On December 4, 1996, at Aspen, Colo., the Forest Service, U.S. Skiing and National Ski Areas Association entered into a Master Service-Wide Memorandum of Understanding. It was the second such in two years. its four pages set forth what each organization will do in support of a “partnership to achieve the common goals of managing and promoting active participation in alpine recreation and sports by all people. . .”
Since the Forest Service is landlord to 137 ski operations that, in total, account for an estimated 60 percent of total annual U.S. skier/boarder visits, this memorandum of understanding—MOU to us, SMU to the government—should be important. Right? The answer is Yes—at least to the Forest Service. It is one of the signals of what they hope will be a heightened role for the agency in meeting an increasing demand for recreation.
To report on the interview SAM had in April with the new Forest Service chief, Michael Dombeck, some basic background is called for, though with the caveat that there is a risk in oversimplifying complexities in such a brief overview.
The Forest Service, responsible for managing 191 million acres of National Forest on behalf of the American people, operates under twin mandates: conservation and multiple-use management. Multiple use has traditionally meant various combinations of timber harvesting, mining, grazing, wilderness, recreation and a few other responsibilities. The first three of these uses, usually lumped together as “extractive,” loom large politically because they translate to jobs in many sparsely populated western states.
Wilderness is usually seen as a motherhood battleground between the “lock-it-up” wing of the environmentalist movement and the rest of the country.
Recreation means hiking and packing trips, fishing and rafting, RVs and snowmobiling and a number of campsites leased to the public. It also means ski resorts—a special use that has developed its own special set of relationships with the Forest Service. These ski operations are very distinct in the Forest Service portfolio for a number of reasons, among which are: 1) The longest permit term (40 years) of any special use because of the intense investment of private capital in the facilities; 2) The substantial per-raw acre net dollar yield ($100/acre for 190,000 permitted acres) they represent to the government; 3) The moneyed “glitz” and high social profile of these operations, with which the Forest Service has to deal—gingerly.
In recent years, use of the national forests for recreation has grown exponentially, and current USFS projections point to this as a burgeoning demand that will see recreation account for 75 percent of the national forests’ contribution to gross domestic product by the year 2000. By contrast, the extractive uses account for an ever-decreasing part of the whole, with the heavily government-subsidized logging down to a piddling 2.7 percent. Says Forest Service Chief Dombeck:
“We’ve got this zooming recreation demand on the National Forest, while the extractive side is either stable or even slightly on the downtrend. . .So the agency is caught in an idealogical interchange between opposing forces. . .It’s time-consuming and controversial and sometimes it’s not fun.”
With a stout and entrenched timber core for its heart and head, the Forest Service is trying to cope internally with the new realities of booming demand for recreation. In the meantime, political control of public land policy is completely locked up by western politicians of the Republican right, led by an Alaska/Idaho axis that controls all relevant committees and subcommittees in both houses of Congress.
Since Forest Service purse strings are in the hands of these committees, SAM asked Dombeck if this weren’t a formidable road block to greater emphasis on the recreation role.
“I think they are also under the same kinds of pressures—maybe different weights of these pressures, but we’re all under the same sorts of pressures. In fact, Senator Murkowski [R. Alaska] has been talking about recreation and wanting to do something to bolster recreation. ..and he’s doing that in response to seeing the changing demands on the Forest. But we’ll continue to have controversy; timber sales will continue to be controversial. The other side of that coin is the importance of education and the importance of getting people to understand what’s important: the health of the land, the scenic beauty. I know it’s important to skiers.”
Another interesting fault line, essentially quiet, but very real, runs through the conservative camp. Philosophical bedrock in these circles is a belief in fiscal accountability. True-blue conservatives disdain all sorts of welfare, including corporate welfare. So, when it comes to explaining the sort of welfare administered by the Forest Service to the timber, grazing and mining industries, the true conservative, both fiscal and spiritual, is torn.
This rift was neatly highlighted in a recent Firing Line television debate when arch conservative guru Bill Buckley stayed true to his principles and disowned the King Timber position of a member of his own side in the debate, Senator Larry Craig (R.-Idaho). The fault line is hard to exploit because politicians tend to close ranks when subsidies to big business are under fire: most live vulnerably in glass houses.
