[Senate Hearing 106-785]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
S. Hrg. 106-785
THE U.S. FOREST SERVICE:
TAKING A CHAIN SAW TO SMALL BUSINESS
=======================================================================
HEARING
BEFORE THE
COMMITTEE ON SMALL BUSINESS
UNITED STATES SENATE
ONE HUNDRED SIXTH CONGRESS
SECOND SESSION
__________
OCTOBER 4, 2000
Printed for the Committee on Small Business
______
U.S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE
68-240 WASHINGTON : 2001
_______________________________________________________________________
For sale by the Superintendent of Documents, Congressional Office
U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC 20402
COMMITTEE ON SMALL BUSINESS
.........................................................
ONE HUNDRED SIXTH CONGRESS
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CHRISTOPHER S. BOND, Missouri, Chairman
CONRAD BURNS, Montana JOHN F. KERRY, Massachusetts
ROBERT F. BENNETT, Utah CARL LEVIN, Michigan
OLYMPIA J. SNOWE, Maine TOM HARKIN, Iowa
MICHAEL ENZI, Wyoming JOSEPH I. LIEBERMAN, Connecticut
PETER G. FITZGERALD, Illinois PAUL D. WELLSTONE, Minnesota
MIKE CRAPO, Idaho MAX CLELAND, Georgia
GEORGE V. VOINOVICH, Ohio MARY LANDRIEU, Louisiana
SPENCER ABRAHAM, Michigan JOHN EDWARDS, North Carolina
VACANCY
Emilia DiSanto, Staff Director
Paul Cooksey, Chief Counsel
Patricia R. Forbes, Democratic Staff Director and Chief Counsel
C O N T E N T S
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Opening Statements
Page
Enzi, The Honorable Michael B., a United States Senator from
Wyoming........................................................ 1
Crapo, The Honorable Michael D., a United States Senator from
Idaho.......................................................... 9
Burns, The Honorable Conrad, a United States Senator from Montana 20
Witness Testimony
Thomas, The Honorable Craig, a United States Senator from Wyoming 24
Craig, The Honorable Larry, a United States Senator from Idaho... 26
Hurst, Jim, President, Owens & Hurst Lumber, Co., Inc., Eureka,
Montana........................................................ 28
Bousman, Joel E., Cattle Rancher, Boulder, Wyoming, and Regional
Vice President, Wyoming Stockgrowers Association, Casper,
Wyoming........................................................ 36
Tinsley, Del, Owner/Publisher, Wyoming Livestock Roundup, Casper,
Wyoming, and Member, Advisory Board, University of Wyoming
College of Agriculture, Laramie, Wyoming....................... 48
Bukowsky, Al, Owner/Operator, Solitude River Trips, Salmon, Idaho 159
Van Tassell, Larry W., Professor and Head, Department of
Agricultural Economics and Rural Sociology, University of
Idaho, Moscow, Idaho........................................... 182
McKillop, William, Professor Emeritus, College of Natural
Resources, University of California-Berkeley, Berkeley,
California..................................................... 190
Furnish, James R., Deputy Chief, National Forest System, Forest
Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Washington, D.C....... 201
Alphabetical Listing and Appendix Material Submitted
Bousman, Joel E.
Testimony.................................................... 36
Prepared statement........................................... 38
Bukowsky, Al
Testimony.................................................... 159
Prepared statement........................................... 165
Burns, The Honorable Conrad
Opening statement............................................ 20
Prepared statement........................................... 22
Craig, The Honorable Larry
Testimony.................................................... 26
Crapo, The Honorable Michael D.
Opening statement............................................ 9
Prepared statement and attachment............................ 11
Post-hearing questions posed to Mr. Furnish.................. 212
Enzi, The Honorable Michael B.
Opening statement............................................ 1
Prepared statement........................................... 4
Post-hearing questions posed to Mr. Dombeck.................. 210
Furnish, James R.
Testimony.................................................... 201
Prepared statement........................................... 203
Hurst, Jim
Testimony.................................................... 8
Subsequent submission for the record......................... 35
McKillop, William
Testimony.................................................... 190
Prepared statement........................................... 197
Thomas, The Honorable Craig
Testimony.................................................... 24
Tinsley, Del
Testimony.................................................... 48
Prepared statement and attachment............................ 54
Van Tassell, Larry W.
Testimony.................................................... 182
Prepared statement........................................... 185
Comments for the Record
Cook, Adena, Public Lands Director, Blue Ribbon Coalition Inc.,
Idaho Falls, Idaho, letter..................................... 216
Eaton, The Honorable Craig D., Mayor, Town of Eureka, Montana,
letter......................................................... 220
Finch, Wayne, Rexford, Montana, letter........................... 222
Johnson, Shirley May, Fortine, Montana, letter................... 224
Kvenild, J.R., Broker, Western Land Service, Casper, Wyoming,
letter......................................................... 229
Marvel, The Honorable Bill F., Mayor, Town of Rexford, Montana,
letter......................................................... 230
Panek, Jerry, Owner, Predator 4WD, LLC, Colorado Springs,
Colorado, statement............................................ 231
Radish, Danny, Eureka, Montana, letter........................... 236
Thoman, Mary E., Thoman Ranch--Southwestern Wyoming Ranchers,
Kemmerer, Wyoming, statement................................... 237
Safari Club International, Herndon, Virginia, statement.......... 238
Taylor, David T., and Roger H. Coupal, Cooperative Extension
Service, College of Agriculture, Department of Agricultural and
Applied Economics, University of Wyoming, Laramie, Wyoming,
statement and attachment....................................... 242
West, Rosetta, Eureka, Montana, letter........................... 250
THE U.S. FOREST SERVICE:
TAKING A CHAIN SAW TO SMALL BUSINESS
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WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 4, 2000
United States Senate,
Committee on Small Business,
Washington, D.C.
The Committee met, pursuant to notice, at 9:35 a.m., in
room SR-428A, Russell Senate Office Building, the Honorable
Michael Enzi presiding.
Present: Senators Burns, Enzi, and Crapo.
OPENING STATEMENT OF THE HONORABLE MICHAEL B. ENZI, A UNITED
STATES SENATOR FROM WYOMING
Senator Enzi. I will call to order this meeting of the
United States Senate Committee on Small Business. The topic
today is the U.S. Forest Service: Taking a Chain Saw to Small
Business. I would like to thank Chairman Bond and his staff for
their tremendous help in making this hearing possible. Through
his Committee's leadership we hopefully will be able to shed
new light on the workings of the U.S. Forest Service and will
be able to begin the necessary steps to increase the agency's
accountability to American small businesses.
I am looking forward to hearing what the participants will
have to say today. I feel they have important stories that for
far too long have been pushed aside in the rush by many
national organizations to dominate public policy on Federal
Public Lands.
As a former small business owner myself, I can personally
attest to the huge impact the Forest Service can have on the
economies of Wyoming and on other western communities--on our
homes, our schools, the communities that are built in and
around the forest. Our income often depends on being able to
access these lands in order to harvest trees, minerals, natural
gas, and other important resources. We use the forests to heat
our homes, to graze our sheep and cattle, and for visitors.
At the same time, one of our Nation's best resources for
restoring forest health, the private small business sector, has
been effectively shut out and denied access to their own public
lands. Over the last decade Federal timber harvests nationwide
have decreased by 75 percent.
Now I hear the statistics about how much money comes in
from recreation and how much less the money is that comes in
from timber. We used to do both of those. We used to get the
revenue from both of those, but there has been a 75-percent
decrease in one of them. Because most of the larger, more
successful forest products companies rely on their own private
source of timber, the decrease in timber sales has directly
impacted small, family-owned and operated companies. And while
this important source of timber has consistently dwindled, the
demand for wood in the United States has continued to increase.
The near elimination of Federal timber harvest in the West
has created a void in the market that has been filled by two
main sources: timber harvested on private lands in the
Southeast United States and lumber imported from Canada and
other foreign countries. We are probably eliminating some
important animals in other countries.
As a result of this trend, private landowners in the
Southeast are now overharvesting in order to meet the current
demand for wood products, and imports from Canada now exceed 35
percent of our domestic lumber supply. Once again it is the
small logging, hauling and sawing companies that have not been
able to involve themselves in these new market sources.
The same effect can be felt in other industries as the
Forest Service continues to substitute paperwork for land
management. Ranchers who lose vital grazing leases find
themselves with no remaining recourse but to subdivide and sell
their third-generation ranches to developers so that urban
sprawl has taken the place of elk and antelope.
Other witnesses will discuss the impact on recreation and
how the Forest Service is shutting down outfitters and guides.
We will even hear how this agency has impacted the publishing
industry by forcing the price of paper to jump dramatically in
just the past year.
Could all of these threats have been avoided? No. There are
always risks in any business, but while most businesses have
control over at least some of the elements of their success or
failure, those small businesses that are forced to work with
the U.S. Forest Service too often have found themselves on the
outside of any planning process that could affect their future.
One prime example that I believe demonstrates the Forest
Service's serious neglect of small business involvement can be
found in the way the agency has painfully avoided complying
with the Regulatory Flexibility Act, or RFA, in the development
of its Proposed National Forest System Land and Resources
Management Plan, the Forest Transportation System
Administration, and in Roadless Area Conservation regulations.
Over the past several years the General Accounting Office
and the Forest Service have worked to assess the Forest
Service's inefficiencies and lack of accountability as it
manages our National Forests. Together, these agencies have
identified a weak decisionmaking process and failure by the
Forest Service to develop the strategic long-term goals.
One would think that an agency, struggling like the Forest
Service is to develop an adequate planning process and to
increase its accountability and performance, would embrace a
statute like the Regulatory Flexibility Act. The RFA clearly
lays out an analytical process for determining how to best
achieve public policy objectives without unduly burdening small
businesses.
The Forest Service, however, has gone out of its way and
has performed all sorts of regulatory gymnastics to keep small
businesses out of its decisionmaking process. I believe the
Forest Service has attempted to twist the law and to abdicate
its responsibilities under RFA by dividing or bifurcating its
rulemaking process so that its rules fall within two allowable
exceptions to completing a Regulatory Flexibility Analysis.
It was not the intention of Congress to allow Federal
agencies to use bureaucratic rulemaking equivocation to
circumvent its duties to small business. When Congress
established the RFA, it did so with the goal that small
businesses have a voice in the rulemaking process so that those
who could least afford the layer upon layer of regulatory
burdens could help find a less onerous method of accomplishing
the agency's goals.
I will not place all of the blame for this situation on
this agency, but must state that if the agency is operating
within its legal bounds to twist the process so that it can
ignore its small business constituents, then I believe Congress
should step forward to amend the RFA to close any loophole that
may exist. It was not our intention for the Forest Service to
be unaccountable and we must ensure that this situation is
corrected.
I would argue, however, that the U.S. Forest Service is
accountable and that the agency is failing in its statutory
duties under the RFA to consult with small businesses in the
development of its rules and regulations, and that the Forest
Service has failed to further comply with the statute by
failing to develop less onerous alternatives that do not
sacrifice economic stability. You may be assured I will
investigate this issue further.
