Copyright 1999 Federal News Service, Inc.
Federal News Service
FEBRUARY 23, 1999, TUESDAY
SECTION: IN THE NEWS
LENGTH:
4015 words
HEADLINE: PREPARED STATEMENT OF
MIKE
DOMBECK
CHIEF
USDA FOREST SERVICE
BEFORE THE HOUSE
COMMITTEE ON RESOURCES
FORESTS AND FOREST HEALTH SUBCOMMITTEE
SUBJECT -
FOREST SERVICE FISCAL YEAR 2000 BUDGET
BODY:
Madam
Chairman, Congressman Smith, Members of the Committee, thank you for the
opportunity to appear before you this morning to discuss the Forest Service's
proposed budget for fiscal year 2000.
Only three weeks ago, I addressed our
employees in Montana about the state of the Forest Service. I would like to
review some of those remarks today as I discuss the proposed budget for the
Forest Service.
I am honored to have served as Chief of the Forest Service
for over two years. During this time, I have had the pleasure to be a part of
the continuing evolution in the direction of the Forest Service. I have come to
appreciate that many of the conflicts we face today over management of natural
resources are very similar to the conflicts faced by the agency's first Chief,
Gifford Pinchot. What made the Forest Service unique under his leadership was a
set of conservation values that were not always popular, but which reflected the
long term interest of land health. Madam Chairman, as in the days of Gifford
Pinchot, the values put forth in the President's fiscal year 2000 budget
emphasize long term health of the land.
In my testimony today I want to
concentrate on the values of healthy land by elaborating on three key areas set
forth by Undersecretary Lyons; 1) the major changes reflected in the President's
budget that set a new leadership direction for the Forest Service; 2) how the
Forest Service Natural Resource Agenda reflects these values; and 3) how we are
addressing important accountability issues. Let me first address some overall
perspectives about where the Forest Service has been and where the Secretary and
I want to take it in the future.
Over the last decade there has been a
significant change in how society views conservation values. Many people have
ceased viewing publicly owned resources as a warehouse of outputs to be brought
to market and instead have begun assigning greater value to the positive
outcomes of forest management.
The result of such change is that we often
find ourselves caught in the middle between competing interests. Some look to
you, the Congress to "fix" the legislation that they perceive has negatively
affected their interests. Others push to limit the number of appeals, so the
agency can get on with producing timber or stopping timber production, as the
case may be. Still others ask courts to resolve land use policies through
litigation.
Too often we find ourselves waiting for someone else to resolve
our issues for us. I think that must end. The budget we are going to talk about
today sets the framework for the Congress, the Administration, the States, local
governments, and private parties to begin working together in a new way to
collaboratively resolve conservation conflicts. The central premise of our
approach is that by restoring and maintaining a healthy land base on public and
private lands alike, we can ensure that our children, and their children's
children enjoy the benefits of land and water.
Madam Chairman, with healthy
watersheds as a foundation, there is room for a reasonable flow of outputs;
timber and livestock ' specifically, but many other products also. There is and
will be the ability to produce cleaner water. There is a land base which will
allow us to set aside additional places untrammeled by human beings, and there
is an ability and a necessity to preserve now and for generations to come,
additional open spaces before such spaces are fragmented or degraded due to
private land development, urban sprawl, and other such issues.
For those who
advocate a return to timber outputs of 10 years ago, or those who advocate a
"zero cut" philosophy, I say it is time to inject realism into the debate. The
President's budget provides funding for outputs which are consistent with land
health. I can not visualize a circumstance when such outputs will ever be at the
level of 10 years ago, but I say to the other side of the spectrum, timber
harvest will, and should continue. The President's budget contains innovations
that recognize the ability of people to restore ecosystems from those already
degraded, using modern science and technology, where people have either
contributed to poor land health by over using the land, built roads in unstable
or overly steep terrain, or prevented natural processes such as fire. We can
improve the health of these areas, and do so by not only allowing the removal of
forest products but by demonstrating in some cases such activities can
contribute to forest health. The more timber harvest contributes to ecological
sustainability, the more predictable timber outputs will be. This budget
presents a solid balance that if enacted will help accomplish these goals.
The Forest Service serves many people. With our 192 million acres, 383,000
miles of roads, $30 billion infrastructure, 74,000 authorized land uses, 23,000
developed recreation sites, tens of thousands of dispersed recreation sites, and
35 million acres of wilderness, the national forests are many things to many
people. The Forest Service has the premier Forest and Rangeland Research
organization in the world which is involved in research to improve land health
and to improve the experiences enjoyed on the land by Americans.
