Don’t Move the Forest Service to Salt Lake City

 

 

 Spruce seedling, freshly planted, Monongahela NF

 

A century of field experience across this nation says keep the regions where they are. My own reflects a lifetime in and around the woods — from the eastern mountains, plateaus, and Appalachian forests to the Lake States and her northern boreal forests, and south to north through the inter-mountain west and her Rocky Mountains.

 

There is a quiet idea moving through the conversation about federal land management: that the U.S. Forest Service could be made leaner, faster, and cheaper by collapsing its nine regional offices into a single consolidated headquarters in Salt Lake City. On paper it looks like the kind of thing efficiency consultants love. In practice it would undo the design principle the agency has been built on since 1907, and it would do so in a political environment uniquely hostile to the agency’s reason for existing.

The Forest Service does not need a new center of gravity. It needs the one it has to work better.

A design choice, not an accident

When Gifford Pinchot reorganized the Forest Service between 1907 and 1909, he and his associate forester Overton Price built the regional system on purpose. They had watched the early forest reserves try to operate from Washington, and they had concluded the result was, in Pinchot’s own phrase, red tape and delay. The new district arrangement, he wrote in 1909, brought supervisors into closer touch with their superiors and at the same time freer to do high-grade work on the ground. Western public sentiment for the National Forests, he noted, improved markedly as a result.

A decade later, when Alaska was given its own district, Forester William B. Greeley made the same argument in starker terms: roughly ninety-five percent of the day-to-day business on the National Forests should never need to leave the territory in which the land sits. That ratio has not changed because of email or videoconferencing. Timber sale layout, fire response, range allotments, recreation permits, tribal consultation, scoping with adjacent communities under the National Environmental Policy Act — the work still happens on the ground, and the people authorized to sign decisions still need to be reachable by the people affected by them.

Every reorganization the Forest Service has done since — the 1914 creation of the Eastern District, the 1921 separation of Alaska, the 1928 and 1934 reshaping of the Lake States and Southern regions, the 1943 boundary moves around the Colville National Forest, even Lyndon Johnson’s 1965 elimination of Region 7 in the name of federal efficiency — has moved authority closer to the resource, not farther from it. When Region 7 was dissolved, its forests went to Atlanta and Milwaukee, both of which were closer to the affected lands than Upper Darby, Pennsylvania had been. A consolidation in Salt Lake City would be the first major reorganization in the agency’s history to invert that logic.

Why location is not a neutral question

Any agency headquartered in a regional capital absorbs the political and civic norms of that capital. This is not unique to Utah. A Forest Service centered in Sacramento would absorb California’s land-use politics; one in Austin would absorb Texas’s; one in Atlanta or Portland or Albuquerque, others again. The leadership pool, the local press relationships, the incidental conversations at civic events — all of it tilts toward the politics of the host city. The current arrangement, with nine regional offices and a national headquarters in Washington, was specifically designed so that no single regional culture would set the tone for the whole system, which spans Puerto Rico, the southeastern hardwoods, the Lake States, Appalachia, the Pacific Northwest, California, the Southwest, and Alaska.

Salt Lake City is also a particular case. Utah’s congressional delegation and state government have, across multiple administrations, pursued litigation, legislation, and resolutions seeking the transfer of federal public lands to state ownership or the reduction of federal land-management authority. That is not a claim about individuals. It is a matter of public votes and filed lawsuits. Locating the operational center of the National Forest System inside the immediate political and media environment of officials whose stated positions run counter to the agency’s organic mandate is a structural choice with predictable consequences. The closest elected representatives, the closest local press, and the closest civic networks would all be oriented toward a particular position on whether the agency should retain the lands it manages at all.

You can call this a feature or a bug depending on where you stand. But you cannot call it neutral.

The real problems, and what would actually fix them

There are real criticisms of the current Forest Service structure. Planning cycles are slow. Some functions are duplicated across regions. The agency’s public-involvement processes, despite a generation of reform, still feel consultative rather than participatory to many of the communities most affected by national-forest decisions. None of those problems are solved by relocating the people who sign decisions to a single inland city.

A more honest reform program would do three things. First, consolidate genuine back-office functions — IT, payroll, procurement, fleet, financial reconciliation — into one or two service centers, while leaving the line officers who sign forest plans and NEPA decisions where the forests are. The Forest Service has done this kind of administrative consolidation before. It is the merger of decision authority with back-office work that breaks the design.

Second, modernize the planning and NEPA cycle inside the existing structure. Shared analytical capacity, common geospatial platforms, regional specialist pools in wildlife, fisheries, hydrology, and archaeology, and standardized decision records would cut duplication far more efficiently than relocating leadership. A great deal of what gets blamed on the regional structure is actually the iterative cost of forest plan revisions and litigation that followed the 1976 National Forest Management Act, and that cost is addressable without touching an org chart.

Third, give local communities a real role rather than a symbolic one. Standing collaborative bodies with defined authority in landscape-scale work, and binding consultation with tribal nations on ancestral lands, would address the legitimacy gap that consolidation would only deepen. The agency’s chronic conflict with its publics is a symptom of being too distant from local communities, not of being too dispersed.

Keep the regions

Missoula, Denver, Albuquerque, Ogden, Vallejo, Portland, Atlanta, Milwaukee, and Juneau each sit in or near the lands they administer. Each region has built specialized expertise, partnerships with state agencies and tribes, and standing relationships with congressional delegations and county governments. That accumulated competence is not a line item that transfers cleanly when leadership is moved a thousand miles inland.

The case for keeping the existing field organization is not nostalgia. It is the same case Pinchot, Greeley, and Chief Richard McArdle made in their own annual reports: that the National Forests are too large, too varied, and too embedded in local economies and ecologies to be administered from a single center. Every previous reorganization that succeeded moved authority closer to the land. Salt Lake City would do the opposite, and would do so in a political environment that has openly questioned whether the lands themselves should remain in federal hands.

There is a leaner, more responsive Forest Service available without that risk. It is the one we already have, with the seams tightened.

 

 Lake Como and the Bitterroot NF

A note on sources.

The historical material in this post draws on Peter L. Stark’s Field Organization and Administrative History of the National Forest System, the Forest Service’s own administrative history of NEPA implementation, and the analysis of federal forest management published by Douglas Henderson and Lane Krahl in the FAO’s Unasylva. The arguments and conclusions are the author’s.

from Sam Lammie and Claude