Government Accounting Office (GAO) findings that the Forest Service spent nearly 40 percent of money allocated for wilderness in other areas — including recreation and timber — have led environmentalists and a key congressman to call for sweeping changes in the agency’s structure.
Over the last four years Congress has increased appropriations for wilderness by nearly 80 percent because the Forest Service said it could not manage wilderness properly without more money. Rep. Bruce Vento, D-Minn., and environmentalists went to bat for the agency, only to discover now that the Forest Service used the money for other activities.
“Outside pressure for budget increases has been a great benefit to the agency, and this [misuse] is almost a, breach of faith,” said Jay Watson of The Wilderness Society. “It is evidence of a deep-seated problem.”
The diversion of funds happened because the structure of the Forest Service undervalues wilderness, a Vento staffer explained. For example, he said, the wilderness program has no director, although every other Forest Service program does. Consequently, no one is protecting wilderness funds.
“Would the director of range let the funds divert out of his program?” the staffer asked.
Bill Worf, president of the advocacy group Wilderness Watch, says the agency diverted much of the money to landscape management and cultural resources, programs that support logging. He says the Forest Service broke no laws in the diversion because wilderness technically shares the same budget line allocation with landscape management, cultural resources and recreation.
His organization, along with The Wilderness Society and Vento’s office, has called for wilderness to have its own budget line. He says the Forest Service will “resist that with everything they have because they don’t want to get in a position where they are legally bound.”
But he added that if wilderness does not win its own budget line, his organization will turn up the pressure to ensure that the money is spent as Congress intended.
Wilderness Watch is in part responsible for the GAO study. Worf is a retired Forest Service employee who spent the better part of his career on wilderness issues. In his retirement, he is using that knowledge to monitor the agency.
Worf started with Region One (the Northern Rockies), where he found that the Forest Service spent only 49 percent of the money earmarked for wilderness in 1990, despite a nearly 100 percent increase in allocations from 1988. This led him to investigate all the regions where he found similar problems. He turned his findings over to Vento’s office, which called for the GAO study. Vento is chairman of the House Interior and Insular Affairs Subcommittee on National Parks and Public Lands.
“I am both pleased and disappointed,” Worf said. “I am pleased that the audit got Forest Service attention and disappointed that the agency I used to work for was so careless about their use of money.”
But carelessness may be too simple an explanation. Steve Morton, a wilderness specialist in Region One, said he cannot account for where the money went. He said the money was not used strictly on wilderness because such spending would not help meet what the agency calls “hard target” goals. Forest Service employee performance reviews look at “hard targets” like board feet cut and numbers of animals grazed, but wilderness has no such standards.
Joe Flood and Kari Gunderson, wilderness rangers in Montana’s Mission Mountains, said the GAO study belies the agency’s claim that it is committed to wilderness. They said the agency is most concerned with logging, and that wilderness rangers are frequently criticized for advocating attention to the backcountry. Staff officers in wilderness management are generally recruited from timber programs, a practice that undercuts good wilderness management, they said.
Accountability is another major problem in the Forest Service structure, according to a Vento staffer. Forest Service line officers are not rated on their performance in managing wilderness. Thus they are not likely to give it the attention it needs to remain pristine. Most wilderness areas are subdivided between forests and ranger districts, the staffer added. If each forest or ranger district has only a small piece of a wilderness area, it is unlikely to get sufficient attention.
An agency report to Congress accounting for the discrepancies between allocations and spending said that all regional foresters now must ensure that each forest supervisor receives a specific allocation for wilderness, Also, regional foresters will provide a quarterly status report on its wilderness spendings, which will be used in their performance evaluations.
This should produce more money for wilderness in the field. In the Beartooth District of the Custer National Forest, for example, the district ranger must spend $65,000 on wilderness this year, compared to the $4,000 spent last year.
Tracy Stone-Manning Tracy Stone-Manning is a freelance writer in Missoula, Montana.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Forest Service spends wilderness money on logging.
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