Specifics
of the President's Budget
The President's budget creates a new focus on
State and Private Forestry programs. Over time, our leadership capacity to
assist those who manage the more than 500 million acres of forests outside of
the national forest system has diminished. One of our greatest contributions to
society will be our ability to bring people together to provide technical
assistance and scientific information to states, private landowners, and other
nations of the world. The fiscal year 2000 proposed budget contains an increase
of $80 million in State and Private Forestry, and $37 million in Forest and
Rangeland Research to increase our involvement in this critical collaborative
role.
Consider that we have been spending about $2 billion annually to
manage the 192 million acres of national forest land, yet spend less than $200
million in support of the 500 million acres of state managed and privately owned
lands.
With this budget, support to state and locally managed lands and non-
industrial private lands dramatically increases. The budget proposes $218
million for the Lands Legacy Initiative, which will make new tools available to
work with states, tribes, local governments, and private partners to protect
great places, to conserve open space for recreation, and wildlife habitat; and
to preserve forest, farmlands, and coastal areas. This $218 million is part of
the President's bold government wide initiative to provide $1 billion for the
Lands Legacy Initiative.
The President's budget also continues support for
key programs initiated with the fiscal year 1999 budget by targeting an increase
of $89.4 million for the Clean Water Action Plan to maintain priority attention
to the health of watersheds on federal, state, and Private lands. The budget
also proposes $6 million to support the Climate Change Technology Initiative and
an increase of $6 million for the Global Change Initiative, both of which are
aimed at improving the long term health of the climate that supports life on
this planet.
Forest and Rangeland Research programs are an important
aspect of emphasis in the President's budget. In addition to funds to support
global climate issues, an additional $14 million is proposed for the Integrated
Science for Ecosystem Challenges project which addresses science and technology
needs related to ecological systems.
The President is also proposing as part
of this budget several new legislative initiatives. Most notably, a proposal
similar to one put forward last year, to stabilize payments to states and
counties by separating payments to counties from a reliance on receipts
generated by commodity production. At the beginning of my testimony, I noted the
need to manage outputs from the national forests in a manner consistent with
land health. In doing so, emphasis for producing those outputs has changed. For
example, today a significant number of timber sales are sold for stewardship
purposes rather than pure commodity objectives. There is an increase in the sale
of dead or dying timber. In these cases receipts are less than were experienced
several years ago. I expect this trend to continue particularly in the west.
What we are asking is, why should the richest country in the nation finance the
education of rural schoolchildren on the back of a controversial federal timber
program? The Forest Service has a stewardship responsibility to collaborate with
citizens to promote land health. Collaborative stewardship implies an obligation
to help provide communities with economic diversity and resiliency so they are
not dependent on the results of litigation, the whims of nature or unrelated
social values to educate their children and pave their roads. We need to work
together so states and counties can anticipate predictable payments on which to
base education and road management decisions.
Several other legislative
proposals are also soon to be submitted including proposals to transfer timber
sale preparation costs to timber purchasers through user fees, a proposal to
reform concession management, increased emphasis on obtaining fair market value
for land uses and timber, and establishing a fund to manage the sale of special
forest products.
Natural Resource Agenda
The President's budget contains
many important initiatives. It also contains a broad program of funding for
management of national forest lands. Just one year ago I announced the Natural
Resource Agenda, which is a comprehensive science based agenda that will lead
management of the agency into the 21st century. As an integral partner with the
Government Performance and Results Act, this agenda focus on four areas; 1)
watershed health and restoration, 2) sustainable forest and grassland ecosystem
management, 3) the national forest road system, and 4) recreation.
I want to
highlight briefly our emphasis in each of these areas. A retired Forest Service
employee offered me some advice a while back. He said, "if you just take care of
soil and water and everything else will be OK." Multiple use does not mean we
should do everything on every acre simply because we can. We must protect the
last best places and restore the rest. Forest Service lands are truly the
headwaters of America, supplying river systems and recharging aquifers. They
contain riparian, wetland, and coastal areas that are essential for the nation's
water supply and prosperity. The President's budget provides an increase of
$48.6 million included in programs such as wildlife habitat management,
watershed improvements, fisheries habitat management, rangeland vegetation
management, threatened and endangered species habitat management, and state and
private forest health programs. These increases will allow the Forest Service to
make important watershed restoration and protection efforts.
Restoration and
maintenance of watershed health is contingent on quality land management
planning. As you know, the Committee of Scientists will issue their final
recommendations on forest planning soon. I expect they will suggest that we
focus planning efforts on long-term sustainability, more effectively link forest
planning to budget and funding priorities, practice collaborative stewardship
through use of diverse and balanced advisory groups, and allow for adaptive
management through monitoring. I look forward to issuance of the Committee of
Scientists Report from which revised forest planning regulations will be
developed in late Spring. I believe new planning regulations will be invaluable
in breaking the forest planning gridlock that is hampering national forest
management in so many areas.A second area of the Natural Resource Agenda is
sustainable forest and grassland management.
