Forest Health Bill a "Jobs" issue, former Forest Service boss says.

By SCOTT McMILLION Chronicle Staff Writer

The healthy forests bill signed by President Bush last week won't stop wildfires, but it will put a lot of people on the government payroll, according to the man who ran the nation's two biggest land management agencies during the Clinton administration.

"We're probably sitting on a local jobs bill second to none'' since the Civilian Conservation Corps, a 1930s jobs program, Mike Dombeck said Friday.

He addressed well over 200 people gathered for the annual meeting of the Montana Wilderness Association.

Dombeck ran the Bureau of Land Management, then the U.S. Forest Service during the Clinton years. He is now a professor at the University of Wisconsin.

The healthy forest initiative is a measure the Bush administration touts as a way to reduce the severity of wildfires. It calls for spending up to $760 million a year to remove fuels from overgrown stands of trees.

Most environmentalists decry it as a giveaway to the timber industry by reducing public input and environmental review. The administration wants to pay for removal of small fuels by selling bigger trees that are worth money.

A century of firefighting, especially the snuffing of millions of small fires before they become large ones, has altered the makeup of forests in the West.

"We have changed a lot," Dombeck told the crowd at the GranTree Inn.

Removing those fuels is labor intensive and will employ a lot of people, he said. But choosing where to do that work is critical.

"The most important thing you can do" is treat land within 200 feet of homes, he said.

The forest health bill directs that half of any fuel reductions be close to communities, but all of it must be on federal land. The rest can be in the backcountry. Few homes stand within 200 feet of a forest boundary.

Still, the Bush administration has an opportunity to show sincerity and put resources where they can do some good, Dombeck said. If it doesn't then little will be accomplished and forest health will become a "black hat" issue and cause even more gridlock.

Forests evolved with fire and the nation needs to "completely rethink our relationship with fire and the land," he said.

"When do we fight fire? When it's the hardest and most expensive," he said. "When does the fire season end? When it rains. What do we do when we suppress fire? We save it to burn another year."

The Bush administration had already installed a number of changes in how it runs timber programs, but "not a single load of logs has gone down the road yet" as a result, said Gordy Sanders, of Pyramid Mountain Lumber in Seeley Lake.

And removing small trees and brush -- the intensely flammable materials that carry flames in a dry year -- is very expensive. It costs about $500 a truckload to get them out of the woods, Sanders said.

Thirty sawmills have closed their doors in Montana since the 1970s, he said. His mill now saws 10 percent federal timber. In the 1970s, 70 percent to 90 percent came from the national forest.

But relying too heavily on timber or other extractive industries for Montana's economy is a mistake, said Brian Schweitzer, a Democrat running for governor. None of the Republican candidates accepted invitations to speak.

Some of those candidates say the state's economy will grow when people can "drill more, cut more and dig more," Schweitzer said. "They're wrong."

The wood products industry employs only about 6,000 people in the state, Schweitzer noted, and growth is coming in small businesses in the state's scenic areas close to public land.

The MWA convention ends this weekend.

Reader Comments