Ep. 689: A National Forest Supervisor Speaks Out

Steven Rinella https://www.instagram.com/stevenrinella/?hl=en talks with Scott Fitzwilliams, Ryan Callaghan https://www.themeateater.com/listen/cals-week-in-review, Brody Henderson https://www.instagram.com/brodyjhenderson/?hl=en, and Janis Putelis https://www.instagram.com/janis_putelis/?hl=en. Topics discussed: Will it become illegal to launch a vessel off a public roadway for water access in North Carolina?; a proposal to haze mountain lions with hounds in California after the the mauling death of Taylen Brooks by a mountain lion https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wXwLarIX6So; anti-deficiency; the economic activity generated by a forest; having to fire folks whose salaries you're not even paying; the redundancy in governments; what happens to public lands when there's no one left to manage it?; public lands as a great experiment in democracy; and more. Connect with Steve https://www.themeateater.com/authors/steven-rinella and The MeatEater Podcast Network https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterPodcastNetwork Steve on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/stevenrinella and Twitter https://twitter.com/stevenrinella?lang=en MeatEater on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/meateater, Facebook https://www.facebook.com/StevenRinellaMeatEater/, Twitter https://twitter.com/MeatEaterTV?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor, and Youtube https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterPodcastNetwork See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:05Speaker 01

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• 3:16Steven Rinella?

  Joined today by Scott Fitzwilliams. Scott is here for a very important, sorry, a very important, not important, a very important discussion about our public lands, our U.S. National Forest System. Scott got on our radar, I guess it was, well, here, I'll tell you the exact date. Scott got on our radar in late February 2025 when in our community, in our circle, there was circulated a headline, White River Forest Supervisor Scott Fitzwilliams Resigns Amid Slashing of Agency Workforce.

• 3:58Steven Rinella?

  Then the follow-up sentence, Fitzwilliams guided the 2.3 million acre forest for 15 years, helping manage soaring visitation and an annual $1.6 billion impact in Colorado.

• 4:18Steven Rinella?

  The most trafficked forest in the country, spanning 2.3 million acres. The White River National Forest has 11 major ski areas, eight wilderness areas, four reservoirs, regularly hosts more than 17 million visitors a year.

• 4:40Steven Rinella?

  The forest supports more than 22,000 jobs with forest-dependent workers in its communities, including Aspen, Breckenridge, Carbondale, Eagle, Glenwood Springs, Meeker, Rifle and Vale.

• 4:56Steven Rinella?

  Earning 960 million years, according to the Forest Service Economic Analysis of its top 111 properties, the term I'm not hip on, but properties. The forest's annual impact of $1.6 billion of financial activity in its communities ranks as the highest in the agency.

• 5:22Steven Rinella?

  And the gentleman we have here joining us today was prompted to leave that post at the age of 60, based on some of the things that are going on right now.

• 5:35Steven Rinella?

  With attacks on federal land management agencies. So, we're going to talk about that story, but first, welcome Scott. Good to be here. Uh, first Cal wanted to say something.

• 5:46Speaker 03

  Oh, well, you know, it's customary on this, this here podcast and we talk about other things and, and rarely do we even introduce our guest or acknowledge their existence during that time. So, we're ahead of schedule on that. But, but on the other things topic.

• 6:00Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, the newsy part.

• 6:01Speaker 03

  The newsy.

• 6:02Steven Rinella?

  Now, people write in like, hey, when you do the newsy thing up front, you know, and I'll be like, that's a great name for this, the newsy part.

• 6:08Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 6:08Steven Rinella?

  No.

• 6:09Speaker 03

  Not afraid to run with that.

• 6:10Steven Rinella?

  This, this, this, Matt, what you're talking about matters a lot to me because this is like, uh, in many states, this is a thing that a lot of hunters and anglers rely on. This, and I'll, I'll leave off a version of it, not leave off, but I'll mention too, a version of it is, um, in some states, all water trappers.

• 6:31Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 6:32Steven Rinella?

  Like it's how they conduct their, it's how they conduct their business.

• 6:35Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 6:35Steven Rinella?

  Is, is.

• 6:37Speaker 03

  There, there, I mean, there's a version of this that is, that is like class warfare almost, right? So I mean, this is like one of the most accessible ways to get out and recreate for, for the vast majority of us. North Carolina Senate Bill 220, I, I think it got heard yesterday, but um, there's always, you always have a dog in the fight. So, North Carolina Senate Bill 220, Section 4 specifically. If it were to pass, it would become illegal to launch a vessel. And this is primarily kayaks, canoes, um, small vessels off of the public road right of ways.

• 7:18Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 7:18Speaker 03

  Meaning that, um, certainly in, in a lot of states, your, your public roads have an easement. It's like shoulder to shoulder where, um, you get, you can park and if public ground abuts that shoulder, it's, it's legal access to that public ground, or in this case, public water. Um, so you would, you would be, uh, charged with, I think a class four misdemeanor in the state of North Carolina. If this were, were to go through, as Steve pointed out, if you are a trapper, this is very important. But if you're a, even a large water angler,

• 8:02Speaker 03

  this would eliminate a lot of access to water and it would, in a lot of places, become prohibitive, uh, to go, go fishing. Unless you have access to a, a larger, larger boat. So.

• 8:16Steven Rinella?

  Let's be frank, it's, it's a war on high schoolers and college kids. How else they supposed to get in the water?

• 8:24Speaker 03

  Yeah. Oh yeah. So all those bridge accesses.

• 8:27Steven Rinella?

  In this area, you go like cruising out north of town, west of town, north, northwest of town, every bridge.

• 8:34Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 8:35Steven Rinella?

  In the summer, you can't go to any bridge without some college kid climbing in the water.

• 8:38Speaker 03

  And I mean.

• 8:39Steven Rinella?

  Well, they tell you, I mean, I know it's a different state, but this is like a fight that gets fought. This is a fight that gets fought, like access, stream access. It's like, it's, it's, uh, the same plot. Now, what am I trying to say here? I'm trying to make an analogy. The same issue, it just gets fought in like little different.

• 9:00Speaker 04

  Right.

• 9:00Steven Rinella?

  Micro waves.

• 9:02Speaker 04

  So this isn't just stream access, this could be a lake, a pond, like anything.

• 9:06Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, yeah. But I mean, like, it's, it's, I don't know the particulars here, but it's usually coming like this. It's, it's, people have, there's some dude and he owns riverfront property, or he owns lakefront property. And there's nothing that burns his ass more than looking out the window and here comes some dirtbag floating by.

• 9:28Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 9:28Steven Rinella?

  Catching fish. And he's like, how in the world could it be? How could it possibly be that I own this? In some cases, I own both sides and I gotta wake up to some dirtbag fishing.

• 9:43Speaker 04

  Yep. I mean.

• 9:46Steven Rinella?

  Like, how? And then they get on the phone and whatever.

• 9:50Speaker 04

  Every other day, there's like a video that shows up of some landowners screaming at someone for being in the water that they're legally able to be in.

• 9:59Steven Rinella?

  Yes.

• 10:00Speaker 04

  You know?

• 10:00Steven Rinella?

  Every day.

• 10:01Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 10:01Steven Rinella?

  So it's always, it's like, and this is like a public, they're putting it as a public safety issue. It's not. This is someone talking about, they're, they're, they're talking about something that's not what they're talking about.

• 10:12Speaker 04

  Does the person that proposed this bill own some, some land, some waterfront land?

• 10:19Steven Rinella?

  Someone, someone has his ear. Yeah.

• 10:20Speaker 03

  Whoever introduced this bill may be friendly with some of those folks.

• 10:25Steven Rinella?

  You can picture the phone call, he's like, they're all in the, I can't figure it out. When I bought this place, I thought, but there's all these kids floating by, they're parked up and down the road. Hell, someone's gonna get hit.

• 10:38Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 10:38Speaker 03

  So this is.

• 10:39Steven Rinella?

  In fact, yes, someone's gonna get hit, that's the problem, you know?

• 10:45Speaker 03

  This is such an established form of access and use in, in North Carolina. Um, there's guidebooks and maps of, uh, where it is, you know, good places to launch, safe places to park, et cetera. So, um, this is not like a brand new thing. All of a sudden, people started showing up to, to, you know, that dirtbaggy spot that I have to drive past in order to get to my pay to play boat launch for my big boat.

• 11:15Steven Rinella?

  Mm-hmm.

• 11:15Speaker 03

  Um, and, and that, yeah, so that's exactly what it is. So people need to be aware of this. North Carolina Senate Bill 220, uh, specifically section four would, uh, turn you in.

• 11:26Speaker 03

  To um, a misdemeanor.

• 11:30Speaker 04

  Does this thing contrast with like an existing access law in North Carolina, like a high watermark?

• 11:38Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 11:38Speaker 04

  Public domain kind of thing?

• 11:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, so you know, oddly enough, it wouldn't touch the, the water access. Uh, in the state of North Carolina, their water access law, but it would just say, as long as you try to do it from here to here, it's illegal now and you, and you're, you're going to get a misdemeanor.

• 12:04Speaker 03

  Uh, one of the, the folks who wrote in on this, uh, sums it up pretty well. Says, North Carolina has had a long history of excellent water access and has a constitutional right to use traditional methods to hunt fish and trap game. This bill seems to be in violation of that. So.

• 12:20Steven Rinella?

  Amen.

• 12:21Speaker 03

  Yep. That, that's one of the good ones.

• 12:24Steven Rinella?

  It's a war on college kids.

• 12:27Speaker 03

  It is for fishing.

• 12:29Steven Rinella?

  You know, I was, I, I, I like, I try not to do this, but now then I'll catch myself just like looking through like stuff on social media, you know, like never leaves me where I want to be mentally.

• 12:37Speaker 03

  No.

• 12:38Steven Rinella?

  But this guy's got a video so funny. It's like, there's this dude fishing. He's like, you tell he's in a kayak or something. And he's got, he's got one of those like fishing GoPros. So it's not aiming, it's aiming at him fishing. But it's not aiming at like what's going on around him. But you can see that he's like at a bridge and he says, he goes, hey buddy. You tell he's like addressing someone. Hey buddy, I'm not trying to come after you on this, but just like, let me give you a little life advice. If someone's fishing a hole.

• 13:09Steven Rinella?

  You don't want to come in and start fishing it. And often the distance is your fuck off. Like a little kid.

• 13:16Speaker 04

  Saw that.

• 13:20Steven Rinella?

  Uh, oh, well, you know what? I wasn't gonna do this, but now since we're on legislation.

• 13:24Speaker 05

  No wonder they're warring against those college kids.

• 13:27Steven Rinella?

  Oh, yeah.

• 13:27Speaker 05

  Rude bastards.

• 13:29Steven Rinella?

  Um, no, this is a little kid's voice. Uh.

• 13:36Steven Rinella?

  One more piece of legislation.

• 13:39Steven Rinella?

  Peace. Years ago, I can't remember what the hell year it was. California. Um. Made, in my view, an enormous mistake when they banned, um. Mountain lion hunting.

• 13:57Steven Rinella?

  They banned lion hunting with dogs. They banned mountain lion hunting. Um, now, in California, thanks to this wisdom, they now.

• 14:05Speaker 05

  Nineteen ninety.

• 14:06Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, they now. What are they? One of the funniest things about the lion ban in California, I might, I might be fudging my numbers a little bit, but they're basically this. It was like. Hunters used to kill about three hundred and fifty mountain lions a year in California. Um. Take a wild stab at about how many mountain lions get killed every year now by animal damage control specialists.

• 14:29Speaker 05

  More.

• 14:30Steven Rinella?

  The same.

• 14:30Speaker 05

  Around three hundred and fifty.

• 14:31Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. It was like, they were like, okay, dudes buy licenses and they hunt lions. Let's get rid of that and then we'll start paying people to kill those lions and put them in the dumpster. Uh. And it's created where there's a problem now where. And it like, I has, I don't want to necessarily call it, I want to choose my words carefully. It has been observed in California that, that.

• 14:57Steven Rinella?

