Copyright 2000 Federal News Service, Inc.
Federal News Service
April 6, 2000, Thursday
SECTION: PREPARED TESTIMONY
LENGTH: 2816 words
HEADLINE:
PREPARED TESTIMONY OF MARY COULOMBE DIRECTOR - TIMBER ACCESS & SUPPLY ON
BEHALF OF THE AMERICAN FOREST AND PAPER ASSOCIATION
BEFORE THE
HOUSE APPROPRIATIONS COMMITTEE SUBCOMMITTEE ON LABOR, HHS, AND
EDUCATION
BODY:
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY The Forest
Service has issued no less than five regulatory rulemakings and policy
initiatives that, if enacted, will establish centralized control over the
National Forests, circumventing the existing statutory multiple-use, sustained
yield mandate from Congress. This shift is a clear violation of the original
intent of the Organic Administration Act of 1897. In addition, millions of acres
of federal land have been removed from multiple use management via recent
"National Monument" designations. The Forest Service must be held accountable.
As evidenced by the FY 2000 reprogramming request, the Forest Service is
proposing to lower the funding for the forest management program to a level
specifically rejected by Congress. Based on the all-time low report from the
first quarter of FY 2000, it doesn't appear they will accomplish the program
outputs funded, which continues a trend from previous years. - AF&PA is
opposed to the FY 2001 proposed budget structure, because we believe it will
continue to mask major shifts in funds away from Congressionally approved
programs. The Forest Service has yet to adequately address the growing
catastrophic forest health conditions on the national forests. Restoring the
health of our national forests must be the top priority and Congress and the
Forest Service must work to ensure that funds are available to accomplish this.
Many national forests have the ability to conduct forest management programs
above the levels called for in the President's budget request. We support the
necessary funding to accomplish an increased program, focused on getting needed
dollars to the field. AF&PA strongly supports the Forest Inventory and
Analysis (FIA) research, and the need to get the inventory cycle on a five-year
basis. Congress should require the Forest Service to adequately fund the FIA
program, as agreed by the signing of the MOU on February 15, 2000 committing the
Forest Service, our organization, and others to support full implementation of
the FIA program. AF&PA supports increases to the State & Private Forest
Health Management and Cooperative Fire Protection programs. These programs are
vital to the protection of lives, property and resources, both public and
private.
TESTIMONY
Good afternoon Mr. Chairman. My name is Mary
Coulombe. I am the Director of Timber Access and Supply at the American Forest
and Paper Association (AF&PA) in Washington, D.C. I am presenting my
testimony today on behalf of the Association's member companies, associations,
and allied groups. AF&PA members include forestland owners, manufacturers of
solid wood products, and producers of pulp and paper products. The U.S. forest
products industry has sales in excess of $275 billion annually
here and abroad and employs 1.6 million people, 1.2% of the entire U.S. work
force.
Let me begin my testimony by thanking the Chairman and the
members of this Subcommittee for asking me to testify today on the priorities
and concerns of the forest products industry with regard to Forest Service
natural resources management, and their FY 2001 appropriations proposal.
AF&PA welcomes the opportunity to work with the Subcommittee to increase the
value and efficiency of federal forestry programs to ensure the sustainability
of our nation's forests. Our members are committed to sustainable forestry for
all forestlands, public and private.
Mr. Chairman and members of the
Subcommittee, I would first like to briefly mention three major areas of
concern.
First, the FY 2001 proposed budget, as in the past few years,
does not address in a responsible manner the forest health crisis that continues
to expand in our nation's forests. The lack of program emphasis on forest health
conditions and concrete actions to address these conditions is not just a threat
to the national forests, but also to adjacent private lands and communities.
Forest Service managers must do the work for which the national forests were
originally established by Congress: securing favorable conditions of water
flows, furnish a continuous supply of timber, and to protect our resources on
both public and private lands from the rampages of wildfire.
For over
two years now Forest Service Chief Mike Dombeck has testified in front of
numerous House and Senate subcommittees that 40 million acres of our national
forests are at high risk of catastrophic forest fires and an additional 26
million acres are at risk of insect and disease mortality. These conditions are
frightening and unacceptable, and yet in the last two budget cycles the
Administration has not put forward a plan with budget proposals to deal with
this crisis in our national forests. If the Forest Service is going to address
the forest health conditions on the national forests, then adequate dollars must
reach the field level to carry out restoration and management programs. In our
review of the budget, it is apparent that another year has gone by and the
Administration is still unwilling to commit the dollars that are needed to begin
the restoration process. We encourage this subcommittee to acknowledge the
problem by recommending a budget that reflects a commitment to addressing this
growing crisis.
