Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
demonstration restoration projects, such as those undertaken in the Blue Ridge
Demonstration, but managers and stakeholders in the White Mountains were faced
with a major financial obstacle when planning for long-term treatments across tens to
hundreds of thousands of acres. One policy mechanism used to address this issue was
the use of “goods for services” authorities (for a description of specific stewardship
contracting authorities, see Moseley and Davis 2010), which allowed the revenues
generated from the sale of merchantable trees removed (generally those at least twelve
inches in diameter) to be used as an offset against the costs of removing nonmer-
chantable material. While this arrangement lowered per-acre costs compared to res-
toration thinning treatments conducted under traditional policy arrangements, it still
left a significant gap averaging $550 per acre.
Two mechanisms were envisioned to help pay for restoration costs associated with
the WMSC. First, because the stewardship contract represented a long-term agree-
ment rather than a fixed, short-term project, the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forests
were able to immediately apply monies remaining in the National Forest System at
the end of each fiscal year to on-the-ground projects. This allowed them to obtain
funds that other forests would have difficulty using because of the time and prepara-
tion required to set up a new service contract (Sitko and Hurteau 2010). Second, the
long-term nature of the WMSC provided impetus for local businesses to invest in cap-
ital improvements, which were expected to drive treatment costs down over time as
markets for restoration by-products expanded.
While average per-acre costs for restoration have remained stable during the first
years of the contract (GAO 2008), Sitko and Hurteau (2010) point out that in many
cases this represents a greater amount of restoration work for the money invested. This
is an impressive gain considering this period coincided with an almost unprecedented
downturn in the national wood products market. The first years of the contract also
coincided with major cost overruns in the Forest Service's fire suppression duties at
the national level, which were paid for partially by spending money from other pro-
grams, including those that would have supported treatments under the WMSC. Per-
sonnel changes within the Forest Service bureaucracy after the initial years of the
project resulted in declining internal agency support for the project, which meant
that less and less of the potentially available funding was allocated to the WMSC.
More than any other factor, a lack of adequate funding has limited the Apache-
Sitgreaves National Forests' ability to realize the large-scale restoration vision articu-
lated in 2004.
Building Markets
The WMSC was designed with the idea that forest restoration activities and local eco-
nomic development could support one another in a synergistic relationship. While
White Mountains communities retained a small proportion of their wood processing
capacity through the tumultuous years of the 1990s, they also made sustained invest-
ments in building local capacity for small-diameter wood utilization. This local ca-
pacity—in the form of integrated networks of sawmills, post and pole plants, and a