  Man, I hate to say this because I don't want to like feed into, I don't want to, you know, I don't want to do that thing where you're trying to get people to agree with you and so you create like a false narrative.

• 15:06Steven Rinella?

  It has been observed by some people who are like pretty good on mountain lions and, and pretty good on. Human wildlife interactions. It has been observed that in the, the decades since then. There has been less pressure on lions to avoid the kind of human lion interface. Um, really good biologists, really good lion experts, um, dudes that we know.

• 15:33Steven Rinella?

  Bart George? No, Bruce Bart. Oh, yeah. Bruce's hunting, you know, that these. Bruce is in Idaho or Washington State. Bruce is in Washington State. Yeah. Okay, whole career in chasing mountain lions. Um, and he has observed that over the years in these states where they've put like heavy restrictions or ban lion hunting, you see an increase in human lion conflicts because they just don't. The lions just don't have a perception of like trouble. They don't associate humans with trouble.

• 16:07Steven Rinella?

  We've had on a researcher Bart George is even working on a project where they'll go out and

• 16:14Steven Rinella?

  they'll get a, they'll get a collar on a mountain lion that's causing trouble, like killing pets, killing livestock, whatever. They'll get a collar on it. And they'll see, can we t- train this lion to avoid people by, because it's wearing a collar. We know right where it is. So we're going to go and play the sound of human voices. When he was doing this project, he would use this podcast. He would play this podcast to the lions. And monitor how close can I get to the lion? Before the lion will move. And at times he would get 15 feet, 30 feet from the lion, playing human voices before the lion moves. Then they put dogs on it and tree the lion and mess with it. That's not the word he uses, but they mess with it. They harass it.

• 16:58Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, we did a whole episode on it called Living with Lions. Living with Lions. They worry it. That's what they say in Europe. They would worry the lion with dogs. And then you let some time go by and then you come and play human voices to the lion. And is the lion like, oh shit, these guys, these people are trouble. And he wants to leave. Well, Bart had found some positive reinforcement that some level of human pressure, some level of inconvenience around humans and the use of dogs pushes lions away and makes them kind of like less inclined to come near human voices. Um, we had on some guys on the show. Uh, we had Wyatt Brooks on the show and Wyatt Brooks was hunting, uh, shed hunting,

• 17:40Steven Rinella?

  hunting shed antlers with his brother, Talon, and his brother Talon was killed by a mountain lion in El Dorado County, California. And those guys came on the show, or, or sorry, Talon, who's passed away, obviously did not, but Wyatt came on the show to talk about Talon's death. Um, in response to this, Senator Marie Alvarado Gill has introduced a bill, SBA 18, which she views would enhance public safety and reduce loss of livestock by establishing a five-year pilot program in El Dorado County during which permitted houndsmen with trained

• 18:20Steven Rinella?

  hounds may haze problem mountain lions away from areas where they pose a threat to public safety, livestock, or pets. I like, that's great. I applaud it. Um, I don't mean to trivialize it. I just, I, I guess it's a step in the right direction. I would be so much happier, and I don't, I know it would take like an act of God, meaning an act of Congress, to undo the mountain lion hunting ban. Um, but I think that that's what needs to happen in California.

• 18:53Speaker 04

  The thing is that, that I find with, that might happen with this is the anti-hunting folks, the animal rights activists would probably look at this as a negative, like it's bad to go haze those lions and they should be looking at it. You know, like, don't go bother those lions, don't harass them with dogs. And they should be all for it because it's probably going to save some lions' lives, right?

• 19:19Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. My view on it, and reluctance to dig into it too much, not reluctant to dig into it, but like choosing my words carefully, is I like.

• 19:29Steven Rinella?

  Um, I don't think of mountain lions like as a negative.

• 19:33Speaker 04

  Right.

• 19:34Steven Rinella?

  But if I saw a mountain lion in my yard, I'd be like, cool.

• 19:36Speaker 04

  Mm hmm.

• 19:37Steven Rinella?

  When we have bears coming in, I like encourage my neighbors to not tattletale on them. Because I'm like, if you tattletale on that bear, it's dead.

• 19:46Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 19:46Steven Rinella?

  They're not gonna spend a bunch of money and have some guy spend two days moving that bear 200 miles away so it can walk back here.

• 19:51Speaker 04

  I, I believe I told your wife one time, I'm like, Katie, uh, you didn't pull the trigger, but you loaded the gun.

• 20:00Steven Rinella?

  I know. I'm always like, can't, don't tattletale on bears. Cause if, if like, if one person tattletales, they kinda like, ah, we'll keep an eye on it. When 10 people tattletale, that bear's dead. Dead bear.

• 20:13Speaker 04

  When I lived in Eagle, Colorado, where a part of, you know, near the White River National Forest, occasionally we would get reverse 911 calls saying there's a mountain lion in your neighborhood.

• 20:25Steven Rinella?

  No way.

• 20:25Speaker 04

  Mm hmm.

• 20:26Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 20:27Speaker 04

  And that usually in like, late winter. And so like, you know that lion's on the hit list, right?

• 20:33Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. So in, in my choose my words carefully thing is, um, I look at it like, I like, like, I look at it as, uh, regulated mountain lion hunting under quota systems and bag limits and seasons, um, is in no way detrimental to having a healthy population of lions.

• 20:59Steven Rinella?

  Uh, I think it was wrong. It was ill advised to ban lion hunting. And I look at this as a positive because it's like a step in the right direction, hopefully. But I just can't act like I'm glad about it because I'm super scared of lions.

• 21:12Speaker 04

  Mm hmm. Yeah. And Steve's trying not to like, use the, the fear argument. Um, there's.

• 21:23Steven Rinella?

  I don't know if there's, there's been a study that like definitively proves hunting reduces wildlife conflict. But at the same time, it's like, well, areas that don't have black bears don't have black bear conflict. And areas that don't have lions don't have lion conflict.

• 21:41Speaker 04

  I was doing some research for a project Steve and I are working on. And it was regarding the black bear situation in New Jersey. When, what was his name?

• 21:51Steven Rinella?

  Pedals.

• 21:52Speaker 04

  Bill Murphy.

• 21:52Steven Rinella?

  Murphy.

• 21:53Speaker 04

  Murphy outlawed essentially, like first it was, he outlawed it on state and then he let the management plan expire. So bear hunting became completely illegal in New Jersey for a couple of years.

• 22:03Steven Rinella?

  And then he had what I believe they call to be a mea culpa.

• 22:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, he got, he listened to people who were real pissed off. Is that what you mean?

• 22:11Steven Rinella?

  No, he said, I was wrong.

• 22:13Speaker 04

  Yeah. Um, but anyway, they did a study during that timeframe of human bear conflicts. And, and you said, there's no like study that's been done on increased conflict, but it was something like 237% increase in bears killing pets, bears breaking into cars, bear, you know, all the thing. So it was like the outlawed hunting and that stuff shot through the roof. So.

• 22:45Speaker 04

  You know.

• 22:45Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 22:45Speaker 04

  You take what you will, but.

• 22:48Steven Rinella?

  Sure. Anybody could set up their own little experiment, have a garden and then have a bunch of rabbits eat in the garden.

• 22:54Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 22:55Steven Rinella?

  And then do a couple of high profile killings of some of those rabbits. And you will see the other rabbits are like, jeez, I'm going in the middle of the night now. Not doing that in the morning anymore, you know, it's just, it's. All right. Scott, tell me about your career, man. How'd you wind up like? How'd you wind up there? How'd you wind up as the White River Forest Supervisor? What was your path?

• 23:19Speaker 00

  Oh, it was a long path. Um, you know, I grew up in Wisconsin and, and, uh, ended up in Colorado for graduate school and tripped into an internship with a place called the Forest Service I knew nothing about.

• 23:32Speaker 00

  I knew the difference was you couldn't hunt in parks and you could hunt on the forest. That's what I knew the difference. And so, uh, started my career and bounced all over the country. I think I worked in seven states. I was in Cody, Wyoming, Jackson, Wyoming.

• 23:48Speaker 00

  Dickinson, North Dakota. Um, I was on the National Grasslands out there and then I went to Sitka, Alaska for five years.

• 23:56Steven Rinella?

  Really?

• 23:56Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 23:57Steven Rinella?

  For the Forest Service?

• 23:58Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 23:59Steven Rinella?

  And that was on Tongass?

• 24:00Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 24:00Steven Rinella?

  Working on Tongass?

• 24:01Speaker 00

  On the Tongass, yeah. I, I was Jim Bechtel's boss.

• 24:04Steven Rinella?

  Really?

• 24:05Speaker 00

  What, you know, you guys had him on recently.

• 24:07Steven Rinella?

  Oh, sure, man, yeah.

• 24:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. And, uh, then I went to Oregon, um, for a few years in Eugene and then ended up in, back in Glenwood Springs on the White River. So I started as an intern in Colorado and ended up finishing my career in Colorado.

• 24:22Speaker 04

  What kind of work were you doing, like, throughout those?

• 24:25Speaker 00

  Um, you know, I started really, uh, my, my, originally I started kind of in the public affairs and legislative affairs world for a few years. And then, uh, then I became a line officer, district ranger. And then I was a recreation wilderness, um, minerals land staff on the Tongass. That's what the work, I worked on that. That's why Jim worked for me and then, um...

• 24:48Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, cause he's a geologist.

• 24:49Speaker 00

  He's a geologist, yeah. And so, um, and then I was, I've been a line officer, you know, either a district ranger, deputy forest supervisor, forest supervisor. So it's been great. I mean, to work in so many incredible places is, you know, I'm so grateful for this career. It's been unbelievable.

• 25:06Steven Rinella?

  Can you explain, uh, for folks, what is the scope of a forest supervisor? And then if you could talk a little bit about, um, how that could get more and more complex as you enter into a forest like the White River Forest?

• 25:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. So, um, the, the way that agency's set up, we, uh, we, they give line officer delegated authority for a chunk of land. And in a case of a forest, a forest, um, depends where it is, you know? And on the Tongass, it's 17 million acres, on the White River, it's two and a half. And, you know, in the east, they're smaller forests. And basically you have... All responsibilities for that piece of ground. I always told people it's toilets, the targets and everything in between. You're responsible for everything. And so, you know, you're responsible for the money, you know, the budget, the targets, the accomplishments, the people.

• 26:01Speaker 00

  And but these jobs now, you know, in these line officer jobs, they're they're really evolved into, you know, part of a community. You've got to be the, you know, you're the name, you know, the face of the agency in that community. And so, you know, as we collaborate and we work together, it's so, you know, it can get complex because you're the one that signs the decision for that timber sale or that new trail or, you know, closing that trail and your name's on it. And so.

• 26:34Speaker 03

  Or you may have had like a mine up in the Tongas or oil and gas or industry.

• 26:41Speaker 00

  Greens Creek Mine and Kensington Mine up in, you know, yeah, those are huge mines. And so, you know, and I think, like we all know, I mean, everyone loves this public land and wants to see it managed a certain way. And so it gets a little harder and harder as people just.

• 27:00Speaker 03

  Not a certain way, my way. I want it done for for hunting and fishing specifically.

• 27:06Speaker 00

  Yeah. But you know, Gifford Pitscho, who starred the Forest Service, he and Teddy Roosevelt back in 1905, and I still believe in this, and I hope as the restructuring that is taking place, this doesn't go away. They purposely set it up where it was very decentralized. We want the decision making where the communities are. We want the decision making where the, you know, where it affect, you know, how where it affects people. And that has been, that's why I love the job is I rarely in all the years got told, you need to do this on this project from a boss or from above. And that's the way Pitscho and Roosevelt wanted it. They wanted it decentralized on the ground.

• 27:50Speaker 03

  Disregarding what's happened in the last couple of months, was that consistent from like that ability to be decentralized? Was that consistent from like one administration to the next?

• 28:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, ebbs and flows and different emphasis. And that's always been the case. But we've kind of always navigated through that and. And save a few, there's always been a few things where it's been top down. Some, the, I don't know how many revisions of the Tongus Forest Plant.

• 28:21Steven Rinella?