In closing, I must state that I do not believe a healthy
forest and a healthy economy are mutually exclusive. In fact, I
would go so far as to say that healthy forests and healthy
economies are interdependent and that without a strong local
economy, the U.S. Forest Service will find itself unable to
meet the demands that will be placed on the agency in the next
century.
[The prepared statement of Senator Enzi follows:]
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Senator Enzi. I defer to Senator Crapo.
OPENING STATEMENT OF THE HONORABLE MICHAEL D. CRAPO, A UNITED
STATES SENATOR FROM IDAHO
Senator Crapo. Thank you very much, Chairman Enzi, and I
have a full statement which I will submit for the record and I
will try to make my remarks brief.
I thank the Small Business Committee and Chairman Bond for
allowing this important issue to be addressed before this
Committee. It may be unusual for many people to see the Small
Business Committee examining forest policies but as you will
see today, there is a very direct impact and a critical issue
that is now very evident.
We know that, in the past, the Forest Service policies have
had a negative impact on small businesses throughout the
Nation. It is my hope that, through efforts such as this
hearing and others, the Forest Service can be made accountable
for fulfilling its mission while allowing interested
stakeholders to effectively participate in the policymaking
process.
In Idaho we have more than 20-million acres of National
Forest land, which is 10 percent of the National Forest System.
Everytime that the Forest Service issues and carries out a
proposal, businesses in Idaho will be affected. There is no way
around that.
But what we can strive for is a process whereby the Forest
Service actively engages those people who are affected by its
land
management policies in order to foster active environmental
stewardship of our public lands and resources without harming
the economy.
Today that type of cooperation between the Forest Service
and the small businesses is absent. As stated in the Small
Business Administration's Office of Advocacy statement on July
17, 2000, to the Forest Service which, Mr. Chairman, I would
like to submit for the record:
The public has an interest in knowing the potential
economic impact of a particular proposed regulation. . . .
Providing the public with a complete economic analysis that
fully discloses the potential impact of the action and
considers less burdensome alternatives not only complies with
the requirements of the RFA, it also complies with the basic
tenets of sound public policy that balance conflicting
interests.
The Federal Regulatory Flexibility Act, the RFA, of 1980
which was later strengthened by the passage of the Small
Business Regulatory Enforcement Fairness Act of 1996, directs
government agencies to conduct a series of analyses describing
the impact of a
proposed rule if it will have a significant economic impact on
a substantial number of small entities.
As a result, agencies must determine whether a rule is
expected to have a significant economic impact on small
businesses. It is apparent that the Forest Service has
repeatedly acted in a manner that contradicts the law of the
land. It has failed to adequately and accurately account for
the direct or indirect financial or other effects that a
proposed action would have on small businesses.
For example, on May 10, 2000, the Forest Service published
a proposed rule on Roadless Area Conservation. Unbelievably,
the Forest Service has argued that this proposed rulemaking
would not have a significant economic impact on a substantial
number of small businesses and therefore that it is not
required to comply with the requirements of the Small Business
Regulatory Enforcement Fairness Act.
Again citing the Office of Advocacy's letter to the Forest
Service, ``case law and the facts support a finding that the
impact of the proposal is indeed direct, not indirect,'' as the
Forest Service argued. Therefore, the RFA necessitates total
compliance by the Forest Service.
In this example, the Forest Service's Initial Regulatory
Flexibility Analysis did not adequately address the issue of
economic impact. A full, detailed economic analysis of the
impact of the Forest Service's policies should be completed
prior to the finalizing of any such proposals.
This roadless proposal reaches far and wide, but other
policies pursued by the Forest Service challenge the resolve of
small businesses on a daily basis. Among many others, the
recreation, timber, logging, ranching and mining industries
have been imposed upon with the onerous burden of defending
themselves against these rules.
From national policies such as the roadless rule, draft
transportation plan, strategic plan, and the cost recovery
rule, to regional and local plans, the Forest Service is
showing a disregard for the impact of its policies on small
businesses. The Federal Government has an obligation to ensure
that its policies will not have an unwarranted effect on
individuals. The Forest Service is not meeting that obligation.
Although the Forest Service may contend that many of its
policies are a result of other environmental laws like the
Endangered Species Act or the Clean Water Act, I disagree.
Closing access may be the easiest way to comply with outside
factors, but it is not the right way to do it. It may take more
effort but the Forest Service should and can work together with
interested parties to address both environmental and economic
concerns.
I want to thank the witnesses for your participation in
this hearing and look forward to your testimony. Your input
based on your personal experiences will be particularly helpful
as we further investigate this issue.
I also want to thank Senator Craig and Senator Thomas for
their participation in this hearing. As chairman of Senate
Subcommittees, which have jurisdiction over these issues, I
look forward to their insight on these issues. Thank you, Mr.
Chairman.
[The prepared statement and attachment of Senator Crapo
follow:]
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Senator Enzi. Senator Burns.
OPENING STATEMENT OF THE HONORABLE CONRAD BURNS, A UNITED
STATES SENATOR FROM MONTANA
Senator Burns. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I want to
thank Senator Thomas and Senator Craig for coming this morning.
We sit together on the Energy and Natural Resource Committee
and of course our dialog with the Forest Service is ongoing
about every time we have a Committee hearing.
Just to give you an idea on how the relationship between
Congress and the Forest Service and also the local people that
live in communities in and around our National Forests has
deteriorated, yesterday in Interior Appropriations we
eliminated the funds for the second time for the assistant
secretary of agriculture that is in charge of the Forest
Service, and for good reason. It is just an indication of the
erosion in the communications between the Forest Service that
is here in this town and the foresters on the ground in our
different communities.
I believe it is vitally important that we focus
specifically on how these policies that are set by the Forest
Service are hurting our businesses in and around our forests.
Whenever there is a change proposed for the use of public
land, we always have to do an EIS, an environmental impact
statement. Well, we can turn environmental into economic and
that is going to have to be done, too, in order to give an
overall view of the effects these decisions have on this
country.
People are being put out of work and today we are going to
see real people with real faces that have real concerns about
their businesses and the people who work in those businesses.
We are small businesses in Montana. Ninety-nine percent of
our businesses in Montana are 100 employees or less. So we know
what it is like. New rules have reduced the amount of timber
harvested from our public lands by over 90 percent in the last
10 years. New rules have blocked new roads from being built.
New rules have reduced grazing allotments on public lands. The
current rules have punished our outfitters and guides and left
them with virtually no economic stability.
I want to give you an example and it is sitting right here.
This is from a tree that lies 50 feet off the road. It is dead.
It died of pine bark beetle and there are thousands and
thousands of board feet available within a rope's throw of a
road that can be harvested to keep our mills alive and lumber
flowing for our consumers.
There have been no plans, none at all, no effort made by
the Forest Service in order to deal with this situation. And
this log, this piece, comes from just a few miles from where
American Timber shut down their mill this last year. It went
out of business early this year and now we have another mill
that is not very far away from it that is cutting back on their
employees.
This is letting a natural resource just go to waste. Not
only do we not have access to the resource but also our
infrastructure and the base of employees has also eroded and
pretty soon those folks will be gone.
So I will submit my full statement, Mr. Chairman. I am glad
that Jim Hurst is here today from up in Eureka country. I
promised him one thing, that we would have him out of here so
he would be home to watch his son play football on Friday
night, and we are going to do that.
I thank you for having this hearing and my congratulations
to Senator Bond for facilitating it.
[The prepared statement of Senator Burns follows:]
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Senator Crapo. So this hearing is going to go till Friday
afternoon?
Senator Burns. Yes, we are going to be here until we get it
all ironed out. Did you bring a lunch?
Senator Enzi. I want to thank everybody who is
participating today. I particularly want to thank this first
panel, our distinguished colleagues from the committee of
jurisdiction. We are handling a very small part of the issue,
the small business issue. Of course, in each of your States
small businesses actually, by Federal definition, would
probably be about 98 percent of the businesses, so it is not
that small a part of the economy. We have a lot of discussions
in this Committee here about what small business is and 500
employees seems pretty big to us in Wyoming.
It is my pleasure to welcome the Senior Senator from
Wyoming, Senator Thomas, and the Senior Senator from Idaho,
Senator Craig. Senator Thomas, would you like to begin?
STATEMENT OF THE HONORABLE CRAIG THOMAS, A UNITED STATES
SENATOR FROM WYOMING
Senator Thomas. All right, Mr. Chairman. Thank you.
First of all, I want to thank you for having this hearing.
I appreciate it very much. All of us are concerned, of course,
about these issues and the impacts that Forest Service policy
has on small business and indeed on all we do in our States.
Both Senator Enzi and Senator Craig and I were in Billings,
Montana, with Senator Burns recently and heard these kinds of
things very directly as they related to the fire damages, and
so on, so I think it is great to do this.
Obviously all of us are concerned about this issue. The
preservation of the resource is, of course, very high on all of
our agendas. I grew up right outside the Shoshone National
Forest in Cody, Wyoming, and I am very glad the forest is there
and I want to work to protect it the best that I can. Certainly
the first purpose is to do that but the second is to allow the
owners of that forest to participate in it, to enjoy it, to
have access to it, and I think that is really what we are
talking about here.
This administration has moved steadily toward cutting off
access. Whether it is the EPA, whether it is the White House
Council on Environmental Quality, whether it is the Department
of the Interior, whether in this case it is the Department of
Agriculture, I think clearly there has been an overt movement
to reduce access to these lands.
All of us here this morning, of course, understand the
importance of public land access. In our State 50 percent of
the State belongs to the Federal Government. It is higher than
that in some of your States. So it has a great deal of impact
on all of us and what we do and on our economy, of course.
We recognize that these lands are in different Federal
ownership categories. I happen to be chairman of the National
Parks Subcommittee. Park lands are operated differently. We
have wilderness areas that are operated differently. But the
point I want to make is that many national forest lands are
multiple use lands and that is what they were designed to be
and indeed can be if they, I think, if they are managed
properly. I am talking about hunting, hiking, visiting.
You know, it was interesting when the roadless proposal
came up, the kinds of people that you heard from. You would
think first of all it might be those who had direct economic
interest, and so on. Not so. For example, we had veterans
associations concerned about how people with handicaps were
going to be able to visit their forests and those kinds of
things. So I think the impact is very broad and it is very
important to consider how best to manage these resources.
I think the policies from the Forest Service certainly need
some review. We have sought to do that. Since 1998 the agency
has proposed a number of management regulatory changes. Just to
name a few, the National Forest System Road Management and
Transportation System Policy--that is all one title. Forest
planning regulations, roadless area reviews, Strategic Plan for
Government Performance and Results Act, final interim rule on
roadless areas, fuel reduction policy, draft environmental
impact statement for Interior Columbia Basin, ecosystem
management project, cost recovery for special use applications,
unified Federal policy for insuring a watershed approach to
Federal lands, to name a few. And I think one of the
difficulties is that these have not always been related to one
another and worked in a cooperative kind of way but have sort
of been thrown out there.
