After years of attempts to weaken protections on public lands and open them up to industry comes further disquieting news. The Forest Service is about to embark on a plan that will send thousands of employees to centralized service centers, removing them from their local roles including firefighting.
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Washington, DC — The U.S. Forest Service is on the verge of approving a massive restructuring that will remove land management planning from individual forests, according to agency documents released today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). The resulting reorganization will affect one in four agency jobs, shrink its on-the-ground firefighting militia and rigidify resource planning.
The plan, called a “Business Process Reengineering,” would consolidate virtually all work performed under the National Environmental Policy Act or NEPA, the basic planning law that shapes significant agency resource management actions. Altogether, nearly 8,000 employees out of the agency’s 30,000 person workforce now perform NEPA-related work. Almost all of this work is done at the forest level.
Under the Business Process Reengineering, all of these functions would be moved into six “eco-based Service Centers” where forest planning would be standardized. …
In a time of extended drought and numerous incidents of fire, local fire-fighting ability would be severly curtailed.
This agency-wide displacement would –
Remove thousands of employees with fire-fighting responsibilities from national forests and relocate them in far-away service centers. Nearly half (3,564) of all Forest Service employees doing NEPA work have collateral all-hazard duties;…
PEER’s executive director providies this apt summary:
“It is awfully late in the Bush administration to begin a gigantic game of bureaucratic musical chairs with thousands of people’s jobs that may be reversed by the next Forest Service Chief,” stated PEER Executive Director Jeff Ruch, noting that the Forest Service contracted out its feasibility study to a consultant, Management Analysis, Inc. “Rather than relying on consultants, the Forest Service should first consult Congress, the public and its own employees.“