Second, the Forest Service is attempting to circumvent
Congress and change its mission and purpose for the National Forests. In the
past six months the Administration has instigated no less than FIVE major
initiatives, including the Roadless Area Initiative, proposed
new planning regulations, draft strategic plan, proposed new transportation
policy, and the proposed new unified federal watershed program. Although
AF&PA understands that these initiatives do not fall under the purview of
this subcommittee specifically, we are extremely concerned about their
cumulative impacts on appropriated program funds. Unfortunately, the funding for
these initiatives is being siphoned away from field level programs vital to the
health and productivity of our nation's forestlands and certainly to rural
America.
Several of these initiatives are either directly or indirectly
attempting to administratively change the mission and purpose of the National
Forests. The draft GPRA strategic plan and the proposed land and resource
planning regulations are inconsistent with the legislative direction for
multiple uses and high level sustained yield of outputs of the renewable timber
resource. We are very concerned that these proposals, coupled with the proposed
FY 2001 budget, would essentially do away with timber production as a primary
use in the National Forest System. The framework for the FY 2001 budget must be
current legislative mandates and not the proposals currently under
consideration.
Third, the President has proposed an entirely new budget
structure for the National Forest System this year. The intent of the new
structure is to shift the budgeting process to a performance-based system that,
according to the Forest Service, will help the agency be more efficient and more
accountable.
While we most definitely support increased accountability,
and greater use and reporting against performance measures, we are extremely
concerned with what we've seen in the budget justification. After thoughtful
review of the proposed "Big Bucket" approach to the NFS budget, and after
multiple conversations with regional Forest Service employees, we are of the
opinion that this new concept has not been completely fleshed out. The proposal
is extremely confusing to many of us in the forest products industry, as well as
the agency's field staff. The proposed performance measures in this new
structure do not provide enough assurance that the work will be done within each
of the three major programs. We support the development by the Forest Service of
new performance measures, which would accurately reflect improving forest health
conditions and other land management objectives. Unfortunately, the measures
proposed by the Forest Service do not adequately address this.
Now, i
would like to present our recommendations regarding the FY 2001 budget request
for the Forest Service.
NATIONAL FOREST SYSTEM
Restoring and
maintaining the health of our National Forests must be the top priority of the
Forest Service. We believe there are a number of tools available to accomplish
this, and one of the major tools available today is active management of the
timber resource. Active timber resource management can also accomplish important
goals of wildlife habitat and biodiversity maintenance in many areas of the
country such as the Intermountain west, the Lake States region and the
southeastern United States.
AF&PA strongly urges the subcommittee to
support efforts to begin re- building and restoring some certainty in the Forest
Service timber sale program. In many Forest Service regions, the lack of regular
timber sales has reached the point that there is little industry remaining. The
capacity that is being eliminated are primarily small, local sawmills and local
jobs that cannot be readily replaced. We urge the Subcommittee to restore the
necessary funding to build this locally and regionally important pipeline in FY
2001. The loss of the local forest products industry will also adversely impact
forest health management programs, in that the capabilities to do the work may
not exist when the time comes to accomplish it.
As the Subcommittee is
aware, the Forest Service timber program is continuing to fall -- from the 12.2
billion board foot program of 1989 to slightly more than 3 billion board feet in
FY2000, with a $15 million decrease in funding proposed for FY
2001. This drastic reduction does not represent a sustainable, multiple-use
approach to federal forest management.
According to Forest Service
information recently provided, many Forest Service regions have the ability to
conduct forest management programs above the levels called for in the
President's budget request. If they receive additional funding, they could
accomplish three important benefits: 1) better meet urgent forest health
restoration needs; 2) better meet the goals, objectives and targets of
environmental plans for each national forest; and 3) improve the financial
efficiency of Forest Service timber programs. The Forest Service has indicated
that they could increase the timber programs by as much as 623 million board
feet nationwide. We support the necessary funding to accomplish this increase.
As we have stated before, the Forest Service must come forward with an
aggressive program to start dealing with the forest health crisis. Stewardship
contracts are a tool that could help in accomplishing this. AF&PA continues
to fully support implementation of the 28 stewardship projects and recommends
expanded authorization for federal land management agencies to develop and
implement projects that trade goods for services to attain desired resource
conditions.