I was particularly, I guess, impressed and negatively
impressed with the roadless proposal. This policy came from
Washington in kind of an announcement to apply to all lands. At
the same time, each of the forests has their own forest study,
which they do periodically for their own forest plan, which
would have been the logical way to take a look at roadless
areas but, instead, that was declared from here. We went to the
meetings. I went to some of the meetings that people were
interested in. There were really no detail available to the
people who came to a so-called hearing and they had no chance
to really react.
So these are the kinds of things that I think ought to be
changed. I believe these policies have been largely implemented
and run by the assistant secretary over in the Department of
Agriculture--not by the professional foresters--and that is too
bad. Small businesses are involved, of course, in recreation,
in tourism, in guiding and hunting and ranching and forestry,
mineral exploration, all these kinds of things, which are very
important to our economy.
So Mr. Chairman, I do think all of us need to take a look
at how we can better implement Forest Service policies, how we
can take some of the regulatory burden off small business, how
we can provide more access to these public lands for the
various kinds of uses and, at the same time, protect the
resources.
I appreciate what you are doing and thank you for the
opportunity to be here.
Senator Enzi. Thank you.
Senator Craig.
STATEMENT OF THE HONORABLE LARRY CRAIG, A UNITED STATES SENATOR
FROM IDAHO
Senator Craig. Chairman Enzi, thank you very much. Let me
also thank Senator Crapo and Senator Burns.
I also want to commend Chairman Bond for allowing the Small
Business Committee to hold these hearings on the role of the
U.S. Forest Service in dealing with small business. I am
especially pleased to be joined here at the table this morning
with Senator Craig Thomas, who has played an active role with
me, as has Senator Burns, on a variety of committees that have
jurisdiction over the U.S. Forest Service.
Since 1995, I have chaired the Subcommittee on Forest and
Public Land Management of the Committee on Energy and Natural
Resources, Mr. Chairman. That Subcommittee has primary
jurisdiction over the programs and operations of the U.S.
Forest Service. During the 104th Congress and in the current
Congress, I also chair the Subcommittee on Forestry,
Conservation, and Rural Revitalization of the Committee on
Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry. So I have had the
opportunity, as chairman of those two Subcommittees, to look at
the broad jurisdiction and also the narrow focus that we have
given to the U.S. Forest Service.
During those chairmanships I and many of you have joined
with me, have held over 100 oversight hearings on the programs
and polices of the U.S. Forest Service. As it relates to the
interests of this Committee and the subject of this hearing,
our oversight record suggests two fundamental conclusions.
First, the U.S. Forest Service is likely the single most
important agency affecting small businesses in the rural areas
of my State and all of your States and most of the western
States of the United States. The Forest Service's programs and
policies essentially determine the success or failure of
logging, road maintenance and other land management service
contractors. The Forest Service basically controls the
marketplace for recreation outfitters, hunting and fishing
guides, visitor concessionaires and resort owners dependent
upon the use of the national forests. The economic health of
small service establishments in public lands dependent
communities is inextricably tied to the national forests and
the surrounding area.
In short, while other Federal agencies like the Small
Business Administration have programs to help these businesses,
the Forest Service determines the future of these businesses.
My second conclusion is that there is not an agency in the
Federal Government that is less sensitive to the needs of small
business. The Forest Service operates in a milieu of constant
conflict among powerful, national interest groups over resource
management direction and priorities. Small business entities
are poorly organized, diverse in their views, and generally are
ignored in the ongoing debate.
Worse, the Forest Service has moved actively to minimize
and, in some cases, even eliminate the limited opportunities
and considerations that other Federal agencies routinely afford
small business interests to access and influence their
programs.
For example, the agency has taken the position that its
land and resource management plans are not agency rules subject
to the requirements of the Small Business Regulatory
Enforcement Fairness Act. The Forest Service persists with this
unlawful and exclusionary position notwithstanding clear case
law to the contrary. Clearly, the agency is of the view that it
is up to small business to petition the court to force the
Forest Service to meet its obligations under the law.
Further, to say that the Small Business Impact and
Regulatory Flexibility Act analyses accompanying Forest Service
rulemakings are cursory would be to award the agency an
unintended compliment. These analyses are typically
nonexistent. I have not reviewed a single Forest Service rule
over the past 5 years which contained an analysis of this sort
which could withstand judicial scrutiny. But here again, the
agency is depending on the limited means of small business to
seek judicial intervention to correct a constant pattern of
lawlessness.
Any reasonable effort to complete these analyses would
easily highlight problems created for small business. For
example, in the case of recreational outfitters, the Forest
Service has regulations which severely constrain the ability of
these small businesses to operate in a reasonable business
environment. Many visitors to the public lands would not be
able to enjoy them without the assistance of outfitters and
guides. The outfitters who provide important guide services to
visitors to our National Forests are required to have a permit
and to pay a share of their revenues to the Federal Government.
But these small businesses are not offered permits on a
reasonable, long-term basis. Rather, they must expend the time
and energy to secure their permit on an annual basis, subject
to revocation at any time. You can imagine the impact such
regulations have on outfitters and guides when they try to get
a loan to buy new equipment or to sell their small businesses.
Perhaps most troubling have been the reports that, through
programs like the Recreation Fee Demonstration Program, the
Forest Service has attempted to supplant small businesses with
government enterprises. The Recreation Fee Demonstration
Program is a pilot effort which allows the Forest Service to
charge recreation user fees for some sites and retain those
fees for agency purposes. We have received a number of
complaints from concessionaires that the Forest Service is
using this authority to drive their businesses away from the
most popular Forest Service recreational sites so that they can
be managed for the agency's financial gain instead of the
concessionaire or the local business person. As a result of
these complaints, we have so far refused to make this fee
collection authority permanent, pending further oversight.
Lastly, unlike other Federal agencies--for instance, the
Environmental Protection Agency--that manage large programs
that impact small businesses, the Forest Service has neither
appointed a small business liaison within the agency, nor
assigned this responsibility to any office within the agency.
Indeed, I believe your hearing will uncover evidence that there
is very little sensitivity to, or understanding of, the needs
of small businesses anywhere in the U.S. Forest Service.
As one outcome of the hearing, I would like to work with
this Committee to assure that we are successful in creating an
independent Office of Small Business Advocacy within the Forest
Service itself. That office should be given the opportunity and
the responsibility to approve both Small Business Impact and
Regulatory Flexibility Act analyses before any final regulation
leaves that agency.
Again, Mr. Chairman, those are my views based on the
experience we have had in examining this agency upside down and
inside out for the last good number of years. So I hope that
once again your effort and this Committee's efforts will expose
what some of us have known and what we hope the country can
understand--an agency now that pays little attention to the
responsibility it has had and has within the law to the small
communities that surround it.
It is tragic to me that somehow in the mix of what has
happened over the last decade the word commercial value is of
disdain on the lips of the U.S. Forest Service. But it is today
and as a result of that the biases that I think are reflected
in the actions they have taken are clearly anti-business, anti-
small business, and therefore anti-West and anti-rural America.
Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
Senator Enzi. Thank you very much. I thank each of you for
your testimony this morning. I particularly thank you for the
leadership that you demonstrate on this issue every day. I want
to again thank you for taking time out of your busy day to
testify and also your agreement to take the results from this
hearing and use them for your work on this issue. Thank you
very much.
Now while the second panel is taking their place at the
table I will do a brief introduction, but I have to mention
that the three of us that are here today are in our home States
almost every weekend traveling a different part of the State,
talking to people that are actually dealing with the problems.
This is a delightful panel because these are the people that we
talk to when we are in our respective home States. They give us
some good, common-sense ideas for things we can do; which we
bring back here. The usual reaction is ``That is too simple; it
will not work.'' But we manage to complicate them. We have some
people here that will give some of those on-the-ground
opinions.
We have Jim Hurst, who is the president of Owens & Hurst
Lumber Company of Eureka, Montana. We have Joel Bousman, who is
a cattle rancher from Boulder, Wyoming, and the regional vice
president of the Wyoming Stockgrowers Association. We have Del
Tinsley, who is the owner and publisher of the Wyoming
Livestock Roundup in Casper, Wyoming. Mr. Tinsley is also a
member of the Advisory Board for the University of Wyoming
College of Agriculture in Laramie, Wyoming. And we have Al
Bukowsky, who is the owner/operator of Solitude River Trips in
Salmon, Idaho.
Mr. Hurst.
STATEMENT OF JIM HURST, PRESIDENT, OWENS & HURST LUMBER CO.,
INC., EUREKA, MONTANA
Mr. Hurst. Senators, thank you for inviting me. My name is
Jim Hurst. I own and operate a small mill in Eureka, Montana,
where I have been a life-long resident.
To get directly to the point, the impact of current and
proposed U.S. Forest Service policies and regulations are and
will continue to be devastating to small timber-related
companies and the rural communities where they are located
unless changes are made soon.
Please note that I speak not only for my company but for my
employees and a significant number of the residents of Eureka
and Lincoln County, Montana. We offer a dire picture of what
the Forest Service is doing to small businesses and families in
our community.
Last Thursday I was forced to lay off approximately 60
percent of my workforce. A copy of my lay-off notice stands
before you.
[The notice follows:]
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T8240.017
Mr. Hurst. The names not on this list represent 60 jobs in
a small community where my firm was the largest employer.
Forest Service policies in conjunction with the likes of NEPA,
the Endangered Species Act, road obliteration mandates, etc.,
are primarily responsible. As these anti-harvest measures
intensified, coupled with an onslaught of appeals by the
environmental industry, our forest, the Kootenai, has sold only
25 percent of historic levels. In short, Federal dictates are
literally sucking the blood out of rural, timber-dependent
communities in Montana.
We are a small independent mill. Our adversaries are big
government, big environmental organizations and big business,
which present us with a bit of a challenge to merely stay in
business. As I mentioned, harvest volumes from the forest have
greatly decreased.
My instincts tell me that the system works like this. The
big environmental groups influence big government to promote a
zero or reduced harvest. Big timber companies that have their
own private forests do not intervene because closing the
National Forests to timber removal increases the value of their
own holdings. The result is the extermination of the small
firms who have deep roots in their communities.
An example of this is the closure of the American Timber
Company. I attended its auction 2 weeks ago. That notice is
here before you.
[The notice follows:]
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Mr. Hurst. When that family-owned small business closed
after 54 years, 145 people lost their jobs. The auction sold
what was left for 2 cents on the dollar. Another independent
company gone forever and for no good reason, as we have clean
air, clean water, abundant wildlife and literally millions of
acres of dead, down and disease-infected timber that needs
treatment--a resource that could be processed into lumber for
our Nation instead of providing citizens with the annual
Montana firestorm event.
Driving us out of business only enhances the opportunities
for big business to buy what U.S. Forest Service timber is
offered at bargain basement prices because of a lack of
competition and would provide big government an opportunity to
ride in on a white horse and offer to relocate us or retrain
us. Problem is, many of us do not want to leave. Many will stay
and live in poverty rather than leave their homes. I realize
this may be a simplistic view but I believe it hits the mark.
I have a Native American friend who, when referring to the
Federal Government's treatment of rural Westerners, said, ``You
are the new Indians. First they take away your land and your
way of life. Then they say, `Trust us.' '' The fact is we do
not trust our national government anymore and it is quite
evident our government does not trust us.
