Task Force focuses on resource management

The Governor's Task Force on Forests, a group tasked with making recommendations about forest policy in Wyoming, recently discussed forest and resource management, met last week in Saratoga.

Started as an idea generated by Wyoming State House District 47 Representative Jerry Paxton, the task force consists of a variety of statewide stakeholders who develop recommendations on how Wyoming can best improve forest health. Around 20 of the group's members, which include environmentalists and those who work in the timber industry, met at the Platte Valley Community Center April 8-10 to come up with more recommendations that could be presented to Gov. Matt Mead.

The Saratoga meeting was facilitated by the Ruckelhaus Institute, a division of the Haub School of Environment and Natural Resources at the University of Wyoming. It was the third of five scheduled task force meetings, which began last December in Cheyenne.

Also included in last week's three-day meeting was a tour of Saratoga Forest Management's sawmill.

Over the course of five meetings, the task force group is creating recommendations for Mead in three areas-wildfires and other disturbances, forest and resource management and economic opportunities and innovation-for him to study and consider. Forest and resource management, encompassing everything from water issues to timber management and recreation, was the overall topic on the agenda for the Saratoga meeting.

"The topic was resource management, so we kind of went through the resource management issues and came up with draft recommendations," said Wyoming State Forester Bill Crapser. "At the end of the meetings we're going to have a big bag of recommendations, and try to sort it out to a few real meaningful ones for the governor. I think we had some good discussions about resource management, and came to some understandings, which kind of goes into the whole picture. The whole task force is a process, and this was just the next step in the process."

The last two meetings will be held April 30-May 2 and June 24-26, will take place in Casper, and a list of recommendations will eventually be submitted to Mead.

"We have to put this meeting into context with the other meetings we've had," said Steve Smutko, professor for Haub School of Environment and Natural Resources and Agricultural and Applied Economics. "What we were trying to do is cover a pretty wide agenda. There's a lot of things that this group wanted to discuss, so this meeting was really focused around resource management. We hit on the main topics that the group really wanted to deal with."

Last week's meeting yielded several recommendations that group members came up with, which began with "We recommend that the governor ... " Some of those recommendations for the governor included:

• Advocate a programatic review of the NEPA process for national forests in Wyoming and BLM field offices.

• Collaborate with federal agencies to utilize all available authorities to ensure appropriate, but not excessive, analyses.

• Take an active role in public-private partnerships to fund analysis and programmatic activities.

• Direct state agencies to promote, support and participate in collaborative efforts.

• Continue to and enhance funding for communities to establish socioeconomic boundaries.

• Facilities the creation of a mechanism to financially and technically support place based collaboration on forest issues.

• Support strategies under implementation.

• Support the development and utilization of conservation tools for mitigation in forest management, conservation banking and exchanges

• Support the recreational, economic and ecological values and opportunities for solitude, inherent in intact backcountry areas, and encourage use of available tools for management in road-less areas.

• Support an increased level of monitoring to guide future adaptive management and measure the results of activities implemented. Monitoring could include but not limited to multi-party monitoring, statistical sampling and spatial analyses.

"There were some things kicked around and discussed that the groups really couldn't come to consensus on yet," Smutko said. "Whether or not they'll pick that back up I don't know, but overall i think we're on that trajectory. We've got a good set of issues to be discussed. We've got some good potential recommendations to go to the governor."

Smutko said the task force will eventually come up with around five of the best recommendations to present for Mead.

"We've got some good potential recommendations to go to the governor, and there was a ton of material generated by this task force so far that we'll have to whittle down," Smutko said. "We're talking about maybe five things that are going to go to the governor as specific recommendations, and I think we heard a few of those today and during the previous days. The group is making really good progress, and I think we're well positioned."

The topic for the next scheduled task force meeting, which takes place April 30-May 2 in Casper, is "economic opportunities and innovation". After those meetings, a list of five recommendations will be presented to Mead.

"We'll go into the next meeting in Casper talking about economic opportunities and innovation, and after our last meeting, what we'll end up with is a whole set of draft recommendations that we'll have to whittle down," Smutko said. "Then we'll go through a voting process, to see what comes out as a strong consensus for recommendations to go forward with to the governor. I think the governor's office wants the top five things, but what we'll end up doing is saying 'Here are the top five recommendations, but here are a whole bunch of other things the group discussed and would like to see go forward.' We'll end up putting together a document that covers everything the group discussed."

Smutko said he feels the task force group will become more recognized over time.

"I think what we'll see come out of this is strong recognition for the group, and more people will know it's important that local decisions around forest management be made at the local level," he said. "We've been very clear talking about establishing collaboratives at that local level to carry out, and the things that need to be done at the forest level."

Smutko said this fall is when Mead would like the top-choice recommendations.

"We'll meet for the last time in June, and what we'll end up doing at the June meeting is going through all the recommendations, finding out which ones will rise to the top," he said. "From that we'll then develop a document, and we'll spend the summer putting together that document, which will then go back to the task force to make sure it's all okay. Once we get task force approval the co-chairs will take that to the governor, and that will probably be in early fall. Right now they're just drafts, but I think these were good ideas and the group members hit issues they felt they needed to hit."

Jessica Clement, Research Scientist and Program Director for the University of Wyoming Ruckelshaus Institute of Environment and Natural Resources, said the task force is dealing with enormously complex issues during the meetings. She said she was happy to see the members learn so much from each other.

"There's an enormous amount of expertise and knowledge in this room, and they're really learning a lot from each other and gaining more and more clarity," Clement said. "They're also finding out what the areas of agreement are, and what the areas of agreement or consensus are. That's going to create the foundation for creating these recommendations to the governor, and though they're well on they way, there's a lot more work to do. There's a wide diversity of opinions, and I think the group is learning how to look at all the complexity from all these different value points."

Clement said the hard part will be narrowing down the recommendation list to present for the governor.

"We'll have to find out, 'what are going to be recommendations to the governor that everybody supports?', and that's the tricky part," she said. "But things are moving along and it's progressing. As facilitator of this process, I like the recommendations that everyone agrees to and feels good about."

Paxton said he was pleased to have the third task force meeting in Saratoga, where members could tour and experience the local sawmill.

"Having it here in Saratoga, so we could have the task force take a look at an active mill, is really getting the job done of helping provide tools for forest management," he said. "It's an important industry in the Valley here, and when they have other issues they need to cover further on down the line and at some point in time, they'll have a pretty good understanding of the whole process and how it works. I think one of the issues that was important to me is the location. That was an important part of the whole process, and I think we pretty well covered the different topics we had set forth in our agenda."

Paxton said the tour of the sawmill gave task force members a better idea of Saratoga's economy, and how the industry plays a key role in forest management.

"Most important to me was to give the full group an understanding of the importance of having a sawmill in a community, not just from a standpoint of the employment issue, but also from the standpoint of a tool in forest management," he said. "If we didn't have the two mills going that we have right now, we'd probably have a lot of logs stacked up around here from hazard trees."

Paxton added he was eager for the next task force meeting in Casper, which begins the last day of April. He said a main concern to bring up involved what to do about woody biomass from forest areas.

"I just hope we come up with some real solid recommendations to the governor regarding the use of woody biomass, and that's going to be my important thing for that particular meeting," Paxton said. "Woody biomass is the leftover stuff we can't use for anything else, and it's the same kind of stuff they were using to fire the boiler over at the mill. It's the waste material, and it could also be waste material from the landfills. I've been looking at a lot of different possibilities for the last eight years on the utilization of woody biomass, and I've got some good ideas I hope I can share with the rest of the group.