  Oh, yeah.

• 28:21Speaker 00

  Oftentimes that became extremely politicized and Washington kind of ran that toward some undersecretary.

• 28:29Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, in that case, it fell into like a administrations, one administration would put a major

• 28:36Speaker 00

  Right.

• 28:37Steven Rinella?

  Plan into effect and another administration called into question.

• 28:40Speaker 00

  Right.

• 28:40Steven Rinella?

  And you just probably got to roll with that, right?

• 28:42Speaker 00

  Absolutely. And, and, you know, our laws, National Forest Management Act and on the, on the BLM side, FLIPMA, they're set up to put 10, 15, 20 year plans together, a forest plan, that's supposed to take some of that, level some of that. It's like, okay, here's how we're going to do it for the next 15 years. And it's worked well and, and, and, and I still have hopes it's going to work well, but certainly under, you know, what, what current restructuring, I'm not sure. I just hope we maintain that decentralized management and decision-making because I think Pinchot and Roosevelt had it right in 1905, and I think it still applies today. It's just harder because of more people.

• 29:25Steven Rinella?

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• 30:09Steven Rinella?

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• 32:55Steven Rinella?

  As a forest supervisor, you gotta wake up.

• 32:59Steven Rinella?

  Every day, someone has to be pissed at you.

• 33:02Speaker 00

  Pretty much.

• 33:03Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Can you lay out a little bit and you can keep it, you can keep it true to Colorado. We can leave Tongas in the rearview mirror for a minute, but um, can you, can you explain a little bit like the push and pull?

• 33:14Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 33:14Steven Rinella?

  I mean, it's gotta be like, you got, just to give you a sense of what I'm picturing, you can correct me if I'm wrong. I mean, it's gotta be like a lot of fire conversation, cattle conversation, logging conversation, access kind of preservation conversations, huge conversations around wildlife.

• 33:32Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 33:33Steven Rinella?

  Dealing with state game agency, like, like who is trying to get a hold of you, you know, throughout the year, right? To tell you how you ought to be doing things.

• 33:42Speaker 00

  All of the above, Steve. It's, it ebbs and flows a little bit.

• 33:48Speaker 00

  Vegetation management, you know, timber harvest, fuels, projects are all, can always be a pinch point for people, you know? People and certainly in Montana, it's, you know, it's Montana and this region is one of the most litigated regions as far as fuels, projects and timber sales and stuff.

• 34:08Speaker 00

  You know, it, it's, it's, it's the contrast of leave it alone, preservation first, conservation use, you know? That's whatever it is. It doesn't matter if it's cattle, if it doesn't matter if it's, uh, you know, logging, mining. People just have visions of what their national forest should look like and don't want to change. It's getting harder because so many people are moving from places that they think it's a national park.

• 34:39Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 34:40Speaker 00

  I mean, not we've had, what are you doing cutting trees? Well, we've been doing it since 1905. I mean, it's part of our mission. It's in legislation requiring us to do that. And the toughest ones these days, and especially in places like Vale and Aspen and Summit County and is individual landowners with the easement or a lands issuer needs something. They're tough because they're generally rich and.

• 35:12Speaker 04

  You mean, you're talking like second homeowners that butt up against?

• 35:15Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 35:16Speaker 04

  Yeah, there's a lot of that.

• 35:17Speaker 00

  That's been really challenging over the years, but it's all challenging, but it's all.

• 35:21Steven Rinella?

  But like, help people understand what you're talking about. I have a sense of what you're talking about, but say people that aren't real, that don't follow the politics of.

• 35:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, as, as more and more people move into the urban, you know, the forested lands, a lot of it, they have to get an easement from the Forest Service to put a driveway in or to put a power line in or to, or they have a crappy survey and they ended up building part of their house, which happens all the time on national forest system lands and then, and then we say, hey, you gotta move your house. Or there's this thing called the Small Track Act that can purchase the land if, if it was proven it was done accidentally, you know, bad survey or something. So, so as more and more people coming into these areas are building these homes in the forest and up in the hills, you know, they require all these easements and right of ways and permits and things like that.

• 36:12Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 36:13Speaker 00

  It's one or two people that consume a tremendous amount of time and, and they just don't understand.

• 36:18Steven Rinella?

  Cause they're lawyered up.

• 36:19Speaker 00

  Totally lawyered up. Ah, and, and they, you know, and they know people. Well, I'm gonna call so and so. So that, that's how, that, that bugs me because it's not a, you know, collective, society-wide discussion of how we should manage a landscape or forests. It's just one dude with a house and yet my staff is spending, you know, three days a week working on that, you know, project, so. Got it, got it.

• 36:44Speaker 04

  How was it dealing with the big ski industry corporations? Cause like you're, you're, you're in a posi-, you were in a position where a lot of national forest managers aren't, you know, dealing with so much of that.

• 36:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's, um, they're big companies and, and, and, but most of the ski areas have been permitted. I think it would have been harder when they were permitting new ski areas. Um, you know, now it was more about can they do this expansion? Can they replace this lift or build this new restaurant? Um, it's still tough. I mean, those numbers you talked about at the beginning, the, the 22,000 employees and, you know, 1.6 billion dollar contribution to GDP, most of it's from that industry. I mean, they employ a lot of people and, and pour a lot of money, but it's challenging because you look around the West and where we have these resort communities,

• 37:39Speaker 00

  it's completely changed. I mean, nobody could afford to live there, you know? It's crowded, it's expensive, it's, you know, 70% of the homes, for example, in Summit County where Breckenridge and, and A Basin and Keystone are, 70% of the homes are second homeowners.

• 37:56Speaker 04

  Seventy, wow, right.

• 37:59Speaker 00

  Well, so no one can afford to live there and, and so then you struggle with like all these mountain towns dealing with, with affordable housing and, and so.

• 38:08Speaker 04

  And those ski areas too, like they'll tell you that they can't exist without a summer program as well. So it's not just in the winter when there's a ton of snow and the animals aren't visible.

• 38:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, we permitted the first, um, at, on Vale Mountain, the first summer uses. The Congress passed legislation to allow them to do things like zip lines and, you know, Alpine coasters and things like that. And we were the first forest to do that. The part about our forests is the White River is all the big resorts are there. And so we're always first in experimenting with whatever it might be. But, you know, they're a good partner and they, you know, I like working with innovative, creative industries and they're one, you know, they're always looking at the next best thing and... Got it. But, you know, I think we have to step back and realize, okay, the impacts are

• 39:01Speaker 00

  real. It's only 4,000 acres of permitted land that they have, you know, their permits on that they actually... All total? Well, let, no. On the White River, it's only 40,000. So of... Oh, I'm sorry. Okay. But, but say one resort, say a resort like Snowmass, I think it's about 4,000 acres under permit. Forty thousand acres of, of, of land is under permit and skiers on the White River. Not out of 2.3 and a half million, that's not a huge amount. Yeah. But the, the, the impact is way past that, you know, because it just brings people and lots of them. And so I think we've got, I think that's something in the future we're

• 39:43Speaker 00

  gonna have to really start to recognize is these resort towns and these, you know, kind of high-end tourism places, we're gonna have to manage that in some way that, at least realize that the, the effects are way beyond the resort or whatever. Yeah.

• 40:00Speaker 03

  Oh, just the, you know, all these towns, you know, like that is the industry there. It's support the, the ski areas over anything else. And when I used to go to meetings in the ski town that I lived in, it was just amazing, like the, the piddly stuff that the community would get involved in, like horse shit on mountain bike trails that were actually just game trails that people started riding mountain bikes on.

• 40:30Speaker 03

  And the like amount of noise pollution the mountain would put off.

• 40:35Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 40:36Speaker 03

  During non-ski season, times of year, right? That, I mean, if you got up at elevation where they were doing the work, you could hear almost conversations a lot of the times from miles away.

• 40:49Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 40:49Steven Rinella?

  Um, I don't think you should be allowed to ski.

• 40:51Speaker 03

  The trash associated.

• 40:52Speaker 00

  Where do you stand on that?

• 40:53Speaker 03

  Is insane too, you know? Um, that's, you know, you go hike the ski lift lines.

• 41:01Speaker 03

  Uh, you know, during non-ski season and the amount of shit underneath the chairlifts.

• 41:07Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 41:07Speaker 03

  Just cra- and you know, they do like cleanups and stuff, but I mean, there's so.

• 41:11Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 41:12Speaker 03

  Much stuff.

• 41:12Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 41:13Speaker 05

  How, how much does it cost for a ski area to permit, say, 4,000 acres? Like, is it, isn't it, is it an annual thing?

• 41:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's a, it's a really complicated formula that I can't explain, but it's based on the revenue you derive from activities on national forests. So if the lift is on national forests, uh, restaurants on national forests, obviously a permit, you know, the, the pass. So, um, it's, you know, um, on our forest, um, which was by far the most, it was 70, 65% of the entire nation's, um, fees collection. We collected about 28 million dollars from the 11 resorts.

• 41:52Speaker 05

  Wow.

• 41:52Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 41:53Steven Rinella?

  Is it, is it fair to call it like a profit share or does it not work as a profit share? It's like a revenue share.

• 41:58Speaker 00

  No, it's just a, like a permit. I mean, you're just like a grazing permit, they pay.

• 42:02Steven Rinella?

  No, but you said that they pay relative to revenue.

• 42:05Speaker 00

  Yeah. No, they, they, it's just.

• 42:07Steven Rinella?

  So if their business tanks, if their visitation tanks.

• 42:10Speaker 00

  They'll pay us less money.

• 42:11Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 42:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. There's a minimum, obviously, but.

• 42:15Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 42:16Speaker 00

  Their businesses aren't tanking, um, of late, anyway. Um, so nationwide, we collect about 35 million dollars off of ski areas in the country. Here's the little catch, is not one penny of that comes back to this, to the forest that it was.

• 42:34Speaker 03

  Generated on.

• 42:35Speaker 00

  It is the only thing we permit that no money comes back to the local forest. And, uh.

• 42:41Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 42:42Speaker 00

  There's been a, a act in Congress called the Shred Act, um, that has, um. That has, uh, yeah, I forget how, what did that ski area, but anyway.

• 42:53Steven Rinella?

  That was, whatever it stood for was an afterthought.

• 42:55Speaker 00

  Absolutely, they. Had to come up with the good acronym.

• 42:58Steven Rinella?

  They wanted to be shredded, they know, we'll figure out that rest later.

• 43:01Speaker 00

  But it would, it would return a good portion of the money back to where it came from, which I've been advocating for because they, there's a lot of work, not just associated with the resorts, but all the people that come with it.

• 43:14Steven Rinella?

  Well, how the hell did that get pulled out of, how, how did that get pulled out of the general system? Like, if you do like, like timber harvest, cattle leases, you get some of the revenue, but how did skiing sit in a different landscape?

• 43:29Speaker 00

  When, back in the nineties, when the, it used to be outfitter and guide fees used to go to the US Treasury.

• 43:35Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 43:35Speaker 00

  Campground fees went to the US Treasury, it all went to.

• 43:38Steven Rinella?

  So there was examples.

• 43:39Speaker 00

  Then there was the, what was called the fee demo program where we got to keep all those fees. Now we get to keep all the outfitter fees and all the campground fees and all, every, everything. And then they looked at skiers, they specifically looked at the White River Forest and said, we're not giving that one forest 28 million dollars. So that's basically how it.

• 43:59Steven Rinella?

  Got it. It was just too much jingle.

• 44:01Speaker 00

  Too much jingle in one place. And, and so now there's a way they can spread it out, but now because of the budget, it, it, there's a term in the, in Congress, legislative Congress, in the budget bills called scoring. And it's like golf, and I know how much you like golf too, Stephen. You don't want to score, it's a, the Office of Management Budget gives a piece of legislation a score and it's a financial score. And the more you score, the less chances it has. So in that case.

• 44:29Steven Rinella?

  I'm, I'm sorry, I'm not following.

• 44:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, um, it's, it's, it's a, it's a budget score and it, and they would look at it and say, okay, that's 45 million dollars. That's normally going to the US Treasury.