As far as we are concerned, the Federal Government has
turned its back on rural resource-dependent communities. It
ignores the locals who live, work, recreate in, care for and
understand our
forests. Instead, the ``Wizards of Washington'' know what is
best for us. They allow massive build-ups of fuel in our
forests, yet removing this fuel is currently not an option.
Local, on-the-ground decisionmaking would not allow this to
happen.
Are Forest Service policies negatively affecting small
business in rural communities? You be the judge. The Montana
Hunger Coalition fact sheet states 14 percent of Lincoln County
residents are living in poverty; 28 percent are poor and at
risk for hunger. And that was before my lay-off.
Statewide, since 1994, Montana has led all 50 States in the
rate of increase in poverty. While poverty has been on the
increase, the rate of unemployment has been low. This is
ludicrous in a State with an abundance of natural resources and
with a population willing to work.
The report states that while Montanans are working harder
than ever, they nevertheless lead the Nation in the rate of
increase in poverty mainly because of a deterioration in wages
in agriculture and the extractive industries and an increase in
low-wage sector jobs.
I have brought with me letters from the mayors of Rexford
and Eureka, Montana, further describing the negative impact of
Forest Service policies on their towns. I hope you will include
these letters in the record of this hearing.
In Eureka, Montana, the U.S. Forest Service has an
opportunity to prove its worth. It can care for the land and
serve the people by immediately selling the estimated 150-
million board feet of timber that have been burned within 15
miles of our town. Harvest the trees while they have value and
in the process, grind the limbs and tops into the ground to
stabilize the soil and also stabilize our way of life for
another 3 to 4 years. A momentary stay of execution until we
can determine if sound science, reasonable decisions and common
sense will once again be the trademark of the U.S. Forest
Service. If no stay is forthcoming, I would personally prefer
lethal injection.
If nothing else, I would hope the Forest Service and the
Federal Government would look at small business with the
realization that some of their oversights and the intended and
unintended consequences of their actions are destroying us one
by one. If nothing is done to advance our cause, it should be
noted that some day this country will desperately need us, but
we will not be here. Thank you.
Senator Enzi. Thank you very much.
[A subsequent submission for the record from Mr. Hurst
follows:]
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Mr. Enzi. Mr. Bousman.
STATEMENT OF JOEL E. BOUSMAN, CATTLE RANCHER, BOULDER, WYOMING,
AND REGIONAL VICE PRESIDENT, WYOMING STOCKGROWERS ASSOCIATION,
CASPER, WYOMING
Mr. Bousman. Mr. Chairman, Members of this Committee, my
name is Joel Bousman and I am a cattle rancher and regional
vice president of the Wyoming Stockgrowers Association. My
wife, Susan, and I, along with our son, Jim, and his wife and
daughter, and our son, Cotton, operate a cattle ranch in
western Wyoming. My sons are the fifth generation of our family
in the ranching business in Sublette County. Our cattle ranch
is an independently owned and operated small family business.
After college I returned home to Boulder, Wyoming, and I
bought 1,600 acres and the Federal grazing permits from my
father. My wife and I did the work and we started to build both
our family and our family ranch. In the summers we packed up
the kids, the tent and the lunch cooler and we all headed to
work in the hayfields for the day. To make ends meet, we worked
the ranch together as a family.
My children recognize that our family ranch is a real
business opportunity with high-stake risks. The Federal
Government could put us out of business with nothing more than
the stroke of a pen.
Grazing on Forest Service land is critical to my operation.
If you will refer to the map up here, please, that is a map of
Sublette County in western Wyoming. (See Page 40.) Jackson Hole
is just to the northwest. Sublette County is about the size of
the State of Connecticut. Both shades of the green on the map
are Forest Service land. Yellow is administered by the Bureau
of Land Management, blue, the State of Wyoming, and the small
amount of white you see in the river corridors is the private
land in Sublette County.
Sublette County is only 20-percent private property.
Livestock are on the private land during the winter and the
spring until the new grass begins to grow. The ranchers, with
BLM permits, pasture their cattle on the BLM land through June.
Meanwhile, on all the privately-owned land, the irrigated hay
land, the crops are being grown for the hay that is to be
needed to get through the next winter.
When the Forest Service range is ready for grazing in July,
livestock are then herded into the higher mountain pastures
until early fall. Two hundred and thirty-eight head of our 350
mother cows graze a common Forest Service allotment from July 1
till September 15.
If our ranch loses our forest permit we would have the
option to downsize our ranch or try to find other grazing land.
If we downsize our small business, we would not be economically
feasible and my sons would be unable to join me in my business.
Purchasing private pasture in this case is not a realistic
option because if you can see on the map, there is so little
private land available in the county where I live.
Another option would be for me to sell out to the highest
bidder, likely a subdivision developer. Our land is at the foot
of the Rocky Mountains and some of my neighbors have already
chosen this option. I could sell and try to move elsewhere to
ranch or just retire. I would have to give up my home in
Boulder and the family business I have created, and I would
sacrifice my hope and my dream to pass my family ranch on to my
children.
The threat to my grazing permit is not due to negative
range conditions. I use scientific range monitoring. These
lands are in good condition. Rather, the threat is from Federal
regulations. The Forest Service often ignores the mandates from
Congress to manage for balanced multiple use. Some of the
nongrazing regulations that are harmful to our business include
the endangered species regulations, the roadless initiative and
Forest Service road policy and the Forest Service planning
process itself.
For example, 3 years ago on our ranch's grazing allotment
the Wyoming Game and Fish and the Forest Service tried to
restrict grazing. Their plan was to reduce livestock grazing
while placing Colorado cutthroat trout in an intermittent
stream. We were forced to spend a great deal of time and effort
with scientific experts and fish biologists. Since the stream
was intermittent, it had no water in it part of the year. The
scientific experts finally convinced the fish biologists that
fish cannot live without water. Can you imagine that?
The time, energy and expense required to stay informed and
respond to so many regulations and proposals hurts my ability
to improve my operation. In the last year I estimate I have
spent 15 working days and $1,700 responding to regulations.
What difference does it make if increased regulations force
me out of business? Critics of Federal lands livestock grazing
fail to mention how important private lands are for wildlife.
Like livestock, the majority of wildlife survive the winter on
private lands. Ranchers provide winter forage, water and
shelter for wildlife. Almost 100 percent of Wyoming moose make
their winter home on private land. When a ranch is forced out
of business there is a public cost, a public loss.
For discussion purposes, let us look at a conservation
easement that mandates no development. In Sublette County, a
conservation easement attached to a ranch will reduce the
market value by 40 to 50 percent. The open space and the
wildlife habitat--in other words, the public value--would then
be contained in the remaining 50 to 60 percent of the value of
the ranch.
Six years ago my son Cotton, then 14 years old, came here
to Washington, D.C., to participate in a town meeting with
President Clinton. Cotton talked about the importance of
Federal grazing lands and the increasing costs imposed by
government regulations and specifically the nonfee costs.
Now, 6 years later, I am here testifying before this
Committee about the impact of Forest Service regulations that
still are threatening to take away both his dream and my hopes.
Members of this Committee, I can assure you this situation has
not improved in the last 6 years. Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Bousman follows:]
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Senator Enzi. Thank you.
Our next person to testify is Mr. Tinsley.
STATEMENT OF DEL TINSLEY, OWNER/PUBLISHER, WYOMING LIVESTOCK
ROUNDUP, CASPER, WYOMING, AND MEMBER, ADVISORY BOARD,
UNIVERSITY OF WYOMING COLLEGE OF AGRICULTURE, LARAMIE, WYOMING
Mr. Tinsley. Good morning. I want to thank this Committee
for the opportunity to testify and represent the great State of
Wyoming. I am a Wyoming small businessman. Wyoming is where I
raised my three children and where I have been self-employed
for the past 25 years. I am a publisher of the Wyoming
Livestock Roundup located in Casper. Our subscription base is
85 percent of the people engaged in agriculture in Wyoming.
The message I need to communicate to this Committee today
is simple: The State of Wyoming is under attack by the Federal
Government. This heavy-handed, regulations-laden government is
distorting our wildlife habitat, our open spaces, threatening
our culture and forcing our second-, third-, and fourth-
generation ranchers out of business.
Virtually all of Wyoming is small business, including
ranches. This is why it is so important to tell our story to
this Committee.
The Federal Government owns more than 50 percent of the
State of Wyoming, as you can see on the map.
[The map follows:]
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T8240.030
Mr. Tinsley. Notice the different colors. The colors
indicate the land ownership, including the Federal Government,
State and private individually-owned land. The purple
represents the National Parks, Yellowstone and Teton, and so
forth. The green represents the National Forest. As you can
see, we have five National Forests, I believe, in the State of
Wyoming. The yellow represents the BLM, and the blue represents
the State of Wyoming-owned land, like our school sections and
we have a land trust in Wyoming. Orange represents the Wind
River Indian Reservation, and the white represents deeded
private property. If you look at the map closely you can see
that the western part of the State, in my estimation, is more
than 85 percent federally-owned.
Well, let me explain the ownership of Wyoming and why it
became the way it is. Back in the late 1800s and early 1900s
during the Homestead Act, virtually everything on this map that
is designated white and yellow was available for homesteading.
Homesteaders could claim up to 640 acres. It started at 120 and
moved up to 360 and now it is 640 acres because it is getting
more arid the further west we go in our development of this
great country.
They had to live on the 640 acres for 1 year. One of the
conditions was they had to have a wooden floor in their cabin
to what they call ``prove-up'' or to get legal title to the
property. But as arid as it is and with water as precious as
gold, homesteaders chose to prove-up on lands with live water.
If you can imagine bringing your family out West and as arid as
Wyoming is, if you look at the drainages in Wyoming you can see
that our deeded land is virtually our river bottoms and our
creek flows and that sort of thing.
In later years ranchers started accumulating these
homesteads and assembling ranches. During that same period the
Forest Service started issuing grazing permits on the forest,
making these units balanced. They summered on the forest; they
wintered on their deeded land.
Today these second-, third-, and fourth-generation ranchers
and families are being forced to reduce the number of livestock
they can graze on the forests. That, coupled with the high cost
of operation, is forcing these stewards of the land out of
business. This, in turn, is leaving the deeded base ranch on
the river bottoms vulnerable--which is very, very good wildlife
habitat--vulnerable to subdivisions. As I mentioned earlier,
these are prime wildlife habitat lands. These base operations
are also very attractive to the developers because of the
beautiful scenery, abundance of wildlife along the creek
bottoms, and access to the National Forest.
As a result of these developments, critical habitat is
being lost and destroyed forever. The destruction is the exact
opposite of what the Forest Service say they are accomplishing
by putting ranchers out of business.
The poster to my left depicts what used to be a ranch.
[The poster follows:]
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T8240.031
Mr. Tinsley. The Lathrop Ranch featured about 10,000 acres
of open space and critical wildlife habitat. This is the deeded
land on this ranch. You can see the mountains in the
background. That is where the cattle used to summer. This is
critical wildlife habitat that once served as home to wintering
cattle, elk, deer, antelope and other wildlife. It is now a
subdivision. The people living in the subdivision are now
complaining that the displaced wildlife is eating their
shrubbery and there are problems. My wife and I go out and walk
early in the mornings and we see deer on people's lawns chewing
up their vegetation. Well, this was their winter home. The
people displaced the wildlife.
