A western showdown: before he can reinvent the Forest Service, Mike Dombeck will have to outsmart western Republicans on the Hill

Washington Monthly, May, 1998

Before he can reinvent the Forest Service, Mike Dombeck will have to outsmart Western Republicans on the Hill

The showdown between Forest Service Chief Mike Dombeck and Republican congressional leaders had been building for months. When it finally came, on March 26 of this year, Dombeck was summoned to appear at an unprecedented joint hearing of three House committees -- Resources, Budget, and the Interior Appropriations subcommittee -- to defend his agency against charges of gross financial mismanagement. House Resources Chairman Don Young (R-Alaska) and Helen Chenoweth (R-Idaho), who chairs the Resources subcommittee on forests, browbeat Dombeck with a highly critical new report from the General Accounting Office (GAO) that condemned the agency's financial statements as "unreliable" and accused the service of being unable to account for large expenditures of tax dollars. Sen. Larry Craig (R-Idaho), who made a guest appearance, stormed, "This is the worst mismanagement in the service's history."

Dombeck conceded there were problems at the agency, whose antiquated budgeting and accounting systems are still tied to its rapidly declining timber sales. But the legislators' complaints about such issues were just a sideshow. Everyone in the hearing room knew what had really prompted this confrontation: Dombeck's landmark efforts to reinvent his embattled agency. The Forest Service, consumed for the past half-century with cutting timber, is on the cusp of a new era, and Mike Dombeck's plans for the agency are making some Western Republicans in Congress very nervous.

Road Blocks

In January, Dombeck announced an 18-month moratorium on construction of new roads in most national forest roadless areas. The moratorium is necessary, he said, to allow the Forest Service to begin addressing a $10 billion backlog of road-maintenance needs. Fewer than half the 430,000 miles in the national forest road network are adequately maintained. The Forest Service can't just walk away from these old logging roads. Over time, culverts become dislodged, blocking fish passage, or the roads themselves slump down hillsides, dumping payloads of soil into streams and wiping out fish spawning beds. With adequate funding, the Agency could close thousands of miles of roads, stabilize them, and upgrade those that remain in use.

But Dombeck's moratorium also stands to delay timber sales totaling between 100 million and 275 million board feet -- a fact not well-received by Western Republicans in Congress. After Dombeck's announcement, Idaho's Senator Craig fired off this alliterative masterpiece: "While we understand there are unmet road-repair needs, it is going to take more than press releases, private leaks, preservation-group pandering, and predictions of peril from the Forest Service before we are convinced they are serious about this" More to the point, GOP legislators are threatening to slash the Forest Service's budget in retaliation for Dombeck's moratorium. "If you want to get their attention, [the budget] is the best way," declared Congressman Young. (This, despite the fact that the Tongass National Forest in Young's home state is excluded from the moratorium.)

As if this weren't enough to irritate Western GOP legislators, last year Dombeck became the first Forest Service chief to admit that the agency's timber-sale program is a serious money-loser. Some agency observers say it's about time. Based on its own accounting system, which doesn't calculate the costs of building roads, repairing streams, or making payments to state and local governments, the agency reported that it lost $15 million selling timber in 1996. The GAO, which uses a different system, pegged the loss at $995 million between 1992 and 1994. However you tally the cost, the agency was so strapped in 1997 that it had to transfer $77 million from other dedicated funds to pay for a shortfall in its road, recreation, and state reimbursement programs because its National Forest Fund was bankrupt.

One reason for the shortfall is the agency's controversial "purchaser road credit" program, which allows federal-timber buyers to deduct their road-building costs from the price they pay for timber. Eliminating the program would have saved the Treasury $50 million last year. The high costs of the subsubsidy has united deficit hawks with conservationists in opposing the program as the blatant giveaway it is. The Clinton administration, sensing an opportunity to satisfy both camps, proposed last year and again this year to end purchaser road credits and put more money into management of existing logging roads. Both years, Congress came within a vote or two of ending the program. In 1997 the proposal might have passed the Senate had Vice President Al Gore been present to cast the tie-breaking vote rather than off on a fund-raising trip.

The timber industry, understandably, is not eager to see its windfall abolished. And Republican legislators such as Chenowith, Craig, and Young, who have a vested interest in keeping their powerful timber constituents happy, have already begun working to derail Dombeck's roads initiative. Shortly after President Clinton, at the signing of the 1998 Forest Service appropriations bill last fall, announced that the agency was developing "a scientifically based policy for managing roadless areas in our national forests," Western legislators fired a warning shot. In January, six GOP senators -- Craig, Frank Murkowski of Alaska, Slade Gorton of Washington, Conrad Burns of Montana, Gordon Smith of Oregon, and Craig Thomas of Utah -- sent U.S. Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman a letter offering to sit down with him and address the Forest Service's road maintenance problem. But the senators also cautioned Glickman not to reopen the roadless area issue, which had been fought out during bitter negotiations in the early 1980s: "[W]e cannot agree -- and we believe there would be widespread congressional opposition -- to a flat moratorium on roadless area entry, a redefinition of roadless areas, the designation of any new land use categories, or any other unilateral Administration initiative that vitiates the release language agreements that were forged in a bipartisan fashion in the last generation of state wilderness bills," they wrote. (The letter, like most missives on this issue from the GOP leadership, was crafted by Mark Rey, a smooth-talking former timber lobbyist who now staffs the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee.)