• 44:41Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 44:42Speaker 00

  The 10-year score is 450 million dollars.

• 44:46Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 44:46Speaker 00

  You don't want to score 450 million dollars because they say, you got to find that money somewhere else because we're not going to, you know, lose that 450 million dollars over 10 years to the Treasury. So it's, the problem is it scores, OMB gives it a score of 450 million for a 10-year. Um, so we haven't, it hasn't been passed bipartisan bill that has significant, um, support on both sides of the aisle. But it's what it is right now. It's a bummer because it's the only only fee we collect.

• 45:20Steven Rinella?

  What when you run a forest, how do they present to you or or or do they present to you some version of a P and L? Like like, what are the expectations of a forest?

• 45:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, we're each forest is allocated a budget. Now, they've changed a few things and centralized more and more of the budget. But for most of my career, and you'd wrestle for, you know, make a point and say, you get this much money.

• 45:51Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 45:52Speaker 00

  And you're going to get this much in recreation, this much in timber, this much in grazing. And and with that money, we expect you to achieve these targets. I'm gonna give you, you know, the regional office will give me X amount in timber. We want you to produce 25,000 cubic

• 46:10Speaker 00

  feet of timber or million board feet or whatever it is. Same with grazing. If you get this much grazing, you got to, you know,

• 46:19Speaker 00

  administer this many grazing permits and and recreation is a little more obtuse. But miles of trail, we used to get trail maintenance dollars and and you get a certain amount of trails. We expect you to clear this many miles of trails.

• 46:33Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 46:34Speaker 00

  And then, I mean, throughout my career, I mean, it was a you didn't spend overspend that. If you did, you better have another buddy that could cover you, another forest that because budgets are spun up at the regional level.

• 46:47Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 46:48Speaker 00

  So the accountability was there. We weren't, you know, it's called the Anti-Deficiency Act. If an agency spends more than is appropriated, and I've never seen it happen because it's a big no-no.

• 47:00Steven Rinella?

  Got it. Do they is there ever an expectation articulated to a forest supervisor about?

• 47:08Steven Rinella?

  How much economic activity your forests should facilitate? Like, is that part of your mandate? Or is that just something that happens out of? It happens by chance?

• 47:17Speaker 00

  Um, no. It, it's not. They don't say we want this much economic activity, but they say we're good. We want you to be able to produce this much board feet of timber. Or we need you. You're getting this minerals money. We need you to get that mine approved or get the EIS done. And, um, same thing with recreation. Yeah. I mean, that's a, it's always been a driver in the national forest system is, is the economics. And it not, not to the, you know? That doesn't mean we don't get to balance it, but it's important for sure.

• 47:53Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, like fiscal responsibility.

• 47:55Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah. Yeah. That doesn't mean there's not areas to improve. I mean.

• 48:00Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. What, what is an area to improve?

• 48:02Speaker 03

  I want to get to the areas of improvement. I'd love to get like, how? How is like the permitting for a mine work? Is that on the same? Cause I, I always get wrapped up with the mining acts.

• 48:17Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 48:17Speaker 03

  And I'm like.

• 48:20Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 48:20Speaker 03

  Mines don't make us any money.

• 48:22Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 48:22Speaker 03

  But based off of how you explained the permitting for, um, a ski area. Now I'm like, okay, well, obviously the mine has to have some sort of a revenue share there as well. Or, or percentage of revenue.

• 48:36Speaker 00

  Well, they, they, the 18, you know, we're still operating under the 1872 mining law. And, um, it's been amended and there's been tweaks to it. But, um, where, where there's not a revenue sharing of, of hard rock minerals. Oil and gas, you know, leasing, you know, look what we call on get leasable minerals. It's 25%. You know, everything that comes off of a federal mineral, 25% comes back to the government.

• 49:04Speaker 03

  Not mineral. Oil and gas.

• 49:05Speaker 00

  Yeah. Federal mineral estate. I'm sorry. And.

• 49:08Steven Rinella?

  What about coal? Is that under mining or is that under oil and gas?

• 49:12Speaker 00

  Coal's under mining. So it's under the 1872s. It's considered locatable. So coal, gold, silver.

• 49:20Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 49:20Speaker 00

  Precious metals. So they have to pay a land use fee, uh, you know, for occupying that piece of national forest. But they don't pay, um, you know, if they.

• 49:30Steven Rinella?

  They don't pay for the loot? The stuff?

• 49:32Speaker 00

  Not, not like they do oil and gas.

• 49:34Steven Rinella?

  And not like you do with timber.

• 49:36Speaker 00

  Nope, no.

• 49:37Speaker 03

  But if you read, like if I were to pop up the 1872 mining act right now.

• 49:43Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm. Which I got in my, I got in my pocket.

• 49:44Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, I mean, this is, I can't believe you, because it is referenced all over and depending on what historical source like you read about. When it was enacted, it was like, oh, this is really how it's gonna be. It was kind of a joke when we wrote it. As was like the diamond clause too. Um, so depending on what source, it was like.

• 50:05Steven Rinella?

  You mean it was written by the, it was written by the extractor?

• 50:09Speaker 03

  Yes, and it was, but it was also written in a like, well, this will never go anywhere, ha, ha, ha type of way.

• 50:16Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 50:16Speaker 03

  Um, but it's five dollars an acre, a surface acre.

• 50:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, that they pay a fee.

• 50:22Speaker 03

  Is that still the, is that still the thing?

• 50:25Speaker 00

  It's, yeah, I, I don't have a lot of my, I haven't dealt with mines. Yeah, it's cheap. It's, it's ridiculous. But the law hasn't been changed. And so, um.

• 50:35Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 50:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, locatables are hard, you know, because th- those are just, I like dealing with oil and gas leasing. It's nice organized process. It's clear. Um, locatables are really complicated and, uh.

• 50:50Steven Rinella?

  I'm not, I'm not a, um, big minerals guy. Can you, can you help me, uh, understand like?

• 50:58Steven Rinella?

  How is oil not a locatable? Like what the hell does locatable mean? The terminology, I mean.

• 51:03Speaker 00

  Um, covered under the 1872 mining law.

• 51:07Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 51:07Speaker 00

  So th- those are, those are what we normally think of mining. Gold, silver, lead, zinc, um, where you dig something out of the ground. When oil and gas came into play, we, we, we evolved a little bit and said, wait, we'll lease these lands. So there'll be leasable minerals.

• 51:29Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 51:29Speaker 00

  And so we just use the term locatable and leasable because two different completely processes manage those and regulatory structure.

• 51:39Steven Rinella?

  And for the forest, for the taxpayer, the, for the American taxpayer.

• 51:47Steven Rinella?

  They're doing, the American taxpayer is doing better on a timber harvest. They're doing better on a ski lease. They're doing better on oil and gas than they're doing on mineral extraction.

• 51:59Speaker 00

  If you're looking just at what direct payments go to the treasury or to the agency, yeah.

• 52:05Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 52:05Speaker 00

  For sure.

• 52:06Steven Rinella?

  All right.

• 52:08Steven Rinella?

  You brought up there's things that could be done better, but I feel like we're a little bit burying the lead. So I don't want to, I don't want to.

• 52:17Steven Rinella?

  Let's, let's jump ahead here. I'm trying to sort all this out in my head.

• 52:20Speaker 03

  If, if I were to go back and say, here's our guest, Scott Fitzwilliam.

• 52:25Steven Rinella?

  Please, let's start.

• 52:26Speaker 03

  We're going to talk about government waste on national forests. And we're going to learn how national forests work and how we're pissing away all this money.

• 52:37Steven Rinella?

  That's how you'd have kicked it off?

• 52:39Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 52:39Steven Rinella?

  Oh, I was going to come in like, that's interesting. I was going to come in like, um.

• 52:47Steven Rinella?

  Scott resigned over certain actions that are taking place.

• 52:54Steven Rinella?

  Coming down from Washington DC. Um, decisions that are being forced, things that are being stripped away from a level of local control and, and, and local expertise. And then he said, hey, listen, man.

• 53:11Steven Rinella?

  There's plenty of ways to clean up, but this is ditching the baby with the bathwater. I don't know.

• 53:18Speaker 03

  That's nice, but let's play the Spencer New Hearth game. Which one's going to get more clicks?

• 53:25Steven Rinella?

  Okay. Which approach is more appealing to you?

• 53:28Speaker 00

  I think, I'm thinking about, you know, people who listen to the show and stuff. Uh, you know, context of what's been going on and, and, and, um, it's been pretty wild since inauguration. I mean, you know, first thing that's happened is we all got this email that said fork in the road.

• 53:45Steven Rinella?

  Yep.

• 53:46Speaker 00

  And we all deleted it because we go to training that says, when you get spam email, delete it. Cause it, it came from a source we'd never seen before. It was bizarre. Hey, you can retire right now and get paid till October and. So, but it turned out to be real. So that was the, what they called the deferred resignation program, which I took. Oh, you did? Okay. Yeah, cuz I was gonna retire in the next year and a half. Yep. But they offered to pay me till October. I'm good. I'm eligible to retire, so it wouldn't affect my retirement much, so. And then, then it was, the next thing that happened was what we called the Valentine's

• 54:31Speaker 00

  Day massacre, where we, we just got a letter and said, "You need to fire all these people." And that was rough. We had sixteen on our force, but I know the force here, the Galatin, the Custer Galatin, it was in the forties. And it was, we had to give them this, we had to call them up, give them this letter that said, "You're fired based on your performance", which was a complete lie, a complete utter lie. Their performance was fine. Some of it just had their performance rating. So that wasn't fun. And it was, and on our force, fifteen to sixteen were field-level

• 55:11Speaker 00

  people. They worked what we, we were employee called a permanent part-time. They're a permanent government employee, but they only work half the year, the field season. They start about now, finish after hunting season, and then they go work in the ski resorts or whatever. Yeah. At what salary? The, they're like GS5, so the, the cost to the, the half of the year they're paying for us is eighteen thousand bucks. Okay. So, annual salary of about forty, forty-two thousand dollars, eighteen, nineteen thousand. But they get healthcare and things like that. And most of those were paid with fee money, so it wasn't taxpayer money, it was the fees we collected at maroon bells and campgrounds and outfitting guides and stuff. And, and they...

• 55:55Speaker 00

  Clean toilets, clear trails, do fire patrol. That didn't make any sense.

• 56:02Steven Rinella?

  That was out of fee money.

• 56:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, fee money. And I had to fire six people who were paid for by the counties. We have pretty well-off counties, you know, Picken County and Eagle County and Summit County. And for years and years, they've been actually giving us, the feds, money because they wanted more people on the ground during the busy season because we just didn't have enough money to have patrols and people clearing trails and cleaning up human waste and all that stuff. So, so we had to fire people who were paid for by counties. That didn't save any money. That's what was.

• 56:39Speaker 04

  How common is that in other, is there other forests that have similar systems where they're?

• 56:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, lots of forests have. The other big fee we get is we get grants in most, I don't know how much in Montana, but certainly Wyoming, you get grants for what we call the sticker fund, where you, your ATV stickers and your snowmobile stickers.

• 56:59Steven Rinella?

  Sure.

• 57:00Speaker 00

  The state gives us money to hire people to, you know, have ATV crews. And so we had to let people go that were paid for by the state.

• 57:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, because your off-road vehicle stamp, your OHV stamp that you can, like in Montana, you can buy it online with your hunting license, that is, that's specifically earmarked for trails and possibly a campground.

• 57:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, and trailheads. And I'm more familiar in Colorado, but it's a great source of money. I mean, and we had whole crews that were paid for by the state, some of which, because they were in this probationary period, we had to fire. Didn't make sense. That's when I started to think, this, this is not a restructuring.

• 57:43Steven Rinella?

  Why did it need to come as it was a performance issue? That's just like a legal?

• 57:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'm sure they.

• 57:48Steven Rinella?

  They're anticipating litigation.

• 57:49Speaker 00

  Right, which they ended up losing. And some of these people were, judges ordered in some states and some districts had, are now back to work. I'm not sure what is efficient about, we paid them the whole time that they were fired because the judge ordered back pay. And so there's nothing efficient about that.