The people of Wyoming lose a way of life, a culture, when
this is done. But everyone in our Nation loses the magnificent
scenery and wildlife habitat that are provided by those
ranching families that we are losing.
Keeping the Federal land ownership in mind and coupling it
with the fact that Wyoming's population is only 480,000, we
soon realize that any change in the use dictated by the Forest
Service guidelines dramatically impacts every man, woman, and
child in Wyoming. In all 23 counties in Wyoming, there are
people living there that have forest permits, including Gosham
County, which is in eastern Wyoming on the Nebraska line. There
are seven forest
permit-holders there. The people of our State depend upon
production agriculture and the use of renewable resources--
grazing, timber, minerals, wildlife, and open spaces. Forest
Service policies that destroy the habitat and the landscapes by
replacing ranchers with developments cripple both Wyoming and
America.
It was interesting yesterday morning when I picked up our
local statewide paper that the Wyoming News Service did a
survey and they asked people in Wyoming, ``What would you ask
at the debate tonight?'' Overwhelmingly the people from Wyoming
said we would ask, ``Why is our Federal Government shutting
down our forests?'' Its affect is overwhelming. And I am not
talking about people in agriculture; I am talking about people
on the main streets of Wyoming.
I would like to see this Senate set up a revenue impact
study. Instead of an environmental impact study, let us study
the revenue and what it is going to cost us to implement all of
these regulations and the impact it is going to have on rural
Wyoming.
I want to talk just a minute about Yellowstone Park, if you
will, please. Four years ago we went on a pack trip and we went
through the southern part of Yellowstone Park. We went in the
South Gate and made the loop opposite of the way the highway
goes through. We rode through the burned areas with 1-million
acres of the 3-million acres in Yellowstone National Park that
were burned. Today the Canadian thistle, which is a noxious
weed, has grown so thick in that country that you cannot ride a
horse through it. This is what is happening. They will not
spray it; they will not take care of it; but yet they let it
burn and it has just done tremendous damage to our economy. It
is a very serious situation.
I want to conclude by thanking you for this opportunity to
testify. I will be real happy to answer any questions that you
may have. I would like to submit some other material with my
testimony if I could, please.
Senator Enzi. We will accept anything for the record that
you want to add to your testimony. We appreciate the additional
information and we will make sure that Members of the Committee
have it, too.
[The prepared statement and attachment of Mr. Tinsley
follow:]
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Senator Enzi. Mr. Bukowsky.
STATEMENT OF AL BUKOWSKY, OWNER/OPERATOR, SOLITUDE RIVER TRIPS,
SALMON, IDAHO
Mr. Bukowsky. Mr. Chairman, I appreciate this opportunity
to testify before the Committee. The management of Federal
forest lands and forest uses is undoubtedly the single most
significant factor in the economies of the rural communities in
which my family and our employees live, so we are particularly
grateful that congressional attention is being focussed on our
relationship with the Forest Service.
My name is Al Bukowsky. Along with my wife Jeana, we own
and operate Solitude River Trips, a small outfitting and
guiding business that has operated since the mid-1970s on the
Middle Fork of the Salmon River in the Frank Church River of No
Return Wilderness. I personally guide on all of our river
trips, so you are listening not only to a businessman but a
person who is directly in the field every river trip day.
Mostly we have a good working relationship with the Forest
Service. At other times they seem to ignore our input, as the
following examples will illustrate. Outfitters met regularly
with the Forest Service for several years leading up to the
release of the draft environmental impact statement for the
Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness in 1998. We were
regularly assured that the resource was in better shape than
when the Wilderness was designated in 1980. With minor tweaking
in management, the Middle Fork could be expected to remain in
great shape for the foreseeable future. We should expect only
minor changes in management through the DEIS.
In January 1998 the DEIS hit the streets and what a
bombshell. The preferred alternative called for a 50-percent
cut in river use, guided and nonguided. The preferred
alternative recommended that a large portion of summer use be
shifted to winter use, telling us that the Forest Service
personnel obviously had no understanding of our business
operations, let alone Idaho's weather. As you can see by the
chart, they wanted to shift the peak use in the summer to the
shoulder seasons, which in the Frank Church, the river is froze
over and under several feet of snow.
[The graph follows:]
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Senator Enzi. Figures.
Mr. Bukowsky. Private and commercial users in the Frank
screamed loudly. The Forest Service backed down, acknowledging
publicly that they had spent $1 million on a DEIS that was
seriously flawed. Forest Service staffers with a purist bent
toward wilderness river use had misinterpreted their own
sociological data in writing the DEIS. Outfitters had no
alternative but to raise over $50,000 and spend countless hours
of our time and many sleepless nights in order to deal with the
inaccuracies in this dishonest document.
To their credit, the Forest supervisors, especially George
Matejko and Dave Alexander, became actively involved and worked
closely with all users in a supplemental EIS process. The
record of decision will be out sometime next year. Only then
will we know if the Forest Service has really been up front and
honest in their dealings with us.
Outfitters on the Middle Fork tend to pinpoint the last
decade as a turning point when the long history of good
relations with the Forest Service began to disintegrate into a
rockier road. For example, on April 9, 1997, we had an
emergency meeting with the
Middle Fork river managers. They told us that sensitive Native
American sites along the Middle Fork were showing signs of
abuse and would be closed to camping if our care for these
sites did not improve in the coming season.
These are prime camping sites for us, clustered closely
together along a specific stretch of the Middle Fork. Closure
would mean long days on the river without hope of a campsite
for our guests, which naturally could lead to a serious safety
issue.
On June 12, 1997, barely 2 months later, outfitters showed
up on the Middle Fork to launch their first trips of the float
season. They were met at the launch site with paperwork from
the same district ranger who had been at the April meeting,
ordering that all 10 of the campsites were now closed to
camping, as you can see by the letter signed by the district
ranger.
Outfitters immediately insisted upon a joint field trip.
After much work and public involvement during the height of our
operating season, the Forest Service finally agreed to a
mitigation plan and reopened most of these campsites.
The kicker in this story is that the campsite closure order
given outfitters as they launched their first trips in June had
been signed by the district ranger on April 1, 1997, 8 days
before our emergency meeting with the outfitters he called
together on April 9. What possible motive could the agency have
had in hiding a decision already made 2 months earlier? Why in
the meantime were we led through the charade of thinking
outfitters and other boaters would be part of the
decisionmaking process?
[Form R4-2300-4 follows:]
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Mr. Bukowsky. There are also examples, however, of success
in turning things around, in this instance in the Sawtooth
National Recreation Area in central Idaho. Just 3 years ago the
Upper Main Salmon River resource managers and outfitters were
on extremely divergent roads relative to common sense
management of that section of the river. To protect spawning
Chinook salmon, the river was abruptly closed to float boaters
each August, often with less than 12 hours notice. Lawsuits
were filed. Communications between the outfitters and the
Forest Service became nonexistent. Thanks to the constructive
attitudes of two new rangers on the SNRA staff, outfitters and
the Forest Service are once again working hand in hand.
Communication and understanding there could not be better.
Communication and collaboration is the key. Unfortunately,
abrupt management style has become typical behavior for many
within the agency. Because the special use permit conveys a
privilege, not a right to operate, outfitters have little or no
defense against sudden changes in the rules. A permit is not a
contract and the sudden loss of privileges previously agreed
upon between the agency and an outfitter is not compensable nor
necessarily negotiable.
Senator Craig recently reported legislation from the Senate
Committee on Energy and Natural Resources that goes a long way
toward providing a stable regulatory climate for the outfitting
industry. S. 1969 seeks to create a statute from existing
Forest Service outfitter and guide regulations that have worked
well until recently. This legislation would put a stop to the
agency's manipulation of outfitter rules into a moving target.
Overall, the Forest Service is desperate for money and
staff and the new cost recovery program for commercial
outfitters is one of several new sources of agency revenue that
threatens outfitters. Cost recovery, as proposed earlier this
year, promises additional financial burdens that may break the
back of outfitters and other small business operations on
forest lands.
In Idaho, cost recovery has already been proposed on the
Upper Main Salmon River where outfitters and private boaters
need a new take-out site in the effort to protect summer
Chinook on their traditional spawning grounds. The Forest
Service told us that all costs for NEPA analysis related to
this new take-out would be charged exclusively to the four
small float businesses that operate the Upper Salmon, despite
the fact that many nonguided floaters enjoy the same stretch of
river and would share the facility. Total cost for this NEPA
work is estimated at $132,000, a $33,000 hit on each of these
four outfitters and no hit on private boaters, which perfectly
illustrates outfitter concerns about implementation of national
cost recovery rules proposed earlier this year.
The real kicker in the national cost recovery rule is the
requirement that all fees be paid up front even prior to the
resolution of a dispute or the permit will not be processed and
you are out of business.
In conclusion, I would like to emphasize to the Committee
that outfitters fear they are seeing encouragement within the
Forest Service of prejudice against commercial operations on
forest land. Over 32 percent of the land in this country is
owned by the Government. In recognition of this, agencies like
the Forest Service must adhere to policies that sustain private
sector businesses offering quality services to forest visitors,
taxpaying businesses that are critical to the economies of
local and regional communities.
When Congress returns home at the end of this session, I
hope that your Committee Members will repeat the theme of
today's hearings in a series of town meetings throughout the
State this winter. I know you will have participation from
various outfitters and guide organizations. It was not so long
ago that outfitters and guides were proud of their partnership
with the Forest Service. We continue to be proud of the job we
do together to protect the land and serve the public. Locally,
it depends upon open communication and mutual respect.
Mr. Chairman, it is my hope that your hearing today will be
an important step toward putting the outfitters and other user
groups, the Forest Service and the communities they serve back
on this positive collaborative path. Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Bukowsky follows:]
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Senator Enzi. Thank you. This testimony has been
outstanding and very helpful.
Senator Burns has some appropriations meetings, which is a
key thing. We are in the process of spending $1.8 trillion and
he needs to go do some specific work on that, so we will defer
to him for questions first.
Senator Burns. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I will be very,
very short. I want to ask a couple of questions.
By the way, I want Mr. Bousman to know that during the
fires in western Montana I was down in the Big Hole, and you
are familiar with Wisdom and through that country, and I was
talking to the ranchers down there. We had a visit from the
Rainbow family on the Forest Service land out there this year
and there are about 20,000 of them, they figure, but they just
flock everywhere.
We got to go up and look at a couple of pastures, a couple
of meadows that they just trashed. These people, 20,000 of
them, had no permit to be there, none. They just flock in there
and they destroy. You ought to see these meadows. I mean they
are terrible. And when you compare them to a year ago, pictures
taken, it was something.
I asked the forest supervisor about that and why we have to
jump through all the hoops for permits and then these people
can come in and trash an area, leaving big rocks in the road so
that you cannot get in and out, and they said they cannot get
those people off of there. So there is a double standard here
and we want to do away with that double standard if we possibly
can.
