Dave Meyers, deputy director of the U.S. Forest Service's Wasatch-Cache National Forest, said 23 jobs will be eliminated during the coming three years, some through retirement and attrition. The positions are mostly managers, and their elimination means the remaining managers will shoulder heavier loads.
"It's top-down," Meyers said. "The whole intent is to be more efficient by saving money on salaries and getting more money to the ground."
A recent Office of the Inspector General report that said protecting private property from forest fires has consumed 50 to 95 percent of the Forest Service's money.
As part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Forest Service mission is to sustain health and productivity on 193 million acres of national forests - about eight million of which are in Utah - and grasslands. But wildfire costs have steadily eaten into the budget at the expense of what the public wants most: trails, campgrounds, ranger talks and information centers.
Meyers said the public won't notice any effects of the merger. But already managers of the Uinta forest are examining whether to eliminate picnic tables, fish cleaning stations and other amenities.
"You will see some reduced services initially. I don't think you will see closures," said John Logan, Pleasant Grove District Ranger.
Logan said he believes top agency honchos are hoping to save $2 million by cutting management positions that pay around $100,000, giving up office space and running fewer vehicles.
"Where it's really going to hurt is making decisions on what is important and what isn't," Logan said. "There are a lot of changes going on in the agency that maybe in the long term are good, but now in the crunch is going to be hard."
The nation's growth increasingly is concentrating in the West, especially in Utah, where St. George, Provo, Orem, Heber and Cedar City landed at the top of the U.S. Census Bureau's charts this year.
Meanwhile, the Forest Service budget has been static for years, barely keeping up with inflation. President Bush's proposal for the 2008 budget actually would be $64 million less than this year's budget, a situation the administration says is a result of "the war on terror" and a need to reduce the national deficit.
In June testimony before the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, Agriculture Department Undersecretary Mark Rey said that a report issued every four years showed that 8.4 million new homes were built at the edge of wildlands in 2005. Those homes constituted 60 percent of new homes built in the nation, triple the rate of construction away from forest's edge.
Bush is continuing his push to cut three-quarters of current Forest Service employees through outsourcing in a forced bidding process that makes the employees compete for their own positions. The latest attempt is to outsource the agency's "fire militia," which includes all employees who have received firefighting training.
The problem with that idea is that when the Forest Service people aren't fighting fires, they are picking up trash, cleaning campgrounds, maintaining trails and otherwise keeping the national forest squared away, Logan said.
Firefighting contractors would not such mundane work, he said. Nor would they have any incentive to minimize firefighting costs, given the government's practice of reimbursing costs, plus an agreed upon profit margin.
