After 2 years, Arizona's major forest thinning effort is back on the drawing board

Opinion: If two years of study and collaboration couldn't make the 4FRI effort viable, how are we supposed to thin the forests before they burn?

Joanna Allhands
Arizona Republic
Tri Star Logging workers cut pines destined for sawmills or an adjacent biomass electric plant in 2018.

Arizona got lucky this year.

Monsoon rains tamped down what was shaping up to be a catastrophic wildfire season.

But our forests remain horrendously overgrown, and efforts to thin them – while important and ongoing – still aren’t big enough to appreciably lower the risk.

This is a major problem that the Four Forest Restoration Initiative (4FRI) was supposed to solve. Arizona doesn’t have enough logging infrastructure left to work at scale, and most of the lumber that needs removed is low-dollar stuff, which makes it difficult to privately finance larger thinning projects.

If 2 years can't deliver a solution, what can?

The Forest Service doesn’t have the resources to do it alone, either. There is wide agreement that government must work with a broad range of public and private partners to mechanically thin hundreds of thousands of acres of national forest before they erupt into dangerous and destructive infernos.

And yet, at the 11th hour, the U.S. Forest Service abruptly canceled a request for proposals (RFP) to do just that, essentially sending the effort back to the drawing board after two years of work and significant financial investments from those who bid.  

It’s a major setback – and wakeup call – for 4FRI, one of the nation’s largest forest restoration projects. If two years of work couldn’t produce a viable effort to expedite mechanical thinning, what can?

This effort was huge and unprecedented

The Forest Service has awarded smaller contracts before, but the goal this time around was to go much bigger, with more or larger players, and for a much longer timeframe to help speed the work.

The agency collaborated with the federal Bureau of Reclamation, the state forestry department, the state commerce authority and Salt River Project to help draw up the scope of work, something it had not done before. Provisions were revised multiple times in hopes of making the project more workable, a process that extended the timeline by more than a year.

Some complained about the delay, saying the uncertainty it created was making it even harder for existing forestry companies to remain viable in Arizona.

Still, in the end, multiple groups submitted bids by the May deadline.

But at the 11th hour, it fell apart

The Forest Service went into radio silence as it evaluated those bids. And then, in September, the agency released a statement saying it had canceled the RFP, citing “significant risks (that) compromise the likelihood of successful performance over 20 years.”

Bidders were shocked. Angry. Bewildered.

Arizona’s governor and senators criticized the loss of time amid the mounting fire risk – and understandably so. We don’t have another two years to keep talking about how to make larger scale forest thinning successful, much less to rebuild the trust that has been lost by nixing an effort when everyone thought it had nearly crossed the finish line.

We don't have time to fight over this

If the RFP still had too much risk to be successful long-term, you’d think that would have become obvious during the considerable amount of study that occurred before groups submitted their final bids. It’s maddening that it didn’t.

But we have no choice but to move forward. Our forests simply can’t wait while we argue over how this should have played out.

The Forest Service says it remains committed to this process and hopes to try again with a new proposal that rethinks some basic assumptions, including the acreage and volume of areas that should be treated and whether biomass should be as prominent of a solution to dispose of the waste.

It also is reconsidering how it would adjust prices for the work over the long term, and how it would reimburse contractors for their investments should Congress fail to fully fund the program – an assurance bidders say they desperately need to appease investors.

Act with urgency, provide certainty

But we don’t have two years – or even six to nine months – to work out these details. The Forest Service needs to act with a lot more urgency than that.

Several companies are nearing the end of their contracts, and talk of renewing or growing their work has largely been on hold while the RFP process played out. That is making it nearly impossible for them to make long-term business decisions.

And that’s a problem, because if we hurt the nascent industry that is here, it would be the death knell for any effort to attract larger players.

The Forest Service should focus now on providing some certainty for those that are already doing this work, while it regroups on the specifics to attract larger players. 

A first step: Shore up existing industry

Meanwhile, Arizona should use its Good Neighbor Authority – which allows it to complete forest management projects on behalf of the Forest Service – to expedite more projects like what Salt River Project is doing with other partners to thin about 2,300 acres next year. 

We also should do more to leverage tax credits and donations – and perhaps find low-interest loans – to further incentivize the removal of such low-value lumber.

I know. This is still smaller-scale work, and that’s not the ultimate solution here. But what’s that saying? We can’t put all our eggs in one basket. Nor can we let perfect be the enemy of good.

There is no rich philanthropist waiting in the wings to say, “Here’s $2 billion. Go thin the forest.”

It’s going to take sacrifices from even more of us to take this critical work to scale.

Reach Allhands at joanna.allhands@arizonarepublic.com. On Twitter: @joannaallhands.

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