Earlier this month, One Voice and USA representatives participated in two meetings with national US Forest Service leadership addressing their efforts responding to historic shortfalls in local staffing. These discussions were welcomed as a lack of staff is one of the largest barriers we are encountering in providing access to public lands.
Forest Service representatives outlined the huge scale of their staffing and budget challenges. They also provided an outline of how this year’s broad authority from Congress to realign existing resources would dramatically improve local staffing. They hoped that this transition could be completed in months and would provide significantly more staff for local operations. This will be a good thing.
As an example of the challenges faced, Forest Service leadership identified their appropriated budget is insufficient to over their office leasing costs. The myriad of questions this created was significant.
They updated everyone on status of the unified wildfire service. Currently there are five federal agencies that have firefighting resources. Simply aligning these resources has to be a challenge even before local partners have to be brought into these efforts.
More information on the US Forest Service reorganization is available here.