• 58:08Steven Rinella?

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• 58:52Steven Rinella?

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• 59:33Steven Rinella?

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• 1:00:18Steven Rinella?

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• 1:00:54Speaker 04

  Did you feel obligated? Oh, I don't know if you can answer this, but did you feel obligated? Like you had to have the official, like you're fired based on performance conversation? Did you feel obligated to have another conversation with them and be like, look, my hand, like I can't?

• 1:01:11Speaker 00

  Yeah. Oh, yeah. And I'm sure I would have gotten in trouble for it, but I just told them this is not true. And you know, it's not true.

• 1:01:19Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:01:21Speaker 00

  So that was just hard. And that's when it really started to hit me like, um, the, the next thing they offered was a voluntary early retirement program. So tons of people are taking retirement. So you're losing, you know, we've hired all our new employees.

• 1:01:35Speaker 00

  And now people like me and many of my colleagues are failing. So we're losing the, you know, institutional knowledge. And, um, and then they just offered fork in the road too. Cause they didn't get as many as they wanted. So, um, and then we expect reduction, firings, you know? You didn't take any of that, you're gone. Coming in the next couple of months. And so I just, uh, I've never ran away from a challenge. The fact that I love to fight all kinds of fights, but like, maybe I'm just too old. And I was like, I, I can't be part of the dismantling of this organization. And that's how I see it right now.

• 1:02:15Speaker 00

  It's, um, you know, we're, we're just, there just doesn't seem to be a plan. Like, okay, let's sit down together and figure out, or give us a number. Say for service, we need, you need to cut 20% and let us figure out, okay, that's what we don't need. It was just this random. Bizarre, you know, go fire these people. Okay. Yeah. That didn't make sense to me and I didn't want to be part of that because I can't support it. I can't.

• 1:02:42Speaker 03

  But would you say your forest was like without waste? Without inefficiencies and frauds and things like that?

• 1:02:51Speaker 00

  I tell you, in 35 years working for the government, I've seen inefficiency, saw some waste. I didn't see fraud and abuse. I can't recall like an actual fraudulent activity. I've seen contractors try to defraud the government, you know, where they, we paid a contractor to do something and then they didn't do it or fudged it or walked out on it or defrauded it in some way, but I haven't seen like people defraud it. Does it go on? I think in the context of natural resources, the fixes I would have, was hoping for was

• 1:03:30Speaker 00

  one, and I don't know if, I bet you my colleagues in the Parks Service and BLM would similar, we've gotten, we got really top heavy as far as too many people in Washington in regional office at the expense of what we're supposed to be doing. That's on the ground, doing the groundwork. That's what the public wants. They want clear trails clear and they want fuels reduced and they want the cows taken care of, they want garbage picked up and we were, I would have made that adjustment and you know. The other thing I think we've really got to come to grips with, and you guys talk a lot about this stuff, is the redundancy in regulations like Endangered Species Act or,

• 1:04:13Speaker 00

  you know, the Archaeological Protection Act, the section 106. So, you know, when we do a project, we have really good biologists who work on that piece of ground and then, and maybe there's a grizzly bear or wolf or whatever the endangered listed species is, and they design mitigation, you know, we're going to do this fuels project or cut the trees, but the biologist comes in. But the way the process works on Endangered Species Act, then we send that biological evaluation to a biologist in an office in Montana, it would be in Helena.

• 1:04:47Speaker 00

  Who has never seen that piece of ground ever. And then they make an evaluation of what we should be doing. So you have two agencies making redundancy. I think we've got to really step back on that. It's, it's, the people on the ground know. We have biologists that know how to protect these species. Maybe there can be just a concurrence, but with, with Fish and Wildlife Service. You know, when we have archaeological protection, we have to go through what's called Section 106 consultation. So we have an archaeologist, we, they find a, a site or some resource. Then they have to write up a big fat report, send it to the state shipo office, state historic preservation office.

• 1:05:31Speaker 00

  And they either agree or don't agree with us. And if we don't agree, then there's a group of national archaeologists who can, seems like a lot of archaeologists looking at the same piece of ground. And only one of them's looking at the ground. The other people don't see this, they're, they're in an office somewhere. And I've always thought that, and when I worked in Wyoming, I, we had such great bear biologists and working with the state. And then we'd send our, you know, biological evaluations to Cheyenne where they'd never been on that piece of ground.

• 1:06:02Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:03Speaker 00

  I think we got to look at things like that. And just the redundancy in government, I think is, is something that I think needs to change.

• 1:06:15Speaker 00

  Governments were set up to be a little inefficient and slow. And I think that's by design to protect the public, to protect the taxpayers' money. But I think there's a lot we can do. And, and I just don't think getting rid of the person that makes eighteen thousand dollars a year that clears trails is going to fix any of that.

• 1:06:38Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. When I've looked at the, when I've looked at the cuts that have come to the federal land management agencies, just, and I'm singling them out because it's of interest to me and because I know some stuff about it.

• 1:06:50Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:06:51Steven Rinella?

  I've wondered aloud.

• 1:06:56Steven Rinella?

  Why there wasn't an approach like this, like a layout? That you would get your cabinet in place, you'd get your administrators in place. And you would come to them and say, you have 90 days, you have 120 days. Seems always works like that, right?

• 1:07:16Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 1:07:17Steven Rinella?

  90, that's like the magic numbers. You have 90 days, you have 120 days. It's like doing 12 reps when you're exercising. The number of people.

• 1:07:25Speaker 00

  Why not seven?

• 1:07:27Steven Rinella?

  To come to me and present to me, how are you going to cut your budget by 30%? And then you have the professionals in these spaces. Propose, make a proposal. Uh, in your mind, like, why was that not the approach to use? Like, if you had to get in the head of it, like, why not use that approach? Which seems like, like, and how, like, and how in business that would be a thing that would happen?

• 1:08:03Speaker 00

  Um, I don't know. I think, um, there was just a more urgency than I've ever seen. I'm trying to think of how many administrations I've been through. So the first change I was through was when Clinton got in office. So someone add up all those presidents since I've been working. But, uh, the urgency in this one just seemed to be, we gotta do it now. And that's why, you know, we just sent out and fired people and things like that. As opposed to, you need to give me a 25% cut. I don't know, I don't care how you do it. Or you could say, you know, I still want to emphasize these things, but you gotta cut 25%. I don't know, um, that would have seemed to make more sense.

• 1:08:43Speaker 00

  And, and then why, why let people like myself, um, or others? Like, there was no rhyme or reason to who we let take this early resignation program. Deferred resignation program. Some people we want, we shouldn't have offered it to them. They gotta, I mean, they're gonna replace me. So what, what good did it do to pay me to do nothing for six months? I don't understand that. I don't know. They could have just said, no, you're not eligible for this. I don't know. I, um, you know, there's a.

• 1:09:20Speaker 00

  It's a big change, you know, I think, Cal, I told you this, that I don't know how beneficial it is in today's world, but the Forest Service is about the only agency, I don't know, maybe in all government, but certainly in all the agencies, we all talk about Fish and Wildlife Service, Park Service, PLM, that we've, our head, our chief, has always been a career person. We've never had a political appointee until now. It's the first one, Tom Schultz is the new chief from Idaho. I heard he's a good guy, but that's the first time in our history we've ever had a non-career employee become chief. So, changes on the way, which

• 1:10:05Speaker 00

  is fine. I don't know how, what's the difference anymore in today's world, but anyway, I don't know what the future holds. I'm worried about a couple of things. And the one is, do we dismantle the agency to the point where we become ineffective, where they actually can prove, you guys can't do shit? Okay. We're headed that way. I mean, based on what I'm seeing, by the time I left, we had lost 27 people between firings and people just saying, I'm going somewhere else. 27 people in 30 days. 50 people in a calendar year. Who's going to be left to do the work?

• 1:10:50Speaker 00

  And then when people get pissed and say, see, the Forest Service can't do it, maybe we ought to let the states handle that.

• 1:10:54Speaker 05

  Can I interject? It seems like that's always been a, you've probably seen this, Cal, Brody too, work, some of the outfitters that we've worked with over the years, some have good relationships with the Forest Service, and I've often heard outfitters refer to you as the Forest disservice, right? And then now on the Instagram, when you can see sort of some people, sort of the ones that are on board with what's going on now, they're like, listen, I've been cutting this trail out myself, way before any Forest Service trail crew comes in here and does this. We haven't relied on them anyways, because we've been in here doing it, because this is our business, right?

• 1:11:35Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:11:36Speaker 05

  Right? That's like a common thing, that's always been a theme, right?

• 1:11:40Speaker 00

  Absolutely. And it's also been true. I mean, when I was guiding in Wyoming, I

• 1:11:47Speaker 00

  Of course, there's never cut out the trail. They're system trails. Now, we don't cut out trails that are not system trails. They're just the outfitters trails. They're not supposed to be cutting them out or whatever.

• 1:11:56Steven Rinella?

  I one time asked about that. I was trying to see what it requires to make your own trail with a chainsaw and I was dissuaded.

• 1:12:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, bad idea.

• 1:12:05Steven Rinella?

  I was gonna hide my trail.

• 1:12:07Speaker 03

  One of the first meetings I went to here in Bozeman, when I first moved to town, I listened to a fellow who happens to be in the conservation world, just berate the Forest Service for not maintaining the illegally built mountain bike trails.

• 1:12:24Speaker 00

  Yeah. Mountain bikers, over the last decade, are the worst. Those bastards will build a trail anywhere. And they have this theory. It's like, well, we have 3,000 miles. Yeah, but I've been on those.

• 1:12:37Steven Rinella?

  Hmm. Mountain bikers?

• 1:12:38Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah. Absolute.

• 1:12:40Speaker 03

  Hard, hard working suckers, man.

• 1:12:42Speaker 00

  They build trails.

• 1:12:46Speaker 03

  No, yeah, I mean, I'm telling you, I've been up drainages where like, you're like, I was here a month ago and there was no sign. And now there's, it's not like it's a trail. There's jumps and ramps and banks and yeah.

• 1:12:59Speaker 00

  And sometimes in wilderness areas where they're not even. Oh, yeah.

• 1:13:03Steven Rinella?

  I'm gonna add that to my list of people I don't like.

• 1:13:05Speaker 00

  But it's a good example of some of the conflicts today's world. Like literally, I've had these mountain bikers say to me, well, we've already, you know, people have already done all those trails. Well, that's an unsustainable model. Cause sooner or later, you will use them all and we'll just keep building more and more and more.

• 1:13:20Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, that's good. I like, I like that you engage with them on the logic of it.

• 1:13:23Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:13:24Steven Rinella?

  Well, if you're using it, makes it that it's not good anymore. So then you need to make a new one. That would end with all things being.

• 1:13:31Speaker 03

  A mountain bike trail. So you should just sell your bike now.

• 1:13:34Steven Rinella?

  Cause you're headed to the same place.

• 1:13:36Speaker 00

  Yeah. Anyway, but yeah, back to your question. I think there's some truth to it. And, and, um.

• 1:13:43Steven Rinella?

  I gotta, I can't sit idly by. This has been a thing I've been thinking about for a long time. Well, you go ahead, then I'll go. Tell them the truth in it.

• 1:13:52Speaker 00

  Um. Uh, uh.

• 1:13:55Speaker 03

  What, what? Forest Service lands are kind of a co-op, right? Like you, there's always going to be a user, um, even in a user pay system, right? Like if you're an outfitter, you're, you're operating under a permit that you pay for. You're not going to sit there and, and wait for the Forest Service to clear those trails.

• 1:14:13Speaker 00

  You gotta do it.

• 1:14:14Speaker 03

  Get things prepped. You're gonna, you're gonna do it.