The National Forest road system has been the subject of
intense debate over the last decade. The Forest Service has stated it has a
backlog of maintenance and reconstruction of $8.4 billion. We
are baffled by the apparent disconnect between stated problem and the absence of
a funding proposal to address the problem. We recognize that the Forest Service
has proposed an increase in the road maintenance budget, but it is not nearly
enough to meet the stated need, and the proposal for reconstruction and
construction is less than the FY 2000 enacted. If the Forest Service is really
serious about the environmental impacts of the road maintenance backlog, it
should demonstrate it through adequate funding requests.
AF&PA has
supported Forest Service land and resource management planning and inventory and
monitoring because they are important to adequately managing the resources and
uses of the National Forests. We are very concerned though, funds have been
redirected to the national initiative processes and thereby needed information
and decisions are not proceeding forward. Therefore, we recommend that the
budgets remain at the FY 2000 levels, until it is clearer how the national
initiatives will impact the activities under these programs.
FOREST
SERVICE RESEARCH
AF&PA believes the Forest Service research
organization has the unique capacity, expertise, and obligation to contribute to
sustainable forestry goals on all forestland, public and private. In recent
years, the Forest Service research program has tended to focus too specifically
on National Forest priorities, at the expense of the broader needs for research
related to forestland productivity and sustainable forest management practices.
As stated in testimony on March 28 before this Committee, AF&PA recommends
increased appropriations for the Forest Service research program focusing on
three areas of critical importance: (1) Forest Productivity Research, with a
significant Competitive Grants funding component; (2) the Forest Inventory and
Analysis (FIA) program; and (3) the Forest Products laboratory in Madison,
Wisconsin.
STATE AND PRIVATE FORESTRY
The Forest Service State
and Private Forestry programs provide several critical and unique services to
the nation's private forest landowners. Of these, there are a few programs such
as the Forest Health Management, Cooperative Fire Protection, and Forest
Stewardship accounts that are vitally important to keeping our forest resource
healthy. Cooperating with the states on fire protection as well as insect and
disease treatments is necessary in order to protect homes and private lands from
suffering the consequences of inadequately managed, unhealthy conditions on
federal lands. AF&PA supports the increases in these two programs as
proposed by the National Association of State Foresters.
The
Administration has proposed moving the International Forestry Program on-line,
into the State and Private Forestry budget. We are supportive of this move as
long as other priority issues we have highlighted above under the State and
Private Forestry budget are not diminished in any way. We support continuation
of level Forest Service funding to support international forestry consistent
with the FY2000 enacted program, $3.5 million. We want to
reiterate the value of funding in this area to protect the competitiveness of
the United States.
PRESIDENTIAL INITIATIVES
The Administration
is also proposing to make the Forest Service Trust Funds part of the annual
appropriations process. These funds are not currently subject to annual
appropriations. They are generated from receipts from previously sold timber
sales, as a form of a savings account to pay for subsequent activities such as
reforestation and salvage of dead, dying or infested trees. The trust funds were
set up to improve the capabilities of the Forest Service to be responsive and
timely in dealing with land management needs, including a guarantee of adequate
reforestation. The funds are not the problem, and should be retained as they
are. The Forest Service needs to better manage these funds, and can do that
under existing authorities.
The President's budget includes a number of
other proposals which we find unsupportable, including a "user fee" for timber
sale preparation, a de-coupling of the 25% fund payments with receipts from
revenue-producing programs, and exclusive use of sealed bids for timber sales.
We don't believe that these proposals would ultimately solve problems or produce
revenues as promoted in the budget.
CONCLUSION
In conclusion,
AF&PA members encourage the members of the subcommittee to consider the
immensely valuable resources of the National Forests as assets that provide
values, tangible and intangible, for the people today and for our children
tomorrow. The purpose and mission of the Forest Service has not changed over
these last 100 years, and it should not be changed by the Administration for
political purposes, despite the expressed intent of Congress.
The
President's budget proposal reflects a real and serious trend away from the
congressionally mandated mission and purpose. The proposed budget fails to
provide the funds to realistically protect the forests from further damage and
devastation from wildfire, insects, and disease. By not addressing the need for
active management of the National Forests and not providing for the appropriate
investments in the health and vitality of these forests for the future, the
risks to both our national forests and adjacent private lands continues to
increase.
We are eager to work with the Subcommittee and others to
ensure that our National Forests, and the Forest Service who is charged with
managing them, have the necessary resources to keep them as world class examples
of sustainably managed forests and grasslands.
Thank you for this
opportunity Mr. Chairman. I would be happy to answer any questions from the
Subcommittee.
END
LOAD-DATE: April 21, 2000
