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Stewardship contracting not fully utilized?
CAROL DALY, 6/03/05
When Congress made stewardship end-result contracting available to both the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), it gave them a valuable tool for carrying out multi-faceted ecosystem restoration projects and addressing related community needs.
The early demonstration projects clearly showed stewardship's promise, but lately it's being treated more like the proverbial one-trick pony. Top departmental officials tout its importance as a management tool, but usually focus on its "goods for services" authority and its use in implementing the National Fire Plan. This narrow focus leads to complications.
- Unreal expectations are created. Hazardous fuels reduction projects usually involve the removal of small, low- or no-value woody material, and the work often doesn't pay for itself.
- Collaboration is administratively required for stewardship contracting. At the same time, the Forest Service and BLM are under intense pressure to reduce hazardous fuels on as many priority acres as possible in the shortest amount of time. These conflicting demands create a perverse incentive to do "collaboration lite."
- If the "hazardous fuels reduction" Categorical Exclusion is used in a stewardship project, other restoration work can't be built in at the same time. This can frustrate participating collaborative groups, while reinforcing the view of stewardship contracting as a single-purpose tool.
There is an "up" side to the stewardship/fuels pairing. Reducing potential life and property losses in the wildland-urban interface is a generally popular idea, and such projects are often less contentious than those of broader scope. They can provide a good starting place for a new collaborative effort, enabling a variety of stakeholders who might otherwise not see eye-to-eye to work together, start to build mutual trust and understanding, and see some on-the-ground results in as little as a year.
But moving on to more-complex projects will require a broader vision and greater familiarity with the full suite of stewardship contracting's special authorities:
Agency folks working on the early demonstration projects were given training and technical assistance, and were encouraged to innovatively use the authorities to accomplish comprehensive ecosystem restoration. Today, Chapter 60 of the Forest Service Handbook and the far less-detailed BLM Stewardship Contracting Guidance provide some direction, but there's not much "hands on" help available to first-timers.
The Forest Service has begun addressing the need. Field staff are invited to share their experiences and lessons learned on the Stewardship Contracting page of the agency's web site. A full day's training in collaboration, developed in response to a 2004 GAO study (GAO-04-652, "Additional Guidance on Community Involvement Could Enhance Effectiveness of Stewardship Contracting"), is being offered during the summer of 2005 to up to 200 agency and community members around the country. It's a good start, but broader, continuing training and technical support also will be needed.
Finally, serious attention needs to be devoted to how collaboration in public land management is to be sustained over the long term. The active involvement of concerned citizens - the folks not getting paid for the time they spend in collaboration - is essential to the success of stewardship contracting, the Healthy Forests Restoration Act, and other key initiatives. Yet their participation seems to be taken for granted. It shouldn't be.
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