Greg Stanko
Deputy Director
Forest Products Industry National Labor Management Committee
(202) 729-4146

Non-fire programs at Forest Service face budget axe

(02/05/2008)

Dan Berman, E&E Daily editor

The Forest Service is looking more and more like the "Fire Service," at
least as far as the budget is concerned.

Wildfire-related spending accounts for 48 percent of the proposed fiscal
2009 agency budget the Bush administration released yesterday. Overall,
the White House requested a 7 percent cut, from $4.45 billion in fiscal
2008 to $4.1 billion.

Fire suppression, however, would see a $148 million increase to just
under $1 billion, a figure based on the 10-year average of fire
suppression costs. Last year, the Forest Service spent $1.4 billion
fighting fires nationwide, according to the National Interagency Fire
Center. The Interior Department spent an additional $450 million.

The proposed fiscal 2009 increase comes amid cuts to the state and
private forestry, fire preparedness and hazardous fuels reduction
accounts.

Agriculture Undersecretary Mark Rey said the cuts are difficult but
unavoidable. "Fighting fires is continuing to increase in cost, even
with cost-saving measures we've employed," Rey said in an interview.

"The wildland urban interface continues to grow. So yeah, if we are
going to continue to fight fires -- which I don't think is an optional
assignment -- in a flat budget environment, we will have to make tough
choices about what we fund," Rey said.

The budget would provide $297 million for hazardous fuels reduction
projects, down from $310 million in fiscal 2008, although the White
House notes its figure is "more than a fourfold increase" from 2000. Per
a settlement agreement, the budget proposes full funding for Northwest
Forest Plan timber sales at a goal of offering 800 million board feet of
timber.

Also on the chopping block: state and private forestry, down to $110
million from $263 million last year. Fire preparedness would fall to
$588 million from $666 million in fiscal 2008.

"The Forest Service has just gotten crushed," said House Interior
Appropriations Subcommittee Chairman Norm Dicks (D-Wash.).

"It's cut 16 percent ... and they don't have enough money over there to
do the trail work, the road work, the forestry with the states, the
conservation."

The proposal would also eliminate $40 million that Dicks placed in the
fiscal 2008 budget for road decommissioning and reclamation.

"We're getting many complaints in the state of Washington about the
trails not being fixed in the forests and the roads not being repaired
and campgrounds not being taken care of," Dicks said. "Sometimes people
forget the Forest Service provides as much, if not more, campground
facilities than our national parks. So to let it just deteriorate is
just not acceptable."

The Forest Legacy Program, which helps conserve threatened private
forests, would be cut $40 million to $12.5 million.

A USFS legislative proposal would create up to five "ecosystem services
demonstration projects" designed to use federal, state, tribal and
private partnerships to restore watersheds and other lands damaged by
catastrophic events and study the "flow and value of ecosystem services
from each project."

No land sales for rural schools
The White House threw up the white flag on a proposal to sell up to
300,000 acres of national forest land in order to provide money for
timber counties.

The Secure Rural Schools and Community Self-Determination Act is a 2000
law that paid out billions to compensate Western counties for the steep
decline in timber sales on federal lands in the 1990s, but the final
checks went out last year. The administration had proposed a highly
unpopular land sale plan the last two years, but the fiscal 2009 budget
proposal goes in a different direction.

The proposal would provide about $300 million from the Forest Service
and Bureau of Land Management over four years, targeted to the most
affected areas, and then capped and adjusted downward each year until
the money runs out in four years. Offsets are provided from within the
top line of the budget throughout the Agriculture Department, meaning
that if the budget were adopted without changes, checks would be mailed
from fiscal 2009 through fiscal 2012.

The budget request does not cover fiscal 2008, and the administration is
open to further negotiations on offsets.

"The better bet there is for us to engage Congress in a bilateral
dialogue, than for us to keep saying, 'What do you think about this one,
what do you think about that one?'" Rey said.

Allison Winter and Katherine Boyle contributed to this story.