The President is proposing a
billion dollar initiative to protect open space, benefit urban forests, and
improve the quality of life for the 80% of Americans living in urban and
suburban areas. Through sustainable forest and grassland management, the Forest
Service will play an essential role in accomplishment of this initiative. The
President's budget provides an increase of $113 million in State and Private and
Research programs which are integral to protecting and restoring the lands and
waters that sustain us. We will collaborate with state fish and wildlife
agencies, state foresters, tribes, and others to develop conservation and
stewardship plans for an additional 740,000 acres of. non-industrial private
forestland. We will help states protect an estimated 135,000 additional acres of
forestland through acquisitions and conservation easements. We will acquire
environmentally sensitive lands through the Land and Water Conservation Fund,
and we will include nearly 800 more communities in efforts to conserve urban and
community forests. In addition, 300,000 more hours of conservation training will
be provided to local communities.
Madam Chairman, I am truly excited about
budgetary emphasis in sustainable forest and grassland management through
cooperation and collaboration. This emphasis will carry into many programs
including fire management where we will employ fire as a tool to meet integrated
resource and societal objectives across landscapes. We will give priority to
high-risk wildland/urban interface areas where people, homes and personal
property are at risk. We will employ fire as a tool to aid threatened and
endangered species conservation and recovery, to reduce accumulated fuels within
and adjacent to wilderness and reduce fuels to help lower long term costs of
suppressing wildfires.
Now I would like to turn to one of the more
challenging aspects of the Natural Resource Agenda. That involves management of
the National Forest Road System. As you know, on February 11, I announced an
interim suspension of road construction in most roadless areas
of the national forest system. We offer this timeout to reduce the controversy
of roadless area entries in order to reduce damage to a road
system which is already in disrepair.
A personal source of frustration is
that few people or interest groups are focussed on the issue of our existing
road system as opposed to the roadless area issue. Yet if we
care about restoring the ecological fabric of the landscape and the health of
our watersheds, we must concentrate on areas that are roaded in addition to
those that are not.
The President's budget proposes a $22.6 million increase
in the road budget, primarily for maintenance. The agency has an estimated road
maintenance backlog of over $8 billion. Meanwhile we are only maintaining 18
percent of our roads to the safety and environmental standards to which they
were built. With the proposed funding level in the fiscal year 2000 budget, we
will increase by 50% from 1998, the miles of road to be decommissioned or
stabilized. We will increase the percentage of forest roads maintained to
standard from 18 percent to 24 percent.With roads that could encircle the globe
many times, our road system is largely complete. Our challenge is to shrink the
system to a size we can afford to maintain while still providing for efficient
and safe public access in a manner that protects land health.
Over the next
18 months, we will develop a long term road policy with three primary
objectives: 1) develop new analytical tools to help managers determine where,
when or if to build new roads, 2) decommission old, unneeded, unauthorized, and
other roads that degrade the environment, and 3) selectively upgrade certain
roads to help meet changing use patterns on forests and grasslands.
Management of roads is very important to local communities that rely heavily
on these roads for livelihoods and rural transportation. I expect decisions
about local roads to be made by local managers working with local people and
others who use or care about our road system. We will obviously continue to
provide access to and through forests. However, it is clear that we simply
cannot afford our existing road system.
The fourth element of the Natural
Resource Agenda involves recreation. The president's budget provides strong
support to the recreation program. With appropriated funds totalling $288
million, and additional funds provided from the recreation fee demonstration
project receipts and the ten percent road and trail fund, this program will
continue to provide strong support to the 800 million annual visitors which we
expect to increase to 1.2 billion over the next 50 years.
The Forest Service
recreation strategy focuses on providing customer service and opportunities for
all people.
The successful recreation fee demonstration program has
served many people at the sites operated under the program through improved
visitor experiences and repair and upgrade facilities which were badly in need
of attention. I strongly support continuation of this program. I do want to pass
on one caution lest this program is viewed as an answer for reducing future
recreation discretionary funds. The recreation fee demonstration program serves
many people in a limited number of recreation sites. The Forest Service
recreation program is highly dispersed. It is the place for a family drive or
hike on a Sunday afternoon, a weekend camping trip, or a week long grueling hike
in the rugged backcountry. Many of these experiences do not lend themselves to a
recreation fee demonstration type program. In fact, less than 10 percent of
forest recreation visits occur at fee demonstration sites. As the backyard
playground for many Americans, it is essential we maintain a recreation program
that allows enjoyment of the national forests without charge in addition to fee
programs in limited areas.
