“4FRI,” as the project is known, is all that. It is an epic project. But merely reciting its size and scope — restoring and reviving 300,000 woodland acres across four Arizona forests by way of mechanical thinning over the next 10 years — fails to capture the emotional investment Americans have placed in this vital project...
The company selected by the U.S. Forest Service over a year ago to conduct the thinning, Pioneer Forest Products, has requested the agency allow it to transfer its contract to another, as-yet unidentified company.
The Forest Service says it is reviewing the request. In the meanwhile, Pioneer stumbles along performing a miniscule facsimile of its once-enormous mission: It hired a dozen loggers, who finally started work in May, to thin 1,000 acres over the next 18 months.
If this development were merely a glitch for an otherwise solid operation, it would not be viewed as devastating as it is. But Pioneer has never been solid. It failed to secure financing for a sawmill. Its business plan has looked star-crossed. It always has been difficult to figure out how this company could make money.
The conduct of the Forest Service, meanwhile, has been — if anything — worse.
A week before the federal agency announced Pioneer’s request, a Forest Service representative told The Arizona Republic the service was confident in the company’s ability to fulfill its contractual obligations.
Perhaps Pioneer’s announcement caught the Forest Service by surprise, too. But, in some respects, pants-down credulity seems worse: Critics of Pioneer have been shouting from rooftops almost since the beginning that the company, owned (at one time, anyway) by a former Forest Service employee, could not possibly do the work. Now we see the critics were right.
Sell the timber, make money for the feds and create a healthy forest. Is the Forest Service incapable of producing a NEPA document that will survive a court challenge?
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