It is also interesting to note that conservative Congressman John Kasic (R-Ohio), chairman of the House Budget Committee, and Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.) have joined forces with Ralph Nader and the Wilderness Society and Friends of the Earth to decry corporate subsidies by the U.S. government. Politics doth make for strange bed-fellows.
It is against this background that the Forest Service shores up its position with an MOU with the ski industry. It wants to put the Forest Service imprimatur on recreation at ski areas on National Forest land. It wants the public to identify them as the core providers of all the mountain beauty and matchless skiing and boarding enjoyed at ski areas. (Providing partnership recognition in print and video advertising is already a requirement of all ski area permits.)
Jim Lyons, Under-Secretary of Agriculture, met in December with the NSAA Public Lands Committee and committed half a million dollars to be spent in furtherance of the winter sports partnership. He asked for recommendations on how best to spend the money. Michael Berry and NSAA’s government affairs director, Sam Anderson, were quick to oblige with a list of ten projects where money might productively be invested. It included, among other items, research projects, money for operations manuals, information tapes and handbooks as well as seed money for helping to hire consultants working on market growth. Poignantly, the suggestion list included money for in-service training of Forest Service employees to sensitize them to today’s customer expectations. The priorities that guide the choices of today’s consumers, they felt, might seem foreign to an administrative bureaucrat.
The Forest Service studied these recommendations and came up with its own plan, dated February 17, for allocating the $500,000. It agreed with several of NSAA’s suggestions, though not necessarily with the dollar amounts. (Not surprisingly, it passed over NSAA’s idea for in-service training.) Clearly, NSAA will get some of what it urged, and though the sums are modest, the money, when leveraged, will be beneficial.
Moving from the specifics of the partnership to the general climate of the relationship, Sam Anderson feels ski industry relations with the Forest Service score a four on a scale of one-to-five, with five denoting a relationship that couldn’t be better. “Our relationship could be better,” Anderson wrote recently to a Forest Service colleague, “but it is presently the best it has ever been.” Chief Dombeck was clearly anxious to agree:
“Everything that I hear is that the ski industry as a whole is very pleased with the relationship with the Forest Service. In fact, they tell me that the relationship has improved tremendously over the past several years. I want it to continue to get better.”
In a different context in the interview, Dombeck returned to his enthusiasm for the partnership with skiing:
‘I’ve got to tell you that both from inside the agency and outside, I hear good things about [the partnership]. In fact, I hope that the model used with the ski industry can be applied to other program areas for us to use in building good partnerships.”
Anderson focuses on consistency as an area for improvement. “The most important thing the Forest Service could do to enhance [this] relationship,” he says, “is to speak with one consistent voice and practice consistent policy decision-making between regions and forests.” He ascribes some of the problems to the agency’s decentralized management structure. “Every level of management in the agency can, and often does, act inconsistently with other equal units (region, forest and district) of the agency,” adds Anderson.
In a recent meeting with the USFS recreation director, both Anderson and Berry stressed that the Forest Service must work to eliminate the inherent competitive disadvantage that faces ski areas on public land because of process and inconsistency in decision-making.
Chief Dombeck essentially agrees with the charge of decentralized management and deftly defends it with populist antibureaucracy rhetoric:
“You don’t want me or someone from Washington dictating what the specifics should be. . .Any time issues come to Washington they get a lot more complicated.”
But on the specific complaint of lack of consistency, Dombeck merely acknowledged that, “Certainly, we have issues we have to resolve.”
Chief Dombeck is obviously a purposeful and savvy player in a high-stakes game. Change is here, but a 35,000-employee government agency doesn’t turn on a dime and Dombeck not only has his work cut out for him in his relationships with the powers on the Hill, but also faces a daunting internal marketing problem: how to sell his agency top-to-bottom on its responsibilities towards its recreation partners.
The official words are there In a Forest Service document on the Winter Sports Partnership, together with details on implementation:
“Our success in achieving the goals of the Winter Sports Partnership is dependent on the strength of our relationships with our ski industry partners. These relationships are, in large measure, based on how well we as an agency help our partners achieve business success.”
Chief Dombeck expects to succeed.
The author acknowledges with thanks the valuable help received from Sam Anderson, NSAA’s director of government affairs.