Mr. Hurst, we know that the Forest Service also has to
adhere to some laws of the land--clean water, clear air, NEPA--
all of these laws that have been passed by this Congress. If
there was one--if you could put your finger on one thing that
would facilitate and bring some collaboration and communication
between the Forest Service and your company and the management
of those resources, what would it be? What would you advise us
to change now that would facilitate both protecting the forest
and making sure that we have a forest there for our children
and our grandchildren?
Mr. Hurst. It would probably be the Endangered Species Act.
And I realize that is probably too much to bite off but what we
need is more local control, more input and some trust in the
folks at the local level that are making the decisions.
Now we have purchased fire killed timber 500 miles north in
the province of Alberta. I think it is the first time that
government wood was ever exported to the United States from
Alberta. The reason we did that is because we could not wood
our mill from U.S. Forest Service timber because of the decline
in timber sales from that agency.
What I found is that the people in Alberta are closer to
that resource. In other words, the province has control of the
timber. As a result, they have a healthy economy. They harvest
the timber, in this case burnt timber, in a timely fashion so
that they can take the revenue from that harvested timber and
reinvest it back into the ground in the form of reseeding or
restoration.
In the United States we do not do that. We do everything we
can to keep resource workers unemployed, it appears, and we are
not making the local decisions that we should, and that is why
I talked about trust. And people, as you all know, out West we
are not going to trash our own backyards, especially the folks
that live there and have lived there. That is ridiculous.
So I would guess something has to be done with the
Endangered Species Act. We have got to speed up this appeals
process and we have to have more trust in locals. That is not
one thing; it's three things; I realize that. But if we can get
more control back to the local land managers to make the
decisions, that would greatly help our industry and our
communities.
Senator Burns. I want to ask the grazers, also. Mr.
Bousman, what would you ask us to change to facilitate maybe
cooperation between the agency and the grazers and to make sure
that we can manage that resource?
Mr. Bousman. Well, Senator, I think one of the concerns
that has the most impact on our type of operation is the fact
that too often decisions are made that do not have the
scientific justification to make them. In that kind of a case I
think if there was one thing that this Congress could do that
would help the people on the land more than anything else, it
would be to put the burden of proof on the Government. Before
they could make a decision they should know that that decision
is in the best interest of the resource and the best interest
of the environment. Instead of doing that, they are making
these decisions based on what is politically correct, not what
is best for the land.
Senator Burns. Anyone else want to comment on that
question?
Mr. Tinsley. Yes, I would, Senator Burns. If you talk to a
lot of these retired forest people that are on the ground in
Wyoming, they say the best years of the National Forests in
this country were when it was managed from the bottom up rather
than from the top down. That was when we had the best use and
the healthiest forest.
Senator Burns. If we expanded the SBREFA to include the
Forest Service, would that help? That is the accountability,
you know. It makes them accountable on all the decisions they
make.
Mr. Hurst. I think they should be. I mean they are directly
affecting the lives of a broad spectrum of Westerners. They
should be held accountable.
Senator Burns. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you for
letting me move up in the questioning.
I want to thank our witnesses for coming this morning
because they bring a lot of expertise to the table and we need
that in this town. I call this town 17-square miles of logic-
free environment, so you bring a little common sense here, so
your voice may sound a little strange.
Senator Enzi. I again want to thank all of you for----
Senator Burns. And you can have my log.
Senator Enzi. Thank you. We will need that.
Mr. Tinsley, you mentioned having hearings in our State and
we do that through town meetings and all sorts of different
ways. What has been so important for your effort today is that
you are bringing a local perspective to the national level.
When we talk to the folks in Wyoming, they understand the
changes that are being made, but the folks back here have a
little different atmosphere to live in. They have already
eliminated most of the Federal land that they can wander around
on and places that they can get away from the traffic and
everything. So we have a lot of trouble educating Easterners on
what it is like in the West. Your pictures and your maps and
your letters have been extremely helpful today.
Mr. Bukowsky, you are performing part of this tremendous
effort because you are taking the people from back here and you
are actually letting them see the area that they worked so hard
to set aside, to make sure that it would be in a pristine
State, and you are as interested in keeping it in that pristine
State so we will be interested in coming to see it. It is kind
of an oddity that we have the people out here thinking that the
people out there would be interested in ruining their jobs.
Mr. Hurst, we have the sawmills in Wyoming that have gone
out of business. They are small businesses compared to the
national standard, of course. They are very big businesses in
the communities they are in and they just literally devastate
the community when they go out of business.
We are talking about healthy forests now, and that is an
acceptable phrase throughout the United States. Everybody wants
healthy forests. When I was with Senator Burns in Montana we
did this hearing and one lady stated that she and her husband
own a logging company in Montana and she is the accountant and
runs the skidder, sometimes the chipper. That is how small
business is. You have to do all of the jobs that are there. She
is a little upset that they keep talking about in healthy
forests having to grub out this underbrush that is not
commercially usable and the dead tinder that there is in the
forests.
So she brought us that little log to show us what some of
this undergrowth is, and it is commercially loggable. It would
make a lot of boards for a lot of homes. And if you turn it
into boards, it preserves the carbon dioxide that it has been
capturing for probably 50 years permanently. If it falls over
in the woods and disintegrates, that carbon dioxide goes back
up in the atmosphere again and that is what we are blaming
global warming for. So we understand the plight and appreciate
the perspective that you have brought of how devastating that
is.
One of the reasons we are kind of hurrying here is that the
Minority has objected to holding hearings over 2 hours. It is a
constant protest that they have had for the last couple of
weeks. So it is going to limit our hearing today. We are going
to have to try to shove everything within 2 hours. We will keep
the record open for 2 weeks. Other Members of the Committee may
send you some additional questions so that we can get your
responses in the printed record.
Mr. Tinsley, I have to specifically ask you a question
because I know you have a unique perspective on the impact of
forest policies because you deal with paper products when you
are putting out your newspaper. Can you tell us a little bit
about some of the effects of Forest Service policies on paper
production?
Mr. Tinsley. Thank you, Senator. That is a good question
and it is a good point that I would like to make.
I think that the newspaper pulp industry in Canada learned
a good lesson from OPEC this summer. They shut down the
production of newsprint for about 3 weeks, shut it not
completely down but they slowed it down about 20 percent,
raised their prices by 20 percent and found out just how dang
much control they have over the newspaper print industry in
America. They liked what they saw, just like OPEC liked what
they saw when they shut the oil flow down.
Consequently, we had to go out and buy inferior paper from
Mexico. I am not saying that to run down Mexico, but it just is
not the quality of paper that we can get out of Canada and what
is made here in America. It was pretty devastating and it was
scary. I mean they could put us out of business in a heartbeat.
Senator Enzi. So if we are not looking at multiple use we
could be looking at--if we are happy with our gas prices now,
we will really be happy with our newsprint prices, huh?
Mr. Tinsley. Yes.
Senator Enzi. Thank you.
Mr. Bousman, you mentioned that your son, Cotton, came back
to Washington and had the chance to ask the President a
question. I am interested in what the response was to that
question on grazing fees and also what your son thinks are his
possibilities for being able to maintain the way of life, the
open space and the future as he has envisioned it.
Mr. Bousman. Senator, as far as the question, my son was
fortunate enough to get to ask the President if he understood
the interrelationship between the nonfee costs associated with
grazing on public lands. The President indicated that he did
not understand that. I cannot say as anything has changed
except not just within the Forest Service but within all the
Federal agencies that people in rural areas in our country have
to deal with--the Fish and Wildlife Service regulations, BLM
regulations, Forest Service regulations--they have all
increased since that time.
I would have to say, in fairness to the President, the
grazing fee formula itself is still the same as it was 6 years
ago. Other than that, everything has gotten worse.
Not only my son, Cotton, but my other son, I am fortunate
that both my boys would love to continue in the ranching
business. I do not know how to explain it. It is something they
have in their blood. People in our business can understand
that. But the sum total of all these regulations--Forest
Service is one example and probably the most glaring example
but the Department of the Interior regulations, Fish and
Wildlife regulations, Endangered Species, the roadless
initiative have the impact of severely affecting our ability to
continue. And, as I pointed out, the situation we are in,
especially in western Wyoming, our options are limited. If I
was to guess the way it appears that we are headed in the last
years in the regulation from Washington, it is very
discouraging, to say the least.
Senator Enzi. Thank you.
One final and what I think will be a quick question. Mr.
Hurst, you stated that some day this country will need you but
you will not be there. What did you mean by that?
Mr. Hurst. Well, let us take the fires, this past summer,
for example. Who were the movers and shakers on those fires?
The loggers that had the equipment and the know-how to make the
fire lines. That is one way. When we are gone, our loggers go
with us. So when it comes to fighting the fires the next time,
you know, it is not going to be as easy to put them out, and it
was not easy this year at all.
We are a small business and when you take a small business
out of a community, for instance ours, who is going to go to
that 4H livestock auction? We are having a hell of a poor year
financially but we bought five beef and three pigs. Who is
going to give the high school scholarships? The Sierra Club?
The Wilderness Society? We have not seen one yet.
Those are the kinds of things that will disappear when we
do. It should also be noted that we will not turn the switch
off because our corporate headquarters are in Stamford,
Connecticut, or Seattle, Washington, with no direct contact to
the communities. I have to look the people on Main Street in
the eye, as these folks do, and we are going to take it that
extra step to try to stay in business. That is why I am here. I
can guarantee you there are one hell of a lot of things I would
rather do than be in Washington, D.C. right now, but I owe it
to my community, and I owe it to my employees to be here, so
that if I have to turn that key off, I can at least look myself
in the mirror and say, ``Goddang it, you gave it a try, Jim.''
Those are the things that you are going to miss.
And I can guarantee you when the Coloradans and the
Californians come out to Montana because it is quaint and they
kind of like to rub elbows with those ranchers and loggers, all
they are going to find is ex-Californians and Coloradans. So
big deal.
Senator Enzi. Once again if you like the price of gasoline,
you are going to love the price of lumber.
Senator Crapo.
Senator Crapo. You might find some Canadian thistle, too.
It is very notable to me that on the panel we have before
us we have different industries represented. We have timber,
grazing, outfitters and guides, and each industry is telling
the same story.
Mr. Hurst, I am not going to ask you a question but I just
want to give you a little story of my own about the timber
industry. We have a small community in Idaho in Lemhi County
called Salmon, Idaho. There are about 10,000 people who live in
the entire county and the county is probably the size of one of
the northeastern States. About 70, 80, maybe even 90-percent
plus of that county is federally- or state-owned.
They had a little timber mill about 6 years ago in this
county. I think it employed about 40 people. I went there as a
Congressman and toured the mill. They were being threatened
with not being able to get timber to cut. I asked them, as I
toured the mill, how many board feet of timber they needed to
be able to cut in this forest which they live right in the
middle of and they gave me a number. I do not remember the
number right now but they gave me a number that would keep
these 40 people employed.
Then that same day I went to the Forest Service and met
with them and they talked to me about the forest management
policies and their projections and they told me that in this
forest, because of the climate and everything else, it took
about 200 years for a tree to mature to where it could be
harvested and they wanted to actually go to a 220-year cycle to
harvest the trees to have a margin of error. I thought wow, 220
years, there is probably not much timber that can be harvested
out of this forest.
