an act that generated more than 1 million public comments in response.

"The planning process is the process we use to make those [land management] choices, so it becomes very important. Some people feel if we just change the process, the answers will come out differently," says Cunningham. The new planning regulations, released last year, were 10 years in the making, and formally reflect the agency's shift in mission toward managing land to sustain ecosystems. The shift is only logical, says Cunningham. If the Forest Service cannot sustain ecosystems, it won't be able to produce timber or other commodities, and for too long, too many forests have been harvested beyond a sustainable capacity. "The notion of sustainability is threaded through the rule very strongly. We really feel it is the linchpin of the Multiple Use Sustained Yield Act," Cunningham says. Under the new regulations, forest managers must plan with sustainability in mind, and they also must have their plans reviewed by independent scientists for viability. "One thing is clear. We're not going to allow wholesale exploitation of land for short-term gain," he says.

William Damon, supervisor of the Washington and Jefferson forests, which are headquartered in Roanoke, Va., says, "the American people haven't figured out what they want out of their land and [the agency] reflects that. There has clearly been a shift toward ecosystem management and away from commodity production, but trying to figure out what exactly that means is difficult," he says. "There are some people who don't want to see any activity on public land." Some proponents of ecosystem management aspire to return federal lands to their pristine condition before Europeans arrived in North America. Aside from the difficulty of determining what the exact state of the land was prior to European settlement, the concept fails to account for the forest management activities of American Indians, says Damon. "In these mountains, Native Americans used fire to manipulate forests much more than we do now," he says.

Difficult Choices

Forest management isn't for the thin-skinned. Virtually every decision will have opponents. Damon spends a lot of time talking to community groups and meeting with concerned landowners, hunters, hikers and people whose livelihood depends on access to the forest. A graduate of the West Point class of 1969, he operates according to a military maxim: "You can't lead from the rear."

The most contentious issues at the Washington and Jefferson forests are timber harvesting and natural gas extraction. (While the Forest Service owns the land, natural gas companies own the gas rights beneath the surface.) "The natural gas industry down here has been very responsive to our needs," Damon says. "They've addressed all of our environmental concerns. But it's still very contentious. Anywhere you have gas extraction you have roads and pipelines. With timber production, there are some groups that will always try to stop you. We're challenged [in court] every time we put up a timber sale."

The Sierra Club, one of the oldest and most influential grassroots environmental groups, has launched a nationwide campaign to end commercial logging altogether on Forest Service land. Meanwhile, logging interests are pushing a timber policy that allows them continued access to the nation's forests, a policy that President Bush's new Agriculture Secretary, Anne Veneman, has promoted in the past.

Damon has played a central role in many of the battles between environmentalists and commercial interests in southwestern Virginia. "You can't cross southwest Virginia without crossing national forest land, and you have to get a permit to do that," he says.

Road Warriors

Of growing concern to forest managers across the country is the convergence of America's love of motor vehicles with its love of the outdoors. According to data compiled by the Sierra Club, annual sales of vehicles designed to operate off roads doubled between 1991 and 1997, from 150,000 to 343,000. Sales of snowmobiles jumped from about 90,000 in 1992 to 170,000 in 1997. Throughout the country, owners of such vehicles are testing the limits of the federal government's ability to accommodate their desires, police activity on federal lands and support state economic interests.

Larry Tripp, a district ranger in the Boise National Forest, says all-terrain vehicles (ATVs) have exploded in popularity and represent a significant challenge for forest managers. Because it's a fairly new phenomenon, there are few trails designated for ATV users, and the trails that are available to them don't match their desires. "They've got a $5,000 piece of equipment and by God they're going to ride it, even if it's not where they're supposed to be," says Tripp. It's not just forest managers who are having trouble with ATV users. Environmentalists and other forest users-hikers, hunters, mountain bikers, horseback riders-don't generally want to share trails with the noisy vehicles. "It's not as significant a resource impact as it is a social impact," Tripp says, although ATVs certainly can damage the environment. The 2.6 million-acre forest's four law enforcement officers cannot possibly enforce trail restrictions against ATV users. "While the lack of law enforcement is a factor, it's by no means a solution," Tripp says. To try to manage the problem, Tripp organized a group that includes land and game managers from state and federal agencies in Idaho and the Idaho ATV Association to promote responsible ATV use. Through surveys and workshops, Tripp hopes to work out ATV policies that will be acceptable to most forest users.

The issue has a potentially significant economic impact in Idaho and other states where ATVs have become an issue. Because state fish and game agencies generally are funded through the sale of hunting licenses, and because much of the controversy is between hunters who use ATVs and those who don't, states have a strong incentive to accommodate both groups. "It's a situation most people wished would go away," says Tripp. "In the meantime, the number of sales keeps going up."

Many Challenges

The disagreements over public land use and values are reflected throughout the country, in Congress, and in the Forest Service itself. Given the extraordinary pressure on agency managers to justify controversial decisions, it is especially critical that they have good management tools by which to make and defend their actions-and that's where the agency's greatest weaknesses are, according to managers in the field and outside critics. The General Accounting Office was so concerned about the Forest Service's weak financial management systems that in January 1999 it added the agency to its list of agencies at high risk for waste, fraud, abuse and mismanagement. In a series of reports on Forest Service accountability in recent years, GAO has taken the agency to task for weak management and reporting systems, poor inventory records and an overall inability to account for billions of dollars worth of assets.

