The good old days

by Nate Luibrand, Darby

I’ve read with interest the recent articles and letters in the Star concerning DOGE and the effects of cuts on local Forest Service employees and the Bitterroot economy. I worked in timber on the Bitterroot NF for 31 years. I would like to make a few observations which hopefully will help people to understand how we came to this current situation and then share some thoughts of how to solve the problem.

Over 40 years ago when timber sales began to be litigated, I remember thinking – this is not going to end well. Just one example to illustrate the problem. In 1982, a 16 million board foot timber sale was prepared on the Stevensville District which had 13 million feet of helicopter logging and the rest was to be tractor and line skidding. The helicopter portion of the sale was thrown out because “someone didn’t want to hear helicopter noise near their home.” Of course, most of that forest is now burned and everyone heard lots of helicopter noise during the fire fighting efforts.

I think everyone should know that sales like this one built the schools in this valley and paved a lot of roads. It was called the 25% fund because counties received 25% of all money paid to the Forest Service for timber sales. It was the good old days when it came to money. Replacing that fund by printing money and giving it to the counties was not a good idea.

But the point of my letter is not to argue about past decisions, but to think about what must be done to save Forest Service jobs. Three things have to happen:

• Forest management decisions can’t be made by the courts anymore. Your local district court judge is not a forester! How is the health of the forest doing? Anyone with open eyes can simply take a hike in the National Forest and see that something is desperately wrong.

• In order for the Forest Service to manage again, the laws will have to be changed. I’m sure everyone had good intentions when they passed laws like the National Environmental Policy Act but now these laws need to be reworked so they don’t ensure poor management of the National Forests. Reworking a timber sale 3 or 4 times to satisfy a court costs a lot of money. This would be called “waste” in the current political climate. Let’s be honest with ourselves, if a sale does get approved, it is so modified that it’s not really doing anything for forest health. This is a message for our congressional delegation, the laws have to be functional for the sake of forest health.

• The biggest hurdle is that the infrastructure is almost gone. Most sawmills and loggers have gone away. When I read the second article in the Star, I kept asking myself, what timber program can function without any sawmills? Not many people shed tears when the logging industry lost their jobs and went to North Dakota to find work. We needed them more than we knew.

So, if these three problems aren’t dealt with, the Forest Service as we know it probably won’t survive the DOGE cuts. It was a great place to work, maybe the best job ever. I hope it ends well for the current Forest Service employees.