• Little Rock, Arkansas
By James Ronald Skains
Journal Correspondent

The Forest Health Conference conducted in Little Rock on June 7-8 under the theme of "Partnering for Healthy Forests" started out as a bright spot for the beleaguered Southern forest industry. However, an in-depth interview by the Piney Woods Journal with Mark Rey, Under Secretary for Natural Resources and Environment of the USDA revealed that while help may be on the way, it remains many months away.

"The Forest Health Act was passed by Congress last fall and signed into law by President Bush on December 3, 2004," Mark Rey told the Journal. "However, the appropriations of the $750 million dollars to implement the Forest Health Act had to appropriated by Congressional action through the passage of the 2004 budget, and that has not happened."

"In fact, as we understand it, the 2004 budget bill will not be passed in Congress until after the elections," Rey pointed out. "We think that Congress will come back into session after the November elections in early December and pass the 2004 Budget bill. If that time table holds in place, then the $750 million that is appropriated for the implementation of the Forest Health Act will be available in early 2005."

"When Congress fails to pass the Budget bill in a timely manner, it makes things extraordinarily difficult for us in Washington to implement programs such as the National Forest Health Act," Rey noted. "The 2003 National Forest Health Act is the keystone part of our efforts to reduce the fuel content on National Forest lands to prevent catastrophic fires as we have had to deal with in the last several fire seasons, particularly in the Western states."

"The only parts of the 2004 Budget that might be passed before the November elections is the Budget for Defense and Homeland Security," Rey explained. "By Congress not passing our appropriations bill in a timely manner, it has made things very difficult for us this year. We have to submit our proposed budget to Congress and the Office of Management and Budget in September for the 2005 fiscal year although we have not had the opportunity to see how the budget for 2004 works out with our programs."

The big question mark for the long-term success of the Forest Health Act has always been whether there is a market for the pre-commercial and non-commercial wood that would come off not only National Forest Land but also Department of Interior land which includes land owned by the Bureau of Land Management. The technical term given by government planners for pre-commercial and non-commercial wood coming from public owned land is "bio-mass."

"The Bush Administration was well aware that markets for bio-mass coming from thinning operations on government owned land was not very strong," said Rey, who spent 18 years in Washington, D.C. with a Forest Products Association before going to work on Capitol Hill as a Senate Staffer in 1994. "We decided to take a two-prong strategy on addressing the lack of markets for wood coming from thinning operations on public land. First, we addressed the problem by proposing incentives to companies that could use bio-mass coming from thinning operations, and secondly, proposed mandating electric power producers to produce some of their power from alternate energy sources such as bio-mass.

"We decided to put these provisions into both the Forest Health Act and in the 2004 National Energy bill," Rey pointed out. "We decided that whichever bill came out of the Senate Committees first, we would then drop the provisions from the other bill. The 2004 Energy Bill cleared the Senate Committee before the Forest Health Act bill cleared that Committee so we decided to go ahead as planned and drop the bio-mass provisions from the Forest Health Act bill."

"This was an unfortunate decision because the Healthy Forest Act bill quickly cleared Congress and was signed into law by President bush in early December of 2003," Rey noted. "However, the real important bio-mass incentives and mandate for green power were not part of the Forest Health Act signed into law by President Bush. The Energy Bill of 2004 is dead in the water for this year, and the earliest the current proposed Energy Bill could pass would be in 2005."

"The federal government is like a slow moving train," Rey said in elaborating on the current scenario of the Health Forest Act, the budget battle and the bio-mass proposals. "However, this year, Congress has been moving slower than in other years. Government didn't suddenly get inefficient, it has always been inefficient."

During the question and answer period of the Monday morning Roundtable Discussion led by USDA Secretary Ann Veneman, the Journal had asked the question, "How much of the $750 million dollars budgeted in the Healthy Forest Act will actually be paid to the loggers who are doing the thinning in the National Forest?" Two of the panelists gave short answers to this question.