• 1:14:16Speaker 00

  And a lot of those outfitters are using the trails that not a lot of people use. So you take your, what little money you have or the staff you have and okay, I gotta send mine to the folk, you know, the places around Eagle and Aspen, because there's 8,000 people a day on those trails. And only seven outfitters a week on the other ones. So I could see their frustration, especially when they have blowdowns and stuff. And I think we were, we got, I, I'd said a little bit, we, we kind of lost our way a little bit. Too much overhead and not really focusing on what we really needed. And man, if I was in charge of reforming, I would have flipped everything upside down. And said, we are going to fund the ground first.

• 1:14:53Steven Rinella?

  Huh.

• 1:14:53Speaker 00

  And then fund what's left, you know, we're going to fund the, the overhead last.

• 1:14:58Speaker 04

  But I, like, I've been places like where we used turkey hunt, you know, with your buddy in Nebraska, where like that national forest is like, it's like a symbol, right? There's like this anti-federal government sentiment and that land is like, they look at it and they just, they get mad. Cause they can't do whatever they want on it, right?

• 1:15:20Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 1:15:20Speaker 04

  So there's an aspect of that involved too. And so I don't think that's the case with the White River necessarily, but.

• 1:15:26Speaker 00

  No, they love their public.

• 1:15:27Speaker 04

  There are places like that.

• 1:15:28Speaker 00

  There's places, you know, Idaho and parts of Montana and, and Utah, um, but, um.

• 1:15:35Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, where, where public land like stands in the way of your ambitions.

• 1:15:38Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:15:39Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:39Speaker 00

  Or whatever it might be and it, it stands for the federal government, which we don't like.

• 1:15:43Speaker 03

  I was also, I, I'd get seen as an apologist sometimes, but you know, it's like, mother nature does not follow your, your multi-use plan either. So if you have budget for a thousand miles of trail clearing and you're in, you know, that burned over pecker pole zone.

• 1:16:05Speaker 03

  And you have a windy summer, you can legitimately clear a thousand miles of the same trail.

• 1:16:09Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:10Speaker 03

  And never get to the other trails because it's just like, and I like, we have a lot of trails. Um, historically, you know, where we'd leave the first couple of hundred yards. Uh, down and nasty and stuff, and then we'd clear the rest of it.

• 1:16:26Steven Rinella?

  Right.

• 1:16:26Speaker 03

  Uh, we'd have our own kind of personal trail for the.

• 1:16:28Steven Rinella?

  That's what I'm talking about. That's what I wanted to make. Yeah. And. One you'd never know was there.

• 1:16:32Speaker 03

  But man.

• 1:16:33Steven Rinella?

  You had to go through hell and all of a sudden like whack, you're on the trail.

• 1:16:36Speaker 03

  You could go in there and do like a full 72 hours of busting your ass, cutting, cutting it, cutting trail and. And even make a nice little stack of firewood for yourself when you come in there later. And the next weekend you go in there and you're like, oh.

• 1:16:53Steven Rinella?

  Trail's gone.

• 1:16:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, trail's gone. As if nobody had ever been in here.

• 1:16:58Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:16:59Steven Rinella?

  I, I want to speak to a thing that you alluded to and, and do you remember how early we were talking about mountain lions? Yeah. And I'm like, uh, my end goal is to restore mountain lion hunting in places where it's been lost. In the service of myself as a hunter, not a hunters.

• 1:17:18Steven Rinella?

  To get to that end goal, I wind up feeling, um, guilty. If I were to play the card that mountain lions are these terrible, dangerous creatures. Like the ends. Um, in that case, like the end wouldn't justify the means, right? My end goal is that I want lion hunting. Right. But I can't get there through a disingenuous path of sowing fear of mountain lions. Got it. Right. Which is a tempting way to go. Hell, yeah. It's effective too. Yeah. The minute you tell everybody this, mountain lions are going to kill your kids. We don't hunt them.

• 1:17:54Speaker 03

  It's right up there with predator control.

• 1:17:55Steven Rinella?

  It's a way to get where you want to get. Yep. Now, um, I'm a public lands user. I'm a public lands defender, but there's a just out of moral honesty.

• 1:18:07Steven Rinella?

  I think that it's a little conspiratorial, maybe you, maybe you disagree. I think it's conspiratorial to suggest that lawmakers are saying the pathway to being able to sell off all the public lands is to emasculate land management agencies to the point where they do a terrible job, at which point we'll be able to go to the public and say, look, what a mess. Let's sell it all.

• 1:18:37Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:18:38Steven Rinella?

  Cause it's like a little, it feels out there to me.

• 1:18:40Speaker 00

  Well, it, it also would require a lot of connections and a lot of people involved with the same conspiracy.

• 1:18:47Steven Rinella?

  Yes.

• 1:18:48Speaker 00

  So when I say I'm worried about the dismantling, I'm worried about the dismant, like, what if we, the basic maintenance of them, the basic stewardship of the land, being able to respond to the public. I think that's what, I don't think we're, we're, there, there's, I don't think people are smart enough to pull that off.

• 1:19:06Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:19:07Speaker 00

  I really don't in any part of government to even Congress to, to like, okay, we've got the, cause that would take time.

• 1:19:14Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. It's like, it's like, it's like a 50 year plan.

• 1:19:16Speaker 00

  Right. However, I, I, based on what I'm seeing and, and, and talking to people at the highest levels who are, are working with these people in Washington, there is a general disregard for

• 1:19:32Speaker 00

  maintaining the, the management and stewardship of public lands.

• 1:19:37Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:19:37Speaker 00

  It's like, they're fine.

• 1:19:38Steven Rinella?

  So the result.

• 1:19:39Speaker 00

  Producing, let's produce more timber and mining and stuff and take care of the cows. But the rest of that stuff, we don't have to worry about.

• 1:19:46Speaker 04

  The end result of the cuts and the inefficiencies that would result from that could also ultimately result in, let's just get rid of it.

• 1:19:58Speaker 00

  Yeah. I think that I'm, I think that's a long stretch. That would.

• 1:20:02Steven Rinella?

  You hear that a lot.

• 1:20:03Speaker 00

  Oh yeah. We do hear it a lot and, and.

• 1:20:06Steven Rinella?

  And you hear the mountain lions are going to kill all your kids.

• 1:20:07Speaker 00

  Kids. Exactly.

• 1:20:11Speaker 00

  Boy, don't you guys think people on both sides of Iowa would lose their mind if we really started to sell off public lands?

• 1:20:19Speaker 00

  Or even transfer them to the state?

• 1:20:21Steven Rinella?

  That has been.

• 1:20:25Steven Rinella?

  In 2015, it sure looked like that.

• 1:20:29Steven Rinella?

  But your People lost their minds in 2015. Yeah.

• 1:20:34Steven Rinella?

  I don't know if there's been a fundamental shift. Because there's been a I think it's a little harder right now to

• 1:20:46Steven Rinella?

  It's a little harder right now to pick and choose policy and there's more pressure to get aligned on a wholesale, across the board fashion. Right. Within ideology. And it's harder to, it's harder to go like, yeah, oh, that's great, but this thing, no way. Right. Right. It's kind of like you need to there's a temptation to, to endorse an entire initiative

• 1:21:18Steven Rinella?

  for fear of cracking. Right. The coalition. Right. But where I say that and I was starting, I was feeling that. But in looking at, it's been interesting to look at conversations around tariffs. Right. Now, when you get into people's money,

• 1:21:36Steven Rinella?

  you find there's a lot of people going like, no, no, no, didn't like this, don't like this, not what I signed up for. I didn't sign up for losing millions of dollars overnight. So there you see people that are aligned with an ideology. Right. Saying like, hey, man, I'm into all this, but this part not into. Right. So you're seeing that around the tariff discussion where

• 1:22:00Steven Rinella?

  allies are, are starting to pick apart what they don't like. So we'll see. Cal and I messaged about this over the weekend where

• 1:22:16Steven Rinella?

  Senator Heinrich, who's a Democrat from New Mexico, avid Hunter. Great guy.

• 1:22:23Steven Rinella?

  He

• 1:22:26Steven Rinella?

  put forward a piece of legislation.

• 1:22:30Steven Rinella?

  Saying, hey, let's leave selling public lands, selling federal public lands out of the budget reconciliation process. It didn't pass.

• 1:22:41Steven Rinella?

  What I thought was really interesting is our state, we have two Republican senators, Senator Danes and Senator Sheehy supported it. Yeah, I saw that.

• 1:22:53Speaker 03

  Zinke too, right?

• 1:22:54Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:57Steven Rinella?

  Verbally supported. Yeah. So

• 1:23:01Steven Rinella?

  in this state, okay, in Montana, you can't win. You could lose elections over public land issues. You have to. You cannot win. You have to. You have to be pro-public land. Yeah. In this state.

• 1:23:17Steven Rinella?

  And they were outliers in their party, right? Yeah. This, this thing that Hunter did didn't, didn't pass. Fifty one was fifty one to forty nine? It's close. That adds up to a hundred, right?

• 1:23:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, one, one Democrat did not vote. And yeah, Sheehy and Danes were the only Republicans to vote for it.

• 1:23:41Steven Rinella?

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• 1:24:25Steven Rinella?

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• 1:25:09Steven Rinella?

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• 1:25:53Steven Rinella?

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• 1:26:35Steven Rinella?

  In that case, when you say like people, Democrats, Republicans, whatever, would lose their minds.

• 1:26:42Steven Rinella?

  I don't know. Like, I'm not like a DC insider. I don't know all the conversations that went in. But I think that it was clear that like Montanans would lose their minds.

• 1:26:50Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:26:50Steven Rinella?

  But I don't, um, Montana's a small state.

• 1:26:53Speaker 03

  But even, so I've been digging into like land use, right?

• 1:26:55Steven Rinella?

  Big, small, small populations, sorry.

• 1:26:57Speaker 03

  Um, Nevada, you know, Nevada successfully, um, lobbied for larger land sales on, on the BLM side. For affordable housing.

• 1:27:11Steven Rinella?

  Right.

• 1:27:12Speaker 03

  Um, so far they've sold 18,000 acres in the name of affordable housing.

• 1:27:17Steven Rinella?

  Eighteen thousand?

• 1:27:18Speaker 03

  Eighteen thousand acres of BLM ground since 1996, I think. Um.

• 1:27:23Steven Rinella?

  How affordable is the housing?

• 1:27:26Speaker 03

  There isn't any, but.

• 1:27:28Steven Rinella?

  That, I, I laugh when I think about the affordable housing aspect of it. I'm like, really?

• 1:27:32Speaker 00

  Well, there, there isn't any. They didn't.

• 1:27:34Speaker 03

  Yeah. Unfortunately, I mean, there's, there's people on both sides of the aisle who are like, oh yeah, we do need affordable housing. If this is the way we can do it, we can do it. But the math provided by Bloomberg Law yesterday was 30 acres out of that 18,000 have actually gone towards affordable housing. And 30 acres out of 18,000.

• 1:27:55Steven Rinella?

  Like tiny houses? Like, what are you talking about?

• 1:27:57Speaker 03

  Well, and that's the thing.

• 1:27:58Speaker 00

  Deed restricted houses and things like that.

• 1:28:01Speaker 03

  And, you know, a huge pushback, right, is you have landowners who strategically purchased on the edge of BLM being like, well, that stuff's always going to be open. So my property value is based off of access to Bureau of Land Management and the fact that like my view is never going to be blocked by another house or housing development. Right? So our state government, who a lot of people argue on behalf of is like, well, the states can do it better. Well, right now the states aren't doing anything.

• 1:28:37Speaker 00

  With state trust lands?

• 1:28:39Speaker 03

  Well, they're not, they're not mandating any sort of restrictions on second or third homes.

• 1:28:46Speaker 00

  Got it.

• 1:28:46Speaker 03

  Uh, deed restricted housing. They're not doing the work, but they're asking for more land.

• 1:28:52Speaker 00

  Interesting.

• 1:28:54Speaker 03

  And, um, this is an extremely unpopular opinion, especially for

• 1:28:58Speaker 00

  Uses.

• 1:28:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, who goes up to Helena and talks to these folks. They don't want to hear it. They just want more land.