A key part of enhancing this dispersed recreation
is through our wilderness management program. The President's budget includes an
increase of $7 million for protection and restoration of natural conditions in
wilderness and to mitigate the impacts of high use areas adjacent to large
population centers. The wilderness legacy is a crown jewel. I am committed to
increasing the Forest Service commitment to the Wilderness Act and intend to
give more emphasis through increased land management planning and
re-establishment of a national wilderness field advisory group.
Each of the
four emphasis areas of the Natural Resource Agenda links directly to one or more
of the goals of the Results Act Strategic Plan. I am pleased that the
President's budget supports this plan for moving forward.
Forest Service
Accountability
Successful implementation of the President's initiatives and
the Natural Resource Agenda is dependent on having the trust of Congress and the
American people. To be trusted, we have to be accountable for our performance.
We have to be able to identify where our funds are being spent, and what America
is receiving in return. We have to do this as efficiently as possible in order
to assure that a maximum amount of funds are spent on the ground for intended
purposes without being diverted for unnecessary overhead. Madam Chairman, as you
know, the Forest Service has had problems with accountability in the past. We
have been the subject of more than 20 oversight reports and internal studies. We
have been resoundingly criticized for having poor decision making, either
bloated or inaccurate overhead costs, and non-responsive accounting systems.
While some of this may be exaggerated, I fully acknowledge that some is true.
We've got the message. We will improve dramatically. Let me highlight several
initiatives that are now underway.
First and most importantly, I have made
it clear through organization changes and personal statements that the business
and financial management functions of this agency are equally as important as
attention to managing the resources. I have placed business management
professionals in operations and financial management positions. We have
established a Chief Operating Officer at the Associate Chief level which reports
directly to me, thus placing our business management functions on an operating
level equal to that of our natural resource functions. We have brought in a new
Chief Financial Officer at the Deputy Chief level to implement the Foundation
Financial Information System. This is her top priority, with a goal of achieving
a clean financial opinion from the General Accounting Office as soon as
possible.
It is also time to reform our budget structure. I want to work
with the Congress and the Administration to design a budget structure that
reflects the work we do and the Results Act Strategic plan on which the Natural
Resource Agenda is based. The current budget structure does not support the
integrated work necessary to restore and maintain land health while promoting
ecological sustainability. In order to ensure accountability while implementing
a new budget structure, we will employ land health performance measures to
demonstrate that we can have a simplified budget and improve water quality,
protect and restore more habitat, and improve forest ecosystem health.In fiscal
year 2000 we will begin to implement reforms to our trust funds. We will examine
alternatives for trust fund management in the future to avoid unintended
incentives to pursue forest management activities that are not consistent with
land health objectives.
For the first time, at the direction of Congress, we
have developed and implemented standard definitions for indirect costs which are
in full compliance with the Federal Accounting Standards Advisory Board. These
definitions have been reviewed by several oversight groups. Based on these
definitions, for the first time we have accurately determined indirect expenses
for the agency, which during fiscal year 2000 we project to be 18.9 percent.
As you know, the issue of indirect costs, often referred-to as overhead,
received extensive attention during the 105th Congress, as did the poor quality
of our financial system and records. I want to make a specific request as your
Committee examines our budget in the coming year. I ask for your patience and
support in rectifying much of our accountability problems. The Forest Service's
financial management and reporting of overhead took a decade or more to fall
into disrepair. It will take more than a year to fix the problem. Let me
emphasize that we are devoting extensive resources to implementing new financial
systems, improving our audit processes, and improving decision making. The
resources we devote to make these fixes involves expenditures of an overhead
type nature. As we concentrate on cleaning up our problems, we need to have
flexibility without legislated limitations which could prevent us from being
successful.
In my testimony today, I have reviewed the President's
initiatives, discussed the Natural Resource Agenda, and described our intent to
improve agency accountability. In conclusion, I want to say that a Forest
Service that meets the needs of the American people and restores and preserves
the health of the nations forests and rangelands, is a goal we all strive for.
I'll leave you with some thoughts based on Aldo Leopold's Sand County Almanac;
the same words I left with our employees in Missoula during my state of the
Forest Service speech.
Let us recommit ourselves to an invigorated nation
and land ethic. An ethic that recognized that we cannot meet the needs of people
without first securing the health, diversity, and productivity of our lands and
waters. An ethic that understands the need to reconnect our communities -both
urban and rural- to the lands and waters that sustain them. An ethic that
respects that the choices we make today influence the legacy that we bequeath to
our children and their children's children.
That concludes my remarks. I
would be pleased to answer any questions you may have.
END
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