This is business and these are contracts

exing questions continue to swirl around the fate of the largest forest restoration project in history, but news of the reopening of a two shuttered power plants in Snowflake have boosted the hopes of advocates.

Supporters of forest restoration hailed the announcement this week that a company controlled by Arizona State Sen. Bob Worsley will reopen the 24-megawatt Snowflake Power Plant, which will provide a market for small trees and restore about 100 jobs to the hard-pressed rural White Mountains community.

Worsley said he would also reopen an adjacent 80-megawatt coal-fired plant, after converting it to natural gas or installing pollution control equipment.

However, an adjacent, shuttered recycled paper mill will be dismantled by its Canadian owners.

The opening of the 24-megawatt power plant will provide a local market for the millions of tons of small-diameter trees that must be harvested to restore Northern Arizona’s sapling-choked forests.

“This is very good news,” said Cathie Schmidlin, a Forest Service spokesperson.

spokesperson. “There will be material going to this plant” from the Four Forest Restoration Initiative (4FRI).

Worsley said he has 10-year agreements with Arizona Public Service and the Salt River Project to buy power generated by burning wood in the Snowflake plant. Not only will the harvest of those pine thickets provide energy, but the thinning will remove enough trees to increase runoff — restoring streams and ultimately putting more water in SRP’s reservoirs along the Salt and Verde rivers.

Worsley said local investors put up $12 million to restart the two energy-producing plants and buy 7,000 acres nearby to serve as a landfill for the ash produced. The move should immediately restore 35 jobs in the wood-burning power plant and create another 65 jobs for crews to thin the surrounding forest.

Previously, the struggling White Mountain Stewardship Project provided wood to the operation. That project relied on a Forest Service subsidy of about $800 per acre and federal budget constraints sharply limited the amount of forest thinned. However, buffer zones created by that thinning project essentially saved Alpine and Springerville from the Wallow Fire. The thinned areas forced a racing crown fire to drop to the ground, where fire crews stopped it.

However, reopening at least one of the Snowflake facilities still doesn’t solve the problems facing the massive 4FRI project, tangled in a dispute about whether the Forest Service picked the wrong contractor.

The U.S. Forest Service continues to contemplate a request to transfer the contract to thin 300,000 acres from Pioneer Forest Products to a still-unnamed other company. Ultimately, the project will encompass some 2 million acres on the Tonto, Coconino, Kaibab and Apache-Sitgreaves Forests.

Gila County Supervisor Tommie Martin said a long delay on a contract transfer that winds up with another flawed business plan puts the future of the county at risk.

She noted that Northern Gila County generates 65 to 75 percent of the economic activity in the county, but remains “100 percent vulnerable to wildfire. We’re talking about people’s homes,wholesale fashion shoes which are their nest eggs. Not only will it bankrupt the county were it to burn, but it will bankrupt a whole lot of people at the same time. This is not some esoteric argument — the value of our homes is at stake. Even if your house doesn’t burn — and the forest burns around it — you’ve lost major assessed value.”

Critics initially greeted the news of a contract transfer with optimism, but for some that hope waned as details emerged.

Martin played a key role in developing the 4FRI consensus. She said she feared the new contractor will stick with Pioneer’s controversial plan based on using small trees and brush to make finger-jointed furniture and either diesel or jet fuel. She cited a recent presentation to the 4FRI stakeholders by one of Pioneer’s partners — a European firm called Concord Blue. The company claims it can make $2-a-gallon jet fuel from wood chips, which Martin characterized as “horsefeathers.”

Speaking for the Forest Service’s regional contracting office, Schmidlin said federal contracting rules require the Forest Service to negotiate for the contract transfer privately and preclude release of Pioneer’s business plan — or the identity of the company Pioneer wants to transfer the contract to.

“This is business and these are contracts,” she said. “What we do is guided by federal acquisition regulations and I don’t believe that regulation allows for public comments. We must make the decision in terms of what is in the best interests of the government. I recognize there’s a lot of interest in this and there are a lot of people interested in seeing this moving forward so we can see these forests thinned.”
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