The first answer was, "Down on the Kisatchie, we are paying $2.00 an acre to the loggers." The other answer was, "We don't know, because we do not know what our administrative costs will be." The Journal rephrased this question during the Veneman and Huckabee press conference: "There is a big difference between $2.00 an acre and $750 million, so where is this $750 million dollars really going?"

That question at the press conference which went un-answered, however did lead to the opportunity to conduct the one-on-one interview with the Under Secretary for Natural Resources and Environment, USDA. It was at that point in the interview with Rey that he patiently answered the Journal's previous questions. He explained the inner-working of the program process, the budget process and the implementation of the Health Forest Act.

"At any time in Washington the different departments are working with three budgets," Rey explained. "First, we are trying to implement the budget that has been approved. Secondly, we are working with Congress to pass the current proposed budget for the coming year; and thirdly, we are preparing a budget for the next year."

"With the $750 million budget for the Health Forest Act, at this point we do not know how much money will be available to pay the loggers who are actually doing the thinning on the National Forest and Department of Interior land," Rey stated. "The reason is because we do not know what our exact administrative cost will be for implementing this program. We hope to keep our cost low so that adequate monies will be available to pay for what is actually happening on the ground."

"All the salaries of the USDA Forest Service personnel who will be working on implementing the Health Forest Act will be included in the $750 million budget," Rey, a native of Ohio, pointed out. "Also, all the consulting contracts, legal fees, litigation cost (if any), and what people refer to as `red tape cost' if any will also be paid out of the $750 million. Once all those numbers become factual, then we can determine how much money will be available to pay actual cost for the forest thinning operation."

"Also included in the implementation of the program is what we call the cost of the RFP's which is simply Request For Proposals concerning specific areas in which we want to implement the Forest Health Act," Rey, a University of Michigan forestry School graduate noted. "For instance, out in Arizona on one of the National Forests, we have 150,000 acres that needs to be thinned. However, there are no forest products mills currently in operation in the state of Arizona."

"So to solve this problem, we have requested proposals from interested parties in the area as to how to solve this dilemma," Rey, who got his first on-the-ground experience during a summer job on a National Forest in Montana, said. "One interested party that has come forward is a local governing body that is looking at thinning the 150,000 acres on national forest land as an opportunity for economic development."

"The local governing body believes that if they can partner with the USDA Forest Service and control the fiber supply on a ten year contract, that they can entice a Forest Products company to build a particle board mill to handle the material coming of the public lands," Rey explained. "This would be economic development for this area in Arizona and would also result in reducing fuel supply on the ground in the forest for a catastrophic wildfire."

"Our Request For Proposals will look at long-term `partnering' of different entities to get the job done of producing healthy forests and reducing the danger of wildfire by thinning and maintaining our forest land all over the country," Rey pointed out. "In the Arizona proposal, the local governing body is talking with some of the Indian Tribes in the area to thin some of their land to produce an adequate supply of fiber for long-term success of the proposed particle board plant."

After concluding my interview with USDA Under Secretary Mark Rey, I realized that I now have a better understanding of how the Forest Health Act signed into law by President Bush in early December of 2003 would work to ensure healthy forest and a reduction in catastrophic wildfires on public land. Stages 1,2, and 3 were completed in that in Phase One, the USDA Forest Service had developed a workable plan for publicly owned forest land.

Secondly, Congress had passed the Healthy Forest Act, and thirdly, President Bush had signed the Act into law in December 2003. Phase four will occur when Congress passes the 2004 budget sometime in late 2004 or early 2005. Stage five, the development of new markets for bio-mass will occur when the Energy Bill is passed and funded by Congress.

Stage five could be enhanced and spurred along if forest products companies decide to build particle board mills in Arizona and other places with a large fiber supply due to the implementation of the Healthy Forest Act. And the final phase, which gets down to the ground concerning actual thinning and determines the overall success of the Healthy Forest act will be spurred forward if the USDA can keep down cost associated with administering and implementing the Healthy Forest Act.

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