• 1:29:03Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:29:04Speaker 03

  Um, so I think there's a giant disconnect between the federal government and the people on the ground. Cause the feds are like, oh yeah, easy button. Sell 400,000 acres of BLM ground. Which, which is under FLIPMA right now, right? Um, it's already gone through the NEPA process and FLIPMA. They've been earmarked for a long time. 400,000 acres of, of BLM ground. Um, but there's also a lot of conversations around an additional 500,000 acres of US Forest Service ground. Um, which hasn't been done before. And that's going to take some, some serious effort.

• 1:29:39Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:29:40Speaker 03

  Um, again, you have all these people who are like, oh yeah, that, that makes sense. Public land sales on behalf of this to address affordable housing. But nobody's actually doing the work to address affordable housing. They're just saying, if we give this over, people are going to be like, oh, see? The government's doing something about this. But it's not, there's no follow through.

• 1:30:08Speaker 00

  No. And living in places that you guys are familiar with, where there's very little affordable housing. It's the biggest issue. I've spent more time in the last six years of my career dealing with housing and affordable housing. We actually have a program. We got the legislation passed and we're the first one in the country, the White River. I gotta stop saying we, they.

• 1:30:29Speaker 00

  And it was in the, it was in the 2016 Farm Bill. President Trump actually signed it, um, um, where, um,

• 1:30:38Speaker 00

  We have what's called administrative sites where we used to have a district office or a boneyard or something. I'm all over the place where we have, you know, crappy housing on them now that

• 1:30:48Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:30:49Speaker 00

  This legislation allows us to lease this property to, um, you gotta give a right of first refusal to a community, a county, a local government, and in exchange for the lease, they will build us employee housing and then they get to build other, all affordable housing. So we have a project in, in Dillon, Colorado where we have 11 acres, beautiful, overlooking the thing. We used to have like six crappy falling apart four service houses on. It's now been bulldozed. We're working with the Summit County government where they're gonna lease it and they're gonna build a hundred and twenty-one million dollars worth

• 1:31:28Speaker 00

  of affordable housing, deed restricted, you know, application, actual affordable housing. And it, and instead of paying the government for the leasing the land, they're paying us in kind by building us a new, you know, fire shop and giving us housing. That's a cool program.

• 1:31:49Speaker 04

  But that's not, that's not on the side of a mountain somewhere, right? Like, it's like, I'm assuming kind of in town.

• 1:31:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's, it's next to, it's already a very nice site.

• 1:31:59Speaker 04

  You're not gonna build some big affordable housing complex on the side of a mountain.

• 1:32:03Speaker 00

  So all over the country, we have those administrative sites that are under util- I think, you know, I started my career, my first permanent job was in Jackson Hole where 98% of the county is federal land and I don't know how the federal government can't play a role. I think we should.

• 1:32:19Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 1:32:20Speaker 00

  You know, but man, every acre sacred there.

• 1:32:23Steven Rinella?

  Well, I'll tell you, when I, on this issue, one of the areas where I felt like, um,

• 1:32:30Steven Rinella?

  That I had a knowledge gap would be, I would wanna, what I'm asked is I wanna have the authority to say, I wanna be the final say.

• 1:32:42Steven Rinella?

  And I'll visit every patch of ground. And I'll say, would this lead, my litmus will be this. Would this lead to a loss of wildlife habitat?

• 1:32:54Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:32:55Steven Rinella?

  If it's yes, then it's no. If it's no, then it's yes.

• 1:33:01Steven Rinella?

  The case you're bringing up, where it's like, it's already a developed landscape. Um, it's in a town, it's a developed landscape, uh, it has buildings. It's not like on the side of wildlife habitat right now.

• 1:33:14Speaker 00

  Um, that makes sense.

• 1:33:15Steven Rinella?

  That's different to me.

• 1:33:17Speaker 00

  Then.

• 1:33:18Steven Rinella?

  Than.

• 1:33:19Speaker 00

  I agree.

• 1:33:20Steven Rinella?

  Uh, other, you know, that, that's different to me in other cases. And when you look at the acreage, I feel like when you look at the acreage, it will have to stray.

• 1:33:31Steven Rinella?

  Like it'll have to stray from already developed sites.

• 1:33:34Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:33:35Steven Rinella?

  Like, do you feel that you're gonna get there?

• 1:33:37Speaker 00

  I, I don't, I hope not. I mean, I think it has.

• 1:33:40Steven Rinella?

  Do you think there's enough already developed sites to like fuel this ambition?

• 1:33:44Speaker 00

  No, not to, to fill the gap of what we, you know, to, to meet affordable housing needs, no. You would have, but there are still some spots that again, you, if you were king, you'd get to look at and decide it. Where it's just, I don't know, a survey from a hundred years ago, where it's like, it's kinda, it's, it's not developed, there's nothing on it, but it's, there's a little spot right, uh, by Eastvale or.

• 1:34:07Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's not like valuable wildlife habitat.

• 1:34:10Speaker 00

  It's winter range technically, but it's also surrounded by a hotel and so like, it's 40 acres. We should build housing on that, but it's not designated administrative site, so. But I'm with you 100%. I don't think we can, you start to crawl up the mountain and and the other thing, it should be for some public good, not let's just sell it off so a rich person can buy it and build a second home.

• 1:34:32Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:32Speaker 00

  Like this whole issue of affordable housing, deed restricted housing, I can get on board some of that.

• 1:34:37Steven Rinella?

  Do you feel that there's a way that you would take this affordable housing issue that's that's forward right now? And let's say we have a way that we, there's a checks and there's a system to measure, like, is this achieving the goal?

• 1:34:51Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:34:51Steven Rinella?

  If the public is behind affordable housing, is this creating affordable housing? And that seems like to me like a thing that you could either, that you could, that you could

• 1:35:01Steven Rinella?

  put numbers around and understand if this is true in execution or not. Like define affordable housing and then some will monitor to make sure that this is being effective and creating affordable housing. Is there a way to get there?

• 1:35:15Steven Rinella?

  With land swaps? Where if if we're talking, if we define like, these are like marginal pieces, isolated pieces, marginal pieces of wildlife habitat?

• 1:35:27Steven Rinella?

  That are close to urban centers or suburban centers. We're going to open these up. Is there a way to pull this off where there's not a net loss in public acreage? And we get better stuff instead?

• 1:35:39Speaker 00

  I think we could get a gain in actual acreage. And I think, you know, that's kind of been the trend because the place closer to the resort, if you will, or closer town is going to be worth more than some stream side up the hill, some inholding up the hill. So I think that's a great way to do it. The problem is if, I don't know, it would, I don't know if the states could do it. I guess the counties would have to zone that to say, this has to be affordable housing. We're not helping the situation if we're just making more second homes. That's what's wrecked all these communities. It's, and I don't.

• 1:36:14Speaker 03

  Well, look at Park City, Jackson Hole, Big Sky, Bozeman. Like, the neighborhood I live in just just filled up magically with the the the heavy snow gone.

• 1:36:28Speaker 03

  Including my next door neighbor who's sidewalk I've been maintaining in their absence. Um, right?

• 1:36:36Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:36:36Speaker 03

  There it, there's a shitload of housing there that nobody is living in until the weather gets nice. Um.

• 1:36:43Speaker 00

  Or the VRVO or whatever.

• 1:36:45Speaker 03

  If you look at the newspaper here in town, it's been every week. There's been a, oh, that affordable housing thing, nobody liked that. In, in the Gallatin Valley.

• 1:36:57Speaker 00

  We need it, just build it somewhere else.

• 1:36:59Speaker 03

  Well, yeah, exactly. And, um, catch Midaho, there's a great project for, um, housing for, for Forest Service.

• 1:37:07Speaker 00

  It's the same leasing program, man.

• 1:37:09Speaker 03

  Yep, same leasing program. Um, the town doesn't like it. It's gonna put too many, uh, people who go to the bars was one of the quotes in one spot.

• 1:37:20Speaker 00

  The bar owners are like sweet.

• 1:37:22Speaker 05

  The other.

• 1:37:24Speaker 05

  What built this town, makes this town great, let's not have them here.

• 1:37:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, the other affordable housing project that they did squeak through in zoning to, to get one more level on an existing, uh, property downtown, right? That all turned into VRBOs.

• 1:37:42Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:37:43Speaker 03

  There's no, no affordable housing there. And so you cannot tell me, like, it'd be like, you parents should chime in on this.

• 1:37:53Speaker 00

  Good.

• 1:37:53Speaker 03

  Your kid's like, uh, I can't live in my room anymore. You're like, well, why is that? Well, I got too much shit everywhere.

• 1:38:02Speaker 00

  Sounds familiar.

• 1:38:03Speaker 03

  I need another room.

• 1:38:05Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 1:38:05Speaker 03

  Do you go?

• 1:38:06Speaker 00

  To which I say, why don't you?

• 1:38:08Steven Rinella?

  Clean up your room.

• 1:38:09Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:38:10Speaker 03

  Right? And that's the situation that we're in over and over and over again. Uh, I, I mean, examples everywhere. It's like, well, we don't want to block people's sightlines by letting somebody build a four-story building in town.

• 1:38:24Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 1:38:25Speaker 03

  So we would like to build up on that hillside or in that migration area or in winter range.

• 1:38:34Speaker 03

  Because we can't affect anybody who's lived here for 30 years. Park City, Utah, right? That is a fully itinerant workforce.

• 1:38:43Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:38:44Speaker 03

  And all of those houses, like you go through, like, I haven't been there in years, but it's all like old mining house, single-story, little tiny homes that are overwhelmingly, like VRBO, vacation rental properties.

• 1:38:58Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:38:59Speaker 03

  Right? It's like,

• 1:39:01Speaker 03

  we can't ignore that problem and expect this new acreage.

• 1:39:09Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:39:09Speaker 03

  To magically fix it.

• 1:39:11Speaker 00

  We should, that should, the going to the public land should be towards the end of the resort, more of a last resort. But if you're gonna do that while you don't control short-term rentals, you don't control the number of second homeowners, again, it's not gonna be sustainable because we're gonna be in the same place because there'll be more people that are gonna take, buy this land and use it for second homeowners. Gotta address the affordable housing. Looks like Bozeman's building a lot of apartments. Are those deed restricted, any of them, or?

• 1:39:41Speaker 03

  I'm not sure. It was just the, the last couple that have been in the paper have been in the downtown core. Like, there's a conversion of a senior citizen center that would allow a lot more people to live downtown. People are up in arms over that.

• 1:39:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, that, I don't understand getting up in arms over that.

• 1:39:57Speaker 03

  Man, it's just like.

• 1:39:59Speaker 00

  Where the hell, it's a great place to put people.

• 1:40:00Speaker 03

  Right? We just don't, listen, we're all here because we love the out, out of doors. But we'd rather construct more stuff on the out of doors if it affects my parking downtown.

• 1:40:12Speaker 00

  We're getting terribly local now.

• 1:40:15Speaker 05

  You did, you brought up land swaps. Did you administrate much of that? Because that's a big thing that, you know, we talk about, especially now with corner crossing, you know, back up in the news where it sure seems like you could like just quickly make a bunch of these quick moves and consolidate the private people's spots and then, you know, not have the private in holdings on the fours of the BLM. And everybody would be better off. How, how, how come that's not easier to pull off?

• 1:40:48Speaker 00

  You said quickly and I was thinking, there's a 64.

• 1:40:52Speaker 03

  Quickly like 20 years.

• 1:40:53Speaker 00

  We have a 64-step process for land exchanges.

• 1:40:58Speaker 00

  Land deals are hard. You gotta praise everyone and you know, you gotta, so that's just, you know, title work, that just takes time. And when you're using, you know, checkerboarded land or trying to consolidate, I think you're right on. I think we need to do more of it. It's getting a little harder. People aren't getting punkier about it. It used to be like, oh, you give this little part up in town to someone and then you get all this acreage or close to town and everyone loves it. But now, just like we've been talking about the whole, every, every piece seems to matter. You can't give that piece up.

• 1:41:30Speaker 03

  Right. Well, try finding like an apples to apples comparison too, right?

