With the recent announcement of the relocation of the US Forest Service Headquarters to Salt Lake City and operational service centers in various locations across the country, we caught up with USDA Deputy Secretary Stephen Vaden to learn what forestry professionals can expect from this reorganization.
Deputy Secretary Vaden said, “Well, what they can expect is a lot more focus on the individual forests and a lot less bureaucracy. What we have found is that the key man who ought to be the focus should be the forest supervisor. That’s the head person at every forest. That’s the person who should be delivering what that forest needs to the chief of the forest service. And yet, thanks to a bloated bureaucracy that’s developed over many years, that forest supervisor in his or her concerns most frequently gets stuck at a regional level and the chief of the forest service never hears anything about it. And that’s keeping problems from being solved. That’s keeping forests from being well-maintained. And it’s just not a good situation, and particularly not at a time when we need to be mining every dollar we spend and spending more of it on taking care of our forests, spending less of it on bureaucracy.”
“So this new relocation and reorganization is designed to do two things. Number one, move the forest service headquarters closer to the lands that they manage out in Salt Lake City, a central location that is close to innumerable national forests west of the Mississippi River. And then for all of our national forests, whether they be west or east of the Mississippi River, bring that control level down to the forest supervisor level and let him or her be the head man making the decisions and reporting what needs to be reported up to the chief of the forest service and not to a huge middle management bureaucracy blocking things in between,” said Vaden.
Audio Reporting by Dale Sandlin for Southeast AgNet.