Retired Forest Planner Blasts Secret Forest Service Project

By Bill Schneider
New West

Sunday 01 October 2006

Where is the outrage?

Dick Artley retired from the Forest Service (FS) on the very first day he became eligible for retirement, September 3, 2003. (The significance of that date will soon become clear.) For the last 12 years of his career, he worked as a forest planner at the Nez Perce National Forest in central Idaho where he still lives.

In an open letter to "fellow citizens who enjoy recreating on public land with our families" making the rounds in cyberspace, Artley sharply criticizes the Recreation Site Facility Master Planning (RSFMP) project currently underway within the FS. His criticism follows vocal opposition to the project from green groups like Wild Wilderness and Western Slope No Fee Coalition that claim it will result in the closing or privatizing of thousands of recreation sites.

"Something very tragic is happening to our public land," Artley proclaims. "This policy (RSFMP) was cooked up in secret by the Forest Service in 2002 with absolutely no public involvement or congressional review. By law, every RSFMP project must go through the National Environmental Policy Act process and have a public input period, but the Forest Service has chosen to ignore NEPA."

Artley writes about his efforts to contact the FS Washington D.C. office to express concerns over the RSFMP process. He provided factual information about how certain sites in on four Colorado national forests were already being illegally bulldozed as a result of the process, despite severe local opposition. In the end, he concluded that his efforts to contact the agency where he worked his entire life were a "waste of time." So, he went public.

As background, RSFMP orders every national forest to inventory all developed recreation sites and rank them compared to a national standard. Sites not measuring up will be closed or decommissioned (a.k.a. obliterated).

"This inventory is being taken on every national forest in America," Artley writes. "The closures will affect mainly simple, remote facilities favored by local residents, hunters, fishermen, and others who prefer dispersed and minimally developed recreation sites. This seems totally illogical and absurd. We all know these simple, remote facilities have very few improvements and are easy to maintain and are maintained at minimal cost."

He also explains that the FS will analyze more developed sites such as campgrounds and determine how much it costs to maintain each site. Then, the FS will compare these costs to "the drastically reduced funding" each national forest receives for recreation. "If there isn't enough money in the budget to operate the developed recreation site to standards, then it will either be converted to a fee site and still be managed by the Forest Service, be obliterated, or be turned over to a private concessionaire who will also charge a fee."

And, he blasts, "Nowhere in America has any national forest ever publicly released their RSFMP Plan. The vast majority of Americans don't have a clue that RSFMP even exists, let alone that it is currently being implemented on their favorite national forest."

Another point he makes is that the FS actually has a lot more appropriated money for recreation management than it admits. "The Forest Service Washington D.C. Office withholds 85% of the recreation budget appropriated by Congress and does not tell the national forest supervisors," he claims.

He went to great length to detail the budget process and concluded that each national forest should have around $1 million for maintenance of recreation facilities. "In spite of this, the Deschutes National Forest's RSFMP 5-Year Plan claims to only have $149,000 in Congressionally appropriated funds to manage its 212 developed recreation sites. The Grand Mesa, Uncompahgre and Gunnison National Forest's RSFMP 5-Year Plan claims to only have $138,000 to manage its 138 developed recreation sites." These are the same national forests he claims are in the process of bulldozing recreation sites.

"So where is the other 85% of the Forest Service recreation appropriation actually going?" he asks. "Somewhere it is being siphoned off in the Forest Service bureaucracy."

Why is this happening? Artley answers that question. "There are two things that the Forest Service is sure of," he writes. "President Bush personally ordered RSFMP, so it must be done, and the only way to pull off RSFMP is to maintain its secrecy."

What to do about it? He encourages people to contact the FS and ask about RSTMP so the agency understands that "the cat is out of the bag," as he puts it. "Once the secrecy is gone, the Forest Service will finally realize that they cannot continue to lie to the public about the motivation and specifics of RSFMP."

A complete text of Arley's letter can be viewed on the Wild Wilderness website where you can also see some of that group's comments. Scott Silver of Wild Wilderness adds that RSFMP represents "the next big step in the ongoing effort to privatize and commercialize recreational opportunities on America's public lands." Plus, Silver insists it involves closing down and decommissioning of perhaps thousands of recreation sites, conversion of free recreation sites into pay sites, "concessioning-out" recreation facilities and eventually "transferring management control of public recreation area to special interest groups" in the name of sustainability.

Oh, yes, the retirement date. As evidence of how secret this program really is, even within the agency itself, a professional forest planner working hard on his job in the FS for at least a year while the RSFMP process was going on didn't even know about it. "Up until the time I retired, I didn't have a clue that RSFMP existed," he emphasizes.