USA: All about the state of the US Forest Service that Obama inherits

Throughout the 20th century, the Forest Service’s mission was to
provide wood for a growing nation. But economic changes and
environmental issues — think spotted owl — caused timber harvests to
drop from 12 billion board-feet in the late 1980s to 3 billion today.
Nothing replaced that mission, says Andy Stahl, executive director of
Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics. Instead, by
default, the agency became the “Fire Service,” with about half its
budget relegated to firefighting. And while expectations from
industry, the public and collaborative partners have continued to
increase under Bush, funding for everything from wilderness and
recreation programs to law enforcement and wildlife has not. This
year, Wyoming’s Bridger-Teton National Forest was forced to cut
programs for wildlife management and road engineering, among other
things, while staff reductions — largely due to not replacing lost
staff — have become common in many districts.

Many forests, including
those in New Mexico, Montana, Nevada and California, have seen funding
yanked from fire-prevention programs, such as fuel-reduction and
wildfire research. In August, even after the Forest Service had
received $332 million in emergency supplemental funding, forest chief
Abigail Kimbell pulled $400 million from a variety of non-fire-related
activities. Research projects were halted, forest-planning projects
discontinued and employee travel and training denied. Meanwhile, total
employment numbers within the agency have fluctuated in recent years —
from 35,902 in 2004 to 32,674 in 2007 to 37,586 in 2008 — but one
number stands out: In 2004, only 2.9 percent of the agency’s workforce
was classified as temporary full-time. By 2008, that percentage had
jumped to 15.4 percent. Forest Service employees were also whacked by
two Bush administration initiatives: The competitive outsourcing
initiative, which would have privatized about two-thirds of the
agency’s workforce, and the consolidation of personnel offices to
Albuquerque, N.M. The outsourcing initiative was cut short, but
beginning three years ago, personnel employees from regional and field
offices were faced with the decision to either relocate or leave their
jobs. Rather than alleviate administrative tangles, the consolidation
has spawned new complications: All employees must now deal with their
own paperwork — related to travel, for example, or new hires — or else
run it through the Albuquerque office, which Stahl says has become a
“black hole” thanks in part to a poorly designed computer system. And
while an estimated 800 employees work there, no one could answer HCN’s
questions about current employment and attrition numbers. Instead, the
requests ended up being routed through Washington, D.C., and an office
in Arkansas. http://www.hcn.org/issues/40.23/up-in-smoke?utm_source=wcn1&utm_medium=email

Posted via email from Deane’s posterous