The following appeared in the Spring 2002 edition of the Cascade Update.

Charter forests offer public lands solution

By Randal O’Toole

President Bush’s 2003 budget for the Forest Service promises a charter forest proposal that could highlight innovative solutions for public lands management. The idea has drawn cautious support from members of Congress on both sides of the aisle. Predictably, certain environmental groups have vowed to “stop this dangerous proposal” even though they admit they don’t know much about it.

The proposal would establish “forests or portions of forests as separate entities, outside of the existing [Forest Service] structure and reporting to a local trust entity for oversight.” Similar to the charter school concept, charter forests may be exempt from the reams of manuals, handbooks, and other internally generated rules that have gridlocked the agency with, as Forest Service Chief Dale Bosworth describes it, “analysis paralysis.”

The Forest Service was once reputed to be the best agency in the federal government. Fifty years ago Newsweek magazine called it “one of Uncle Sam’s soundest and most businesslike investments.” Featuring Smokey the Bear on its cover, Newsweek’s June 2, 1952 issue noted that Forest Service management of the national forests earned a profit, was untouched by scandal, and produced enormous watershed, recreation, and wildlife benefits.

In 1975, when I began studying the Forest Service, almost everyone still believed the agency made money on timber sales and that those sales were good for wildlife, recreation, and other resources. I soon learned that national forests actually lost money on most of the timber they sold; they just covered it up with Enron-like bookkeeping. By 1980 other researchers found that national forest timber sales were harmful to many species of wildlife, water quality, salmon, and the most valuable forms of outdoor recreation.

It took me several more years to figure out why the Forest Service did so much harm to the forests it had promised to protect. Congress gave the Forest Service tax dollars to arrange timber sales, but told the agency to fund reforestation and other post-sale activities out of the timber receipts. Agency managers soon learned to maximize timber sales in order to fund an array of programs, often spending the full amount of timber receipts, leaving nothing to return to the Treasury.

In 1991, for example, northeastern Oregon’s Wallowa-Whitman National Forest spent $6.8 million of taxpayer funds on timber sales for which it collected $9.7 million in revenues. But instead of returning those revenues to the taxpayers, the forest spent them on reforestation and other activities.

The budgetary system was perverse in many ways. Because the money was spent mainly on restoration, the more damage timber sales did, the more money managers got to keep. Officials responsible for wildlife, recreation, and watershed became timber sale backers because some of the money could be spent on those resources, even though the net effect of the sales was harmful to them. Every level of the agency’s hierarchy had a stake in the below-cost timber sale program because as much as a third of the money went for overhead. It was a system designed to spiral out of control, and it did until it collapsed of its own weight and internal discontent as national forest timber sales declined by 80 percent in the early 1990s.

Now another perverse incentive rules the agency: fire suppression. Congress has a history of giving the Forest Service a blank check for putting out fires. Forest managers have known for decades that some fires should be allowed to burn for the good of forest ecosystems. But with an increasingly gargantuan share of the bureaucracy dependent on the blank check that comes around each fire season, the Forest Service blindingly puts out all fires. The northern Washington fire that killed four firefighters last July was in a remote area that forest planners had declared “off-limits” to fire suppression. But when the fire started, the fire bureaucracy never looked at the plans, it just started spending money.

Today, even Chief Bosworth agrees the agency is broken, but few agree about how to fix it. Fortunately, there are many promising ideas.

In This Sovereign Land, University of Montana Professor Dan Kemmis suggests that national forest problems are due to the agency’s tendency to promote polarization rather than cooperation. Kemmis urges the agency to give more decision-making power to collaborative groups of resource users, environmentalists, and other interests. Kemmis points to the Applegate Partnership, in which timber industry and environmental interests in southern Oregon tried to work out a compromise plan for the Siskiyou National Forest, as an example of how such collaborative groups can work.

UC-Berkeley Professor Sally Fairfax thinks the federal government can learn from states that operate their lands as fiduciary trusts. In The State Trust Lands, Fairfax and co-author Jon Souder point out trusts have clearer goals and stricter management standards. As a result, they often operate more efficiently and with less controversy than the federal land agencies. Oregon and Washington state forest trusts earn millions of dollars in profits for schools each year. Washington recently set aside thousands of acres of land from timber cutting by selling cutting rights to an environmental group, something the Forest Service has refused to do.

My own proposal is to fund forests out of a share of their receipts rather than out of tax dollars. This would force managers to be both efficient and responsive to users, not to congressional appropriators.

There is no consensus on which ideas are correct, but none are mutually exclusive. At least two broad-based groups, the Idaho Federal Lands Task Force and the Forest Options Group, have proposed to test these ideas singly and in various combinations on individual forests.

Bush Administration sources say they included the charter forest idea in the 2003 budget in response to these and other calls for such tests. Rather than endorse any particular idea, the administration is providing a wide-open opportunity to test any and all ideas that make sense. As there are more than 100 national forests, there are plenty of opportunities for a variety of tests.

Congress should grant the Forest Service broad discretion to explore alternative ways of managing national forests. Experiments that are successful can help us improve on-the-ground management and relieve controversies not only on the national forests but also on the other 440 million acres of national parks, wildlife refuges and other federal lands.