In 2014, the new Farm Bill allowed the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management to work with states to do watershed restoration and other work on federal land, particularly in areas where the work is needed but the agencies don’t have the money to do it. The program is called Good Neighbor Authority. Washington and Idaho have embraced it. Peg Polichio is a facilitator for Good Neighbor Authority projects for the Idaho Department of Lands.
“The states want to be involved with helping out on the federal lands in their particular states, maybe add some capacity, maybe have some qualities they can bring to the table as partners to help the federal government," Polichio said.
Jon Songster from the Department of Lands says Idaho has developed Good Neighbor agreements with four of the seven national forests in the Gem State.
“We’ve really been focusing on landscapes in the urban interface that have high risk of insect and disease," Songster said.
He says Good Neighbor projects cannot be done in federal roadless or wilderness areas and no new permanent roads can be built. The program does allow crews to maintain existing roads and to build temporary roads into new areas.
Idaho has been particularly aggressive. It has 11 Good Neighbor projects are underway. Peg Polichio says that’s just a start.
“I think it’s up to 20 projects in the chute that we’re talking about conceptually going forward. Not all of them are timber sales. A lot of them are forest restoration projects, wildlife habitat, soil surveys," Polichio said.
In two projects in the Nez Perce-Clearwater National Forest in central Idaho, trees have already been cut. One is a salvage sale after a fire, the other a thinning project. Two projects are in the works in the Panhandle. Last month, the Department of Lands awarded, on behalf of the Forest Service, a salvage sale north of Priest River. The Stimson Lumber Company is scheduled to remove dead and dying trees from about 300 acres. Another project near Priest Lake is in the planning stages.
Washington is a year or two behind Idaho in terms of Good Neighbor activity.
“We are in process of about five projects right now," said Trevor McConchie, an executive policy advisor on forest health for the Department of Natural Resources.
One is in the Colville National Forest.
“We have a restoration thinning with some stewardship-related work that we’re going to be accomplishing, called the Block of Nine project. That one is currently happening as we speak and they’re managing that out of our northeast region,” McConchie said.
McConchie says his agency and the Forest Service will also remove trees from 2,500 acres in the Wenatchee National Forest as a fuels reduction project. They also have projects planned in the Gifford Pinchot forest in southwestern Washington and on the Olympic Peninsula.
The goal is that Good Neighbor Authority projects be self-sustaining. Dollars from timber sales are to be invested into new projects, especially those that wouldn’t be possible for years without a new infusion of money.
McConchie says, while Idaho is moving full speed ahead, Washington is more cautious.
“By the end of 2019, I think is when we’re really going to know if that model works in Washington and I’m confident that it will, but I don’t have a crystal ball. With that, we’re relying on granted funds from the Forest Service. That’s coming out of their appropriated dollars. We’re also using some of the state capital dollars to accomplish some of these projects,” he said.
That money was attached to a forest health bill approved by the legislature in 2017.
Many of the projects in both states are developed with local collaborative stakeholder groups. Jeff Lau is a timber management officer on the Idaho Panhandle National Forest. He says his office worked for months with a broad range of stakeholders to develop a to-do list.
“It allowed us to sense from the public the areas of concern that they had and it lined up really good with this authority because a good portion of those projects were in the urban interface and touched on insect and disease and the concerns of wildland fires," Lau said. "We already had projects planned with our groups to be able to identify a project that we might be able to start or initiate a little bit earlier than we would have without this authority.”
Peg Polichio from the Idaho Department of Lands.
“Most of the forest collaboratives are asking for some thinning in their forests to reduce fire. Some of them are asking for the logging part of it for forest health so it will help their local community revenues and so on. We’re not hearing from anyone, almost anyone, that this is not a good idea,” Polichio said.
Support for Good Neighbor projects is not unanimous. There are some conservationists in the Northwest who think the collaboration movement is a step backward for protecting federal land.
George Wuerthner is an ecologist and author in Bend, Oregon.
“I’ve been in five or six of them in one degree or another and when they go around and do introductions, if there’s 25 people in a room, most of the people have either sympathies and/or are actively involved in resource extraction. They’re timber company executives, county commissioners and foresters and so forth; all of whom, in one way or another, their jobs depend on advocating for resource extraction,” Wuerthner said.
Conservationists are usually outnumbered, he says. And often, they drop out of collaboratives because they don’t have the time or the resources to drive long distances to attend a lot of meetings.
Mike Bader from the Flathead-Lolo-Bitterroot Citizen Task Force in Missoula says, with Good Neighbor Authority now firmly in federal law, he says attempts are being made to give collaborative groups new powers.
“They’re using a process called ‘categorical exclusion’, where these projects are categorically excluded from the National Environmental Policy Act and public involvement, so it really is a stacked deck where it’s invite-only. You have to sign on to the agendas, so there’s not a lot of freedom of thought in these collaboratives. We just think they have an inordinate amount of power and influence that is balkanizing the national forest system," Bader said.
Other conservationists view it differently and have embraced the collaborative process. They include Mike Petersen from the Spokane-based Lands Council.
“When conditions change, when climate changes, when people’s attitude, when support for things, of course you change or you just keep saying the same old rhetoric and there’s people stuck in the same old rhetoric,” Petersen said.
Petersen says he’s pleased by collaborative-supported projects on the Colville National Forest that have led to trees that are better-spaced in forests, while protecting old growth and roadless areas.
Peg Polichio says Good Neighbor Authority not only will lead to better managed forests, she believes it’s also relieving some of the political pressure from those who want Idaho to take over management of all federal lands within its borders.