MISSOULA - Missoula County on Thursday rolled out the draft of a letter headed to the U.S. Department of Agriculture stating the value of the U.S. Forest Service's Region 1 office in Missoula while raising concerns about the agency's proposed consolidation.
Thursday also marked the 115th anniversary of the Big Burn, when fires raged across the Northern Rockies. Add it up and local foresters, retired land managers and elected officials are voicing concern about a federal proposal to eliminate the nation's regional Forest Service offices and consolidate them in hubs far removed from the lands they will manage.
“It seems intuitive that Forest Service management and leadership is best located close to the public lands they manage,” said Mike Burnside with Conservation Matters – a group of retired land managers. “It doesn't seem workable to have everyone reporting to the D.C. office or five offices somewhere else. We don't see that as being workable.”
The Forest Service operates 10 regional offices across the country. Under the proposal released by the Trump administration last month, those offices would close and consolidate into five hubs located in Utah, Colorado, Indiana, North Carolina and Missouri.
The Northern Region Headquarters in Missoula — one of the nation's oldest and most storied — would close.
“The local presence of the Northern Region Headquarters provides immense benefit to our communities and surrounding National Forest lands,” the county wrote. “As such, please consider retaining the current USFS regional office structure.”
While the letter remains in draft form, it's addressed to Secretary Brooke Rollins. In it, the county cited a number of benefits for maintaining the Region 1 office, including access to local experts, agency collaboration and management decisions.
Diverting the latter to a new hub located hundreds of miles away “will inevitably lead to inefficiencies and slow the response to the complex needs of these forests, public lands and the people who depend upon them.”
The county added that regional ranchers and farmers also depend upon programs under the National Resources Conservation Service, which would also be affected by the Department of Agriculture's consolidation.
“There's been no analysis of what this reorganization looks to achieve. If it's about efficiency, it fails that test because it will be more inefficient,” said Jim Burchfield, the retired dean of the School of Forestry at the University of Montana. “Does this enable the Forest Service to achieve its mission, which is to sustain the nation's forests? The public is not going to be able to engage the Forest Service as required by law.”
The federal government owns 58% of the land in Missoula County. The Northern Region Headquarters spans 25 million acres across Montana, Idaho, Washington and portions of South and North Dakota.
Carolyn Upton, former Lolo National Forest supervisor, said Region 1 includes the supervisor's office, the Missoula Ranger District, the Northern Regional Headquarters, the National Development and Technology Center, the Missoula Fire Science Lab and the forestry program at the University of Montana — one of the nation's top programs.
The loss of Region 1 would spell disaster on the ground, Upton said.
“Who's going to do the work?” she said. “With less people and less staff, who's going to do the work that people expect?”
Missoula County Commissioner Dave Strohmaier, a former wildland firefighter, said that while decentralizing services as proposed by the Trump administration isn't always a bad thing, consolidating the Forest Service's regional offices into distant hubs actually serves as a new form of consolidation.
He said it would have negative impacts on on-the-ground work.
“This marks the 115th anniversary of the Big Burn fires of 1910. Ironically, it was the impetus of redoubling efforts on fire suppression on federal lands,” Strohmaier said. “There is a lot of forest restoration work, mission work to be done, in some respects to counterbalance the fire suppression we've done on the landscape over the past 100 years. At a time when there's so much work to be done, this (consolidation) seems to be a move in the wrong direction.”