But I asked them. I said, OK, if you accept your approach,
how much timber would be able to be harvested in this forest if
you kept the forest viable and healthy and only harvested on a
220-year basis? They gave me a number that was 10 times what
the little mill in the community needed. That little lumber
mill is closed because they could not get enough to keep it
open, when even on a very conservative estimate, they could
have had 10 times in their local forest what they needed to
harvest.
That is the kind of thing I think we are talking about. I
want to ask each of you, and I do not know that you all need to
answer this question, but I would like to ask if any of you
disagree with this statement. I have held a lot of hearings on
this type of issue in Idaho in one way or another, whether they
be town meetings or hearings or whatever, about the issue of
whether we can have a viable, healthy natural resource-based
economy and still protect the environment and have a strong,
healthy, sustainable environment.
And for people who do not live in these areas, the first
question they are often faced with or that those who oppose
access to the forests often raise is well, you are going to
have to destroy the environment to allow these small businesses
to thrive.
Well, the people who live in Idaho want to have our forests
be healthy and they want them there for their children and
their grandchildren to recreate in and to enjoy for the quality
of life and to have an economy, jobs, and the families that
depend on those jobs. And I think that is doable.
I would ask if any of you would like to make a quick
comment because I have a couple of other questions about
whether you think there is an inherent inability to maintain
strong, viable forests and still have healthy small businesses
in those forests.
Mr. Bousman. Senator Crapo, I would like to comment along
those lines that I do not believe there is any one of us
sitting here at this table that do not realize that it is in
our own best interest, as natural resource users, to make
decisions which are in the long-term best interest of the
environment and the natural resource.
If we did not realize that, we would be ultimately putting
ourselves out of business.
Senator Crapo. What would you be doing to your son's future
if you destroy the very environment you live in?
Mr. Bousman. That is right. I would be destroying the
future of the ability to pass these businesses down to the next
generation.
Senator Crapo. The yellow light just came on so I am going
to ask each of the rest of you to just indicate whether you
agree with that proposition.
Mr. Tinsley. Yes.
Mr. Bukowsky. Yes.
Mr. Hurst. Wholeheartedly.
Senator Crapo. Let me, in the last minute or so that I
have, go to another issue that is very important to me. As we
talk about different problems here, it seems to me that NEPA
compliance, which you are all very familiar with, I think
probably painfully familiar with, needs reform in the Federal
system. The reason I say that is because each of you in one way
or another has talked about the need for true collaborative
decisionmaking as we approach these policy decisions. Mr.
Bukowsky, you had actually mentioned that when it has worked,
it has worked pretty well for you in your industry, and when it
breaks down is when you really run into these problems.
The question I have is, I think that true collaboration is
more than just having an opportunity to comment and then often
coming to us and asking to extend the comment period because
you do not have time to comment, and more than just the
opportunity to go to public hearings. Hearings and
opportunities to comment are a form of public participation but
to me, it is not collaboration.
I think that we need true collaboration, meaning that the
NEPA process should involve the local community, the small
businesses in the community, and other interests--the
environmental community, those who are concerned about all
different aspects of the problem sitting down at a table and
working through the best way to find common ground and achieve
the multiple objectives that we have for forest management.
Would any of you care to comment on that quickly?
Mr. Tinsley. Yes, I would, Senator. Talking about the
comments, I would like to make a comment about the comments. We
do not get any opportunity to comment on how the forest and how
the public land is used in eastern America. We would not
comment. But the thing that bothers me the most is the fact
that a comment coming from Atlanta, Georgia, on how we use our
forest in Wyoming has just as much weight placed on it as does
a comment coming from Joel Bousman, whose life is going to be
ruined by the decision on how to use the forest.
Senator Crapo. Good point.
Mr. Tinsley. That really bothers me.
Senator Crapo. Mr. Bukowsky, did you want to say anything?
Mr. Bukowsky. The problem with NEPA is they hold all these
town hall meetings and get all your input, and you think it
will come out as part of that decision. But there is nothing in
NEPA that says that once they have these town hall meetings and
they take all this input that they have to use that input. What
I have found out lots of times is that you spend years at all
these meetings giving them input and then they end up not even
using any of it, and the people that are giving the input have
far more experience in the field than anyone in the Government.
Senator Crapo. Thank you. I would love to go on with this
with each of you but my time has expired and we are under a
deadline here. We need to get the next panel up here so that we
do not have to shut down before they have their chance. Thank
you very much.
Senator Enzi. I would again reiterate that the record will
be open for another 2 weeks, so if you have additional material
that you think would be helpful to us, we would appreciate
that. And if Members of the Committee have additional
questions, they will be sending those.
If our next panel would take their places? We have some
expertise now coming from Mr. Larry W. Van Tassell, professor
and head, Department of Agricultural Economics and Rural
Sociology from the University of Idaho in Moscow, Idaho and we
have William McKillop, professor emeritus, the College of
Natural Resources from the University of California-Berkeley in
Berkeley, California. We appreciate your being here today.
Mr. Van Tassell.
STATEMENT OF LARRY W. VAN TASSELL, PROFESSOR AND HEAD,
DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURAL ECONOMICS AND RURAL SOCIOLOGY,
UNIVERSITY OF IDAHO, MOSCOW, IDAHO
Mr. Van Tassell. Thank you, Senator Enzi. I would like to
thank you for being able to visit with you today. As has been
said, I am a professor and department head at the University of
Idaho and only 11 months removed from the University of
Wyoming.
My intent today is to discuss with you how decisions made
by the Forest Service impact Federal land ranchers. The
decisions I will focus on deal with the number of animals that
are allowed to graze or the amount of time they are allowed to
spend on a Forest Service allotment.
In the 1990s I was part of a study to examine the
profitability of a ``representative'' ranching operation after
it adjusted to a reduction in Federal AUMs. An AUM can be
thought of as one cow grazing on the forest for 1 month. A
mathematical model of a representative 300-cow ranch was
developed using input from ranchers who run cattle on the Big
Horn National Forest in Wyoming. The model was allowed to
adjust cattle numbers and to convert hayland to pasture as
Federal AUMs were reduced.
The results of the study are presented in this table. As
total Forest Service AUMs were reduced 25, 50 and 100 percent,
numbers of cows were reduced from 300 head to 267, 221 and 164,
respectively. These reductions translated into a decline in
average annual net cash income of over $11,000, $15,000 and
$52,000, respectively. The ending ranch equity dropped from the
original 88 to 80 percent, 78 percent and 33 percent,
respectively, under the 25-, 50- and 100-percent ranch
reduction scenarios.
The probability of receiving a negative cash flow increased
from 4 percent under the no reduction scenario to 13, 18 and
100 percent as AUMs were progressively reduced. A 36-percent
reduction in required labor resulted when all permits were
removed.
[The table follows:]
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Mr. Van Tassell. Not only does a reduction in Forest
Service AUMs reduce the income of individual ranchers but the
rural communities are also impacted. Dr. Robert Fletcher took
the results from our study and examined the impact the
reduction in total AUMs of grazing allotted to cattle on the
Big Horn National Forest would have on the surrounding four-
county area. He found that a 25-percent reduction in grazing
would reduce yearly economic activity in the four-county area
by $1.68 million per year, of which $441,000 would be personal
income for local residents. The communities would lose over 31
full-time equivalent jobs.
Similar results have been found by other researchers. For
example, Dr. Neil Rimbey found that, in Idaho, the yearly loss
in rancher net income from a proposed reduction of 6,000 AUMs
on the Sawtooth National Forest was over $90,000 per year.
Another impact on ranchers from a reduction in Federal
grazing is the loss of value in the permit they have purchased.
When the U.S. Forest Service permanently cuts grazing rights,
ranchers lose the equity they have in those permits. Over the
1985 to 1992 study period, average permit values were generally
in the $40 to $60 per AUM range for northern States, such as
Wyoming and Idaho, where seasonal grazing is common and $90 or
above per AUM for Arizona and New Mexico, where year-long
grazing is common.
A rancher that runs 300 head of cows on the Forest Service
for 3 months of the year stands to lose approximately $18,000
in equity if he or she receives a 50-percent reduction in the
AUMs they are allowed to graze.
The last thing I would like to mention is the trade-off
between wildlife and livestock. I have heard many times that
livestock need to be removed from the Forest Service lands to
increase wildlife. In most areas, wildlife do not winter on the
Forest Service lands but on private lands. When livestock are
removed from the Federal lands, every AUM on private land
becomes that much more essential to the survival of the ranch.
This additional pressure does not make for a generous
landowner when it comes to allowing wildlife to winter on
private property. A recent study I did of Wyoming ranchers
found that the average operation lost over $4,000 per year from
wildlife depredation. Landowner tolerance, not habitat, is
probably the limiting factor that imposes population bounds on
big game.
I believe that it is in the best interest of society for
the Forest Service and ranching community to work together to
keep livestock on public lands. In many areas of the West I
feel this is happening. More damage will be done to public
lands if ranchers are forced to sell to real estate developers
than was ever imaginable with livestock. Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Van Tassell follows:]
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Senator Enzi. Thank you very much.
Mr. McKillop.
STATEMENT OF WILLIAM McKILLOP, PROFESSOR EMERITUS, COLLEGE OF
NATURAL RESOURCES, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA-BERKELEY, BERKELEY,
CALIFORNIA
Mr. McKillop. Good morning, Mr. Chairman and Members of the
Committee. My name is William McKillop. I am professor emeritus
of forest economics at the University of California-Berkeley.
My degrees are in economics, statistics, and forest science. I
have authored over 100 research publications and conference
papers in the area of forestry and natural resource economics.
My statement today is based on my own experience and
research, and on data provided to me by a range of
organizations, such as the Small Business Timber Council, the
Independent Forest Products Association, California Forestry
Association, and Intermountain Forest Association and Northwest
Forestry Association.
My Exhibit 1 shows the very severe decline that has taken
place in U.S. Forest Service sawtimber sales in the past
decade. In 1988 the total volume sold was 8.4 billion board
feet. In 1998 it was only 1.9 billion board feet. That is a 6.5
billion board feet decline, a 77-percent decline in sawtimber
sales from the National Forests.
In 1988, small business purchased 5.3 billion. That is 63
percent of the total. And in 1998 they were able to purchase
only 1.7 billion board feet.
[The chart follows:]
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Mr. McKillop. These severe declines have had absolutely
traumatic effects on the forest industry, on small timber
companies, on working people and communities in the West. In
the five-State region of Washington, Oregon, California, Idaho
and Montana, there were 494 sawmills in 1989; now there are
only 265 sawmills. There were 86 plywood plants; now there are
only 48. There were 72 veneer plants in operation in 1989 and
now there are only 31 veneer plants in operation.
The severity of this impact is totally unprecedented.
Exhibit 2 shows that the burden of sawmill closures has been
disproportionately borne by small businesses. The red, the dark
color, represents the proportion of small businesses that have
closed. You see that 62 percent of the sawmills that closed
were small businesses in Oregon; in California, 55 percent of
them; in Washington, 70 percent of them; in Idaho, 71 percent;
and in Montana, 75 percent of the sawmill closures were small
businesses.