"We have been very critical of them in terms of their financial management systems, the lack of accountability, the lack of linkage between their mission and goals and the budget allocation process," says Barry Hill, director of GAO's natural resources and environment division. He credits Forest Service officials with making significant strides in straightening out their financial management system-last year the agency installed a new finance and accounting system-and the sustainability model promulgated in the new planning regulations gives field personnel better guidance for carrying out the agency's mission. That said, Congress itself is divided over the Forest Service's ecosystems management mission and that division leads to conflicting pressures on the agency.

"One of the concerns we still have is there's this lack of linkage between their strategic goals and objectives and their budget allocation process," says Hill. "The budget is basically not linked to their programmatic objectives. In fairness, it's a difficult thing to do and they're working on it, but they're not there yet. The employees out in the field are still feeling this disconnect and it's difficult for them to operate."

Forest Service Chief Financial Officer Vincette Goerl arrived at the agency in the fall of 1998, just before GAO added the Forest Service to the high-risk list. That designation went a long way toward motivating senior leaders to focus on improving management systems, she says. Subsequently, she has presided over a very aggressive schedule to implement an entirely new finance and accounting system and, at the same time, to substantially change financial management processes. Among her top concerns was the fact that the agency had not been reconciling its cash balances for years, and was off by about $2.6 billion from the Treasury Department's records. Each region essentially had its own policies and procedures; regions even defined direct and indirect costs differently, she said. One of her top priorities has been to standardize operations.

The changes haven't gone over well in the field. Dozens of managers at the forest level say they have no idea how much money they have in their budgets at any given time and cannot trust the accuracy of the data they do have. The new system has yet to be integrated with feeder systems, which provide financial data on purchasing, travel, timber sales and inventory management, among other things. Consequently, field offices use off-the-shelf finance software to keep track of their operations in what are known as "cuff records."

"If we didn't keep cuff records, I'd have no idea where we stand budget-wise. The level of frustration with this is intense," says one forest supervisor, echoing the sentiments of others interviewed for this story. In a survey conducted for the Federal Performance Report, managers across the agency complained overwhelmingly about their inability to pull useful data from the new financial management system.

Goerl says she is aware of the concerns, but is adamant the agency finally is making headway in achieving much needed financial accountability. The field offices have operated fairly autonomously, historically, and that has made upgrading the financial management system particularly problematic, she says. "The data people believed was accurate [in the past] was, in fact, not accurate." As feeder systems are upgraded over the next few years, and as people in the field become better trained in how to use the new system, she is confident they will agree.

Another major hurdle has been the fact that the agency had never completed an inventory of real property assets, such as the agency's 386,000-mile road system. The Forest Service has an $8.4 billion backlog on road maintenance and reconstruction. Assessing the value of the road system was impossible without the contract records associated with road upkeep. But the agency didn't start maintaining those records until 1995, when a new policy required managers to retain all documentation that would reflect changes in the value of assets, such as the addition of asphalt and culverts to roads. With GAO, the agency developed a methodology acceptable to auditors to assess the value of roads before 1995. As a result of the agreement with GAO, the Forest Service was making tremendous progress in conducting the real property inventory until last summer, when wildfires in the West diverted too many people to firefighting efforts. Goerl says the agency will probably have its first full inventory audit this year.

The Forest Service's efforts to clean up its books come as the Bush administration is eyeing ways to streamline the agency's field structure, administrative operations and overall workforce. In its 2002 budget preview, the administration suggested that "enterprise teams" are one approach to making the agency work better. In California forests, where the approach has been tested since 1998, teams of Forest Service experts in fields such as ecosystem analysis and trail development sell their services to individual forests, reducing the need for each forest to keep people with such skills in their permanent workforces.

Personnel Reform

The Forest Service received a 40 percent budget increase in 2001-its first real increase in years-prompted mainly by concerns in Congress about fire management following the 2000 fire season, the worst in a decade. The agency plans to hire 3,000 part-time and full-time new employees this year, in fire-fighting and fire mitigation positions. It would be a huge challenge for any agency to hire and train so many new people, and for the Forest Service, it will require a substantially improved personnel system, says Steve Nelson, director of human resources.

"The Forest Service is on the cusp of a lot of changes," says Nelson. He transferred to the Forest Service two years ago from the Defense Department's National Guard Bureau, in part because of the opportunity presented by the agency's evolving mission. "There's the potential to do great good here," and changing the personnel system will facilitate that, he says. He is overseeing a plan that will centralize human resources functions across the agency, automate classification and staffing functions and reduce from days to hours the time it takes to post job openings. Applicants also will be able to apply for jobs online.

The shift in human resources is critical to all the other changes at the agency, Nelson says. Revamping the personnel process not only will improve managers' ability to hire qualified people more quickly, but it will give human capital management a critical place in the agency's business planning. Like virtually every other federal agency, the Forest Service is facing a severe personnel crisis as large numbers of seasoned employees become eligible to retire in the next few years. "Human resources needs to be at the table-but first, it needs to earn the right to be at the table," says Nelson.

Not surprisingly, some field managers are skeptical that the new system will solve their personnel problems. "There's no question the system we have now isn't efficient," says one administrative officer in the Northwest. "If this new system works the way they're telling us it will work, I say 'Hallelujah'-and I'll be the first to admit that it works, if it works. But that's a big 'if.' I've got to tell you, there isn't a lot that comes out of headquarters that works as advertised." Changing that attitude may be the agency's biggest hurdle.