By Jim Stanford on November 29, 2007
Today’s the day the Forest Service brass has come to town to talk about why it’s pulling up the stakes of the Bridger-Teton supervisor’s office on North Cache.
Although there has been no official announcement, the Forest Service superiors are here, as one insider put it, to “let us down gently,” having already decided to move the office charged with managing 3.4 million acres to Alpine or Afton, an hour away.
These public officials are going to sell public property and move a critical public lands office without any public input — in fact, over the objections of Wyoming’s congressional delegation and a wide spectrum of community economic and environmental groups.
Instead of an open hearing, the Forest Service is holding private meetings only with those groups that wrote letters when news of the move first broke.
Naturally, I was appalled and planned to crash one of the meetings. But Cory Hatch of the News&Guide infiltrated BTNF headquarters and will file a report. And Franz Camenzind of the Jackson Hole Conservation Alliance will be there, too, to represent the public interest. So no need for a confrontation, yet.
While this whole process reeks of bureaucratic arrogance, it should come as no surprise, given that the Bush Forest Service has moved steadily to commercialize and privatize public lands.
The move fits the pattern of starving an agency until it no longer can provide effective service, and then outsourcing those services to the private sector.
The cash-strapped Bridger-Teton will reap a short-term windfall from the sale of the land beneath the supervisor’s office, which is old and in need of replacing. But exiled in Alpine, Bridger-Teton managers will be farther removed from the lands they oversee and the public to which they most often answer.
That’s exactly the point, says Charlie Woodward, a watchdog of forest privatization. “The Forest Service in Jackson is under a great deal of scrutiny and has to be responsive, and they really don’t like that,” he says.
Woodward, who lives in Victor, and others like Scott Silver of Wild Wilderness, a group based in Oregon, have long warned of fee programs and efforts to commercialize public lands.
For years the Forest Service has been under increasing pressure to run itself like a business. The 2005 bill sponsored by U.S. Rep. Barbara Cubin and her man on the House Resources Committee, the since-deposed Richard Pombo, that would have sold off large swaths of public land to support our bankrupt government was only the most egregious example of this effort.
There is no guarantee that the money raised by sale of the North Cache property will stay locally and address the high cost of housing for employees — the guise officials have offered for the move. Instead, the millions generated could go toward planting a national forest in Iraq, for all we know.
A key portion of our community is being outsourced. Forty-five Forest Service employees will have to commute an hour each way through the oft-dangerous Snake River Canyon, only to be less accessible to the majority of the resident and visiting public who use the Bridger-Teton forest.
BTNF Supervisor Kniffy Hamilton has been an outspoken opponent of more oil and gas leasing in the Bridger-Teton, and her husband, Larry Hamilton, is chairman of the Teton County Democratic Party. One can’t help but wonder whether she is being punished politically; certainly her objection to the move was likely to fall on deaf ears at the higher levels of the administration.
In any case, the job of the public servant charged with overseeing America’s largest national forest outside Alaska will only get harder.
Posted under environment, national forest, politics
This move will have a deep impact on Jackson. Many Forest Service employees have working companions - like in my office - and I stand to lose a valuable employee if the move happens. Having the USFS office in Jackson is very important to the town and year-round community - lets keep it here.
i was at he meeting too. it was a shameless last chance to beg regional to allow b-t offices to remain in jackson. valid points were raised, though.
ogden bigwigs came to meeting with charts and data collected from 2004 that said people are all moving to alpine and there was 900 on the waiting list for affordable housing. local agencies argued that housing authority, trust and habitat were making headway and FT employees were making it work in jackson somehow — some even buying in town.
alpine would be no better for housing in 10 years either, others argued. crucial relationships would be jeopardized.
honestly, the vibe i got was HQ has their mind made up to move super’s office (SO) and leave district offices. they continually asked everyone there how could they maintain important relationships with stakeholders if SO was in alpine?
i didnt get the feeling the FS was looking to the conveyance as a cash cow they could use somewhere else. neither regional rep has any control over where the $ goes.
the sticking point was an abnormal fear that the b-t would not be able to find employees or house them. every agencies present — g&f, refuge, gtnp — expressed strong interest in pooling resources and ideas about a combined housing arrangement. “we’re all in the same boat,” everyone said.
great graphic manipulation, js. love the dollar sign.
thanks, steady jake. I should have taken it a step further and cut down the tree.
the bottom line, to me, is that the Forest Service budget is so starved that the agency has to resort to these desperate measures to fund itself. we’re practically holding bake sales to pay for management of our public lands.
everyone I talked to who attended the meetings said the FS reps have their minds made up.
I meant to add that the folly of this venture was further illustrated when, on the same week we learned that the Forest Service had applied to Congress to sell at least half of the 15-acre site on North Cache, Wyoming Game and Fish announced it was opening a new office in Jackson specifically because of all the wildlife issues here.