For the five-State region, the total number of mills that
have closed has been 250 and of those, 64 percent were small
businesses. And that is sawmills.
[The chart follows:]
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Mr. McKillop. Plywood plant closures--60 percent out of 30
closures in Oregon were small business; 88 percent in
Washington were small businesses. In the case of veneer plants,
60 percent in Oregon were small businesses; 80 percent in
Washington were small businesses. So there has been very much a
disproportionate impact on small businesses of this huge
decline in the Forest Service timber sales.
Associated with these sawmill closures have been very, very
large job losses. The job losses that have resulted from the
closure of small wood processing plants were 57 percent of the
total in Washington, 44 percent of the jobs lost in Oregon, 40
percent of the jobs lost in California, 35 percent of them lost
in Idaho, and 59 percent of them lost in Montana. Overall there
were something like 27,600 jobs lost in wood processing plants
in the last decade and of those, 46 percent were resulting from
the closure of small businesses.
[The chart follows:]
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Mr. McKillop. These jobs relate only to job losses due to
the closure of wood processing plants. On top of that we have
very substantial losses in the logging sector. Typically
logging firms are small companies and this 6.5 billion board
feet decrease, the 77-percent decrease in Forest Service saw
timber output has had a devastating effect on the logging
industry, as well as on the wood processing sector that I just
mentioned.
Lastly, we should note that small business losses due to
this Forest Service policy are not just in the timber industry.
Typically, the timber industry is a basic sector of any
economy, regional or statewide or national economy. It supports
jobs in the rest of the economy and the jobs that they support
are very much jobs in the small business sector.
So not only do we have the losses in wood processing and
logging companies but we also have losses in the rest of the
economy due to the Forest Service's severe decline in saw
timber output. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Those are my formal
remarks.
[The prepared statement of Mr. McKillop follows:]
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Senator Enzi. I want to thank both of you for being here
today. I am the only accountant in the U.S. Senate, so I have
to tell you, I really love the numbers you were using. That is
a very critical part of the hearing, too, to have some
statistics from some very credible witnesses who are experts in
this area that can show some of the devastation. I think both
of you have done an excellent job.
Mr. Van Tassell, I particularly appreciate your comments
about the wildlife wintering on the private lands and that is
uncompensated use. It helps to maintain wildlife in the West,
which is something people really expect to see when they come
out to the West. We may not be very long from the time that
they will make special tours to see a cow.
Ranchers have to obtain operating loans each year. Could
you go into a little bit of how the uncertainty regarding the
Federal grazing regulations, particularly the allotment
restrictions, might impact those loans? Has the Forest Service,
in your opinion, made efforts to reduce that uncertainty or has
it taken operating loans into any consideration in its
decisionmaking? Could you comment on that?
Mr. Van Tassell. I do not know that they have taken
operating loans into consideration at all but it impacts
ranchers like it would any other business. When they go to a
banker, if the assets they are using to produce their product
are uncertain, the banker is not very willing to give them a
loan on that.
The other problem is that historically the grazing permit
has held value for the rancher and the rancher has used that
for collateral in obtaining loans. With the uncertainty
surrounding whether a rancher is going to have those permits to
graze, the bankers have been reluctant to use those for
collateral. So many ranchers have lost that asset which they
had previously used to get a loan; so the uncertainty does
impact ranchers.
Senator Enzi. Mr. McKillop, I appreciate again your
emphasis on small businesses and how they are inordinately
affected. Mr. Hurst mentioned earlier that the small businesses
are the ones that buy the ad in the high school yearbook and
purchase the 4H animals and they do not have corporate offices
in another part of the country, so they have to face those
people on Main Street and they are neighbors, they are actually
neighbors that are devastated by the changes in business.
Could you give us some of those indications of the
magnitude of the impact just in the timber industry?
Mr. McKillop. Yes. I gave you the job losses of 27,600 from
wood processing jobs lost. In addition, there must be at least
about 10,000 logging jobs lost. So there we have something like
37,500 jobs lost in logging and sawmilling, plywood plants,
veneer plants.
Now every job--because the timber industry is part of the
basic economy, every timber job supports one other job in the
rest of the economy--in retail, wholesale, and service sectors.
So you can just about double that number of jobs to get the
total job losses. So you have about 37,500 jobs lost in the
timber industry but that leads to a loss of another 37,500 jobs
in the rest of the economy, therefore, you are talking about
75,000 jobs lost because of this Forest Service policy that has
led to the decline in timber harvests.
Senator Enzi. Another thing that, of course, we apply in
Wyoming is also the total population impact because each of
those jobs represents three other people that are in the
family, too. So now we are up around 300,000 people that are
being affected by the timber. And, of course, all of those are
not in Wyoming but our total population in Wyoming is 480,000
so a small change in forest policy makes a big change in the
lives of our people.
Mr. McKillop. It is very destructive to family structures.
It leads to break-ups of families or moving them. It is
extremely hard on those communities.
Senator Enzi. Again I point to the log over here. One of
the comments that was made was that timbering has gotten this
bad name in the United States but again they are interested in
forest health. It is the future of jobs there, too. And it was
pointed out that one of the big differences between a clear-
cut, which is never a clear-cut anymore but a clear-cut done by
a timbering company and one done by Mother Nature is that the
timbering company respects 200 feet from a stream.
So thank you both for your testimony.
Senator Crapo.
Senator Crapo. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I also will be
brief because we do want to get our last panel on here in the 8
minutes we have left. So I would just state, Mr. McKillop, I
assume that you would agree with the SBA Office of Advocacy's
comments to the Forest Service that their proposed rulemaking,
particularly on the roadless rule, for example, does have a
significant impact on small businesses.
Mr. McKillop. Absolutely. I read the written testimony from
the Forest Service, and I think it is totally incorrect to say
that these actions will not have an effect on small businesses.
Senator Crapo. Thank you very much.
I would just ask a question quickly here, and that is, you
indicated that there could possibly be more damage to the
public lands if we do not properly manage the grazing
activities because that would force other uses of these lands,
such as development and the like, and I think that was very
well stated in your testimony.
Could you also comment on what I see as the flip side of
that? Does grazing necessarily conflict with our ability to
manage these public lands in a way that will maintain them as
strong, healthy forests in the future indefinitely?
Mr. Van Tassell. I am not an ecologist but I work with
several ecologists and from what I have seen and heard and been
around, they are very compatible. The grazing can be used as
the management tool. In fact, I know for the sheep industry,
some sheep producers are paid to graze some Canadian forests to
help the ecology.
Senator Crapo. Well, thank you. Again we could go into much
more and I would like to but we just have a few minutes left
and I would like to see our next panel get up here. Thank you
very much.
Senator Enzi. Thank you. I do appreciate the expertise
represented here.
The next person, our final panel, is Deputy Chief of the
Forest Service, Jim Furnish. We appreciate you being here
today. I understand that you are missing a major leadership
conference in Connecticut. I understand that is where Mr.
Dombeck is at the moment.
We had the people from out of town come first because they
have to travel and they need to deliver their entire testimony.
Mr. Harkin and the Democrats have objected to anybody having a
hearing of over 2 hours today and it severely limits our
capabilities.
We, of course, had hoped that Chief Dombeck could join us
and are terribly disappointed that he did not. We will be
submitting some questions for him to answer; at this point I
will let you begin your testimony.
STATEMENT OF JAMES R. FURNISH, DEPUTY CHIEF, NATIONAL FOREST
SYSTEM, FOREST SERVICE, U.S. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE,
WASHINGTON, D.C.
Mr. Furnish. Mr. Chairman and Members of the Committee,
thank you for the opportunity to be here. Knowing you have
limited time, I am going to keep my remarks very brief to
provide you ample opportunity to ask questions if you would
care to.
We have three basic parts of our organization that try to
address the needs of small business. One is our State and
Private Forestry Organization, which is really our outreach
effort to communities and the business community in America. We
also have a research community through facilities like our
Forest Products Lab in Madison, Wisconsin, that for many
decades has sought to work in innovative ways with private
business to develop the necessary tools and technology to
enable small business to thrive. Then, really, the last is the
National Forests, most of which are in the Western United
States, where we feel we are inextricably linked, as has been
amply testified to earlier, with small businesses and small
communities throughout rural America.
With respect to some of the regulations the Forest Service
currently has in operation, it is true that we have made the
determination that neither the planning regulation nor the
roads policy, we feel, has a significant effect on a
substantial number of small businesses. However, the roadless
policy that is now undergoing final preparation, we did
complete an Initial Regulatory Flexibility Analysis and we are
proceeding with the assistance of the Small Business
Administration Office of Advocacy to address their concerns. We
are in preparation of a Final Regulatory Flexibility Analysis
to comply with the legal requirements.
I think in summary, I would just say that National Forest
lands are experiencing an ever-increasing demand for a variety
of uses from a growing and increasingly diverse population.
There is a continuous demand for commodity production, along
with an increasing demand for recreation, water, wildlife,
fish, and other tangible and intangible goods and services.
We realize that there are diverse and many needs and
requests to use National Forest System lands. We try to work
with small businesses at the local level, as well as with the
Small Business Administration to evaluate, resolve, and address
the impacts of competing uses on these small businesses.
Some local communities may experience local hardships, as
has been testified to earlier. We plan to focus our efforts in
these few communities to help develop community-led efforts to
mitigate impacts and help them diversify their economies.
We believe that today the opportunities for job creation in
new stewardship industries are immense. Maintaining our
existing roads, facilities and recreation infrastructure,
reducing fire risk, and restoring watersheds could lead to
thousands of high-paying private sector jobs that emphasize
ecosystem restoration and forest stewardship.
This concludes my verbal testimony. My written testimony
has been submitted. I would be happy to address any of your
questions.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Furnish follows:]
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Senator Enzi. Your entire testimony will be a part of the
record.
I am going to keep a very close eye on the clock because I
am notified that if we do not shut down the hearing by the
11:30 time that the whole hearing is null and void, and we
certainly do not want that to happen because we have had some
excellent testimony.
I have to say that I want to have more information about
why we are nationalizing the National Forests instead of
keeping the practices at the local level where there was a
local forester who knew what was going on. We have gone to a
one-size-fits-all policy in the Forest Service. I can tell you
the forests out here do not look anything like the forests in
Wyoming, and you cannot manage a forest in Wyoming the way you
manage a forest here. Out there we need as much water as we can
get. Out here they are trying to drain it off.
I really want to know more about why you are trying to
avoid small business input. I was particularly interested in
your comment that you are going to comply with the legal
requirements. Our interest is not in your complying with the
legal requirements. Our interest is in your finding out what
small businesses need and trying to interact with them and work
with them. When we talk about complying with the regulations,
it sounds like you are going to meet whatever you can, staying
within any loopholes that we might have built into the law, and
that is what we are talking about--passing some additional laws
to plug up those loopholes.
I see the yellow light is on and I do not want this hearing
to be null and void so we will be providing you with additional
questions and you can provide additional comments.
With that, I will adjourn the hearing and leave the record
open.
[Whereupon, at 11:29 a.m., the Committee was adjourned.]
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