• 1:41:33Speaker 00

  And then the comparables, and the values are changing so fast. And, and so they're, it's getting harder. But I, I think where Congress can help is do legislative, legislatedly mandated ones where you don't have to, it's like, they tell you, okay, now go figure out the acreage, but you're doing this through legislation as opposed to when it's a discretionary action by a forest supervisor, we have to go through the public, um, public benefit determination, which of course gets into values and all that stuff. But I think it's absolutely what we need to do more of. And, and that we could get help legislatively. But they're tough. I mean, you guys are, have heard of the one over in the crazies

• 1:42:15Speaker 00

  and with Yellowstone Club and stuff. And it's a pretty good exchange, but there's some folks that don't like it.

• 1:42:21Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you're giving up elk habitat for mountain goat habitat, right? Is one way to look at it.

• 1:42:28Speaker 00

  I don't know enough about it.

• 1:42:30Speaker 03

  Can't draw, can't draw a mountain goat tag, but you can sure hunt over the counter elk in the crazies. Uh, Durfee Hills would be another great one that was proposed for land exchange. I mean, that's, that's a whole ecosystem would be kind of a strong word, but it, it's a whole region with its own elk herd, all public, totally landlocked. Uh, you can fly in there. Um, and it's like, but the exchange for that is like,

• 1:42:59Speaker 03

  Antelope country.

• 1:43:01Speaker 00

  Oh, really?

• 1:43:02Speaker 03

  Right? So like trying to find again, like find that apples to apples comparable and, and, and then you have historical use, you know, there's still plenty of folks have, who have, hunted that place and, and traditionally hunted that place. Um, for decades and there just is not a comparable swap type of thing, you know? It's getting harder.

• 1:43:22Steven Rinella?

  I'll propose, you know, when I get that job of I get to be the yay and amen.

• 1:43:26Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:43:27Steven Rinella?

  Part of what I'm gonna look at, and I suggest the Forest Service adopt this. Is, um, how much, what biomass does that piece of land host or support? An important word. And in any swap. And any swap. Would be, are you gaining? Biomass? That you're supporting or hosting?

• 1:43:51Speaker 04

  Well, the White River National Forest supports the largest elk herd in the world. So it'd be a big ass biomass.

• 1:43:58Steven Rinella?

  And that's how you help do it.

• 1:43:59Speaker 00

  And, and we support the, the largest biomass of elk hunters in the world.

• 1:44:04Speaker 04

  Yeah. Speaking of which, like what, what, uh, like what's gonna happen this fall when like, if you could crystal ball it, based on all the cuts that have been made, like, when people are trying to get into their elk spot. Like, is there, like, are they gonna be able to get there? Is there gonna be safety issues when they do get there? Like?

• 1:44:23Speaker 03

  It's gonna be a COVID poop pandemic again?

• 1:44:26Speaker 00

  This is where I need to push all those fear buttons and.

• 1:44:28Steven Rinella?

  Well, that's the thing is this is another one, man, I hate to keep doing this. This is another one that people are throwing out there that I'm not buying.

• 1:44:34Speaker 04

  What?

• 1:44:36Steven Rinella?

  I'm not buying that like, um, that there's like an existent, that it's an existential crisis that, that trails won't be cleared. I don't, I don't view it as existential.

• 1:44:45Speaker 03

  I, I think for, let's say, like, you know, I have a bunch of friends that are in, in this position, where it's like young families. Um, their best way of getting out. Is, is through like established campgrounds.

• 1:45:00Steven Rinella?

  No.

• 1:45:01Speaker 03

  Um, with, with a camper, that type of thing.

• 1:45:04Steven Rinella?

  Campgrounds is a real problem.

• 1:45:05Speaker 03

  That.

• 1:45:05Speaker 00

  Here's what I could tell you. We had a budget meeting. So we already knew we were going into this field season, we'll have zero seasonal workforce. The people we just hired temporary for the summer. So we knew that. So that's zero is zero. And normally we'd have 50 or 60 or something like that. So that's, you know, it would be less people clearing trail and things like that. We fired, you know, these, what would be like crew leaders, the, the, the people that are permanents, but they only work half the year. And, and so that'll be problematic. Will it be like, are people gonna go, oh my God, what happened? I don't think so. Our, um, our road maintenance, the road

• 1:45:50Speaker 00

  maintenance budget on the White River when, when I left, because we had a budget meeting, because they signed the continuing resolution. So we know what our budget's gonna be the rest of the year, pretty much. Our road maintenance budget, we had 20, we have 2,800 miles of road, was zero. So that's how much, and normally we give that money in, to the, in the agreements to counties because they have better equipment and more people. Now, we have a small, we have a, a grader and a three-person crew. So we'll, we'll, we'll clean the culverts that blow out or whatever beavers fill up.

• 1:46:23Speaker 04

  If you've got someone to do it.

• 1:46:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, we have three people. We've lost two, but, um.

• 1:46:29Speaker 03

  So you, for you folks in the White, you recreationists in, in the forest over there, if you see this three-person crew, I'm sure they'd really like to know the areas that also need work.

• 1:46:38Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 1:46:38Steven Rinella?

  The, the road system feels, existential is maybe too big of a word.

• 1:46:43Speaker 00

  Right, but.

• 1:46:43Steven Rinella?

  But the road system, that work feels to me like a real issue.

• 1:46:47Speaker 00

  Right, but it, it's also something, it's like, one year, you may not notice it. Two years, three years, just like a road, you know, it's just the way maintenance of infrastructure works. Um, the recreation budget on the busiest recreation forest in the country, so discretionary. So we've got our people we paid for, but then, like, the clean toilets, the toilet contracts and, you know, toilet paper and, and whatever stuff, was 140,000 bucks for two and a half million acres and 18 million people. Comes to about point nine cents per visitor, if you're wondering.

• 1:47:22Steven Rinella?

  You kidding me?

• 1:47:23Speaker 00

  Yeah. So, so will it be?

• 1:47:26Steven Rinella?

  Is that intact?

• 1:47:29Speaker 00

  The budget? The toilet paper budget. Uh, no, it's not. Literally, we were, we don't have enough money. The, we were looking at, and I don't normally get involved with this, we're like in the detail, but they were looking at, normally, these sites are pumped three times a year, we're gonna do them once. Well, those are, it's not gonna be great. So, will people see things? Yes. Will it be like, ah, you know, it's not gonna be the end of the world. I think, um, depending on fire seasons and flood seasons and things like that, I think there'll be some change. I'm worried a lot. So, uh, when there's a, a fire of any significance, there's what's called an agency administrator.

• 1:48:11Speaker 00

  It's one of us line officers. So if there's a fire on the White River, or, you know, on, on the, on the gallatin here, the, the local line officers, the agency administrator, and we, we, we have overall responsibility, even if a thousand firefighters come in, we're still overseeing them. We go through a ton of training and stuff. They do the work, but we set objectives, we, you know, things like that. Here's what I want you to do with this fire. Cause fire crew will come and just spend money and put it out. I mean, but, you know, here's what resources. I want these houses protected as a priority. Um, a lot of us that are retiring are the most experienced people doing that. You know, in our region, in Colorado, we lost two to three most experienced.

• 1:48:56Speaker 00

  That won't matter if there's not a bad fire season, but if it is, that's the stuff that's gonna add up. And so, that's the stuff I'm worried about in the future. I don't, I don't see a, a land sale real quick, but this stuff matters.

• 1:49:12Steven Rinella?

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• 1:49:52Steven Rinella?

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• 1:51:10Steven Rinella?

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• 1:51:53Steven Rinella?

  Can I hit you with a thing I'm worried about?

• 1:51:55Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:51:55Steven Rinella?

  Maybe you can tell me if this is a reasonable fear?

• 1:51:58Speaker 00

  If you should sleep at night?

• 1:51:59Steven Rinella?

  Uh, I'm worried about this.

• 1:52:03Steven Rinella?

  I could picture a

• 1:52:08Steven Rinella?

  forest supervisor in a left-leaning state. So let's say a forest supervisor in Washington, a forest supervisor in California says, "Fine, I'm closing my forest."

• 1:52:23Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:52:25Steven Rinella?

  "'Cause I don't have the staff."

• 1:52:26Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:52:27Steven Rinella?

  And they use it to score political points.

• 1:52:28Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:52:29Steven Rinella?

  Is that possible?

• 1:52:30Speaker 00

  Um, before I left, we got explicit, um, direction that shall not happen.

• 1:52:36Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:52:36Speaker 00

  Um.

• 1:52:37Steven Rinella?

  I, I was hoping that, because I could picture someone saying,

• 1:52:40Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:52:40Steven Rinella?

  "I'm taking my marbles and going home."

• 1:52:42Speaker 00

  We, we, we, we call it the, you know, the Washington Monument Strategy, you know?

• 1:52:49Steven Rinella?

  I'm not familiar.

• 1:52:51Speaker 00

  Park Service is masterful at this. Cut the Park Service budget, close the monument.

• 1:52:55Steven Rinella?

  Oh, yeah, no, I got, yeah.

• 1:52:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, and close the Washington Monument. And everybody screams and says, "What happened?" And so, we've never done that. We've never taken that out. I think, I think there's going to be some things that are going to require it. Well, at least when I left a month ago, if you had, if you could show your budget couldn't support a campground being opened, it had to go all the way to the secretary's office to get approval, so. And that's gonna be hard to get.

• 1:53:22Steven Rinella?

  A campground? So they're like reviewing a campground site?

• 1:53:26Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:53:26Steven Rinella?

  We have this beautiful, we have this beautiful four visitor site here we'd like to get back up and running.

• 1:53:32Speaker 00

  If, if, if a forest supervisor proposes to close any public facility,

• 1:53:37Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 1:53:38Speaker 00

  it's gotta be run up the chain. So I, I don't think you have to worry too much about it.

• 1:53:41Steven Rinella?

  So they're, they're like, they're anticipating and taking steps against it.

• 1:53:44Speaker 00

  Cause it would happen.

• 1:53:45Steven Rinella?

  It was called the Washington Mall Strategy?

• 1:53:46Speaker 00

  The Washington Monument.

• 1:53:47Steven Rinella?

  Washington Monument Strategy.

• 1:53:49Speaker 00

  Close the monument.

• 1:53:50Steven Rinella?

  Fine, I'll close.

• 1:53:50Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah, I have, uh, And you can, the Park Service gets away with it. They've gotten away with it since 1994. I mean, You guys are all too young for that, but when the Republicans in 94 took control of the House for the first time in 40 years, right? They, they went after everything. The Contract with America and, and, and Newt Kinney was the Speaker of the House and they were cutting and stuff and they went after the park service pretty harshly. And, um, and they cut their budget pretty good and the park service said, fine. And, uh, Mike Finley was the Superintendent of Yellowstone here and he was, he was like this with President Clinton. He was really close to him and Ted Turner and he, he eventually went on to run the Turner Foundation.

• 1:54:34Speaker 00

  But they just said, fine, we'll close the gates and we'll close whole faithful. And, um, and, uh, and I mean, you, you know, little newspaper you get when you go into the park? After those budget cuts, like, it was like, Bambi's gonna die because of congressional budget cuts. I ain't really seen. Really? Oh, yeah. They just played it. And within a year and a half, there was the, give the park service as much money as you want, supported by congressmen on both sides and they got all the money they wanted. So, so, but the park service has gates and, you know, they can do that much better.

• 1:55:09Speaker 05

  That, go ahead.

• 1:55:11Speaker 00

  And back then, things weren't quite as volatile as they are politically, but it was awesome to watch. It was like, damn, how'd you guys do that? Because they cut our budgets and we didn't get any of it back.

• 1:55:21Speaker 05

  That would be my worry is that with lack of, uh, employees, there's probably some amount of enforcement employees that will not be on the ground anymore. And if you, and it kind of links up to the same thing of with the maintenance. If that's not getting done, well, I think we saw it once in, in Eagle County, and this is just what I was told, so I don't know, and I'm not gonna bring up the spot with, so I don't want to burn it, but because the road couldn't be maintained and the ruts got too big, it was too dangerous, they just closed the road. And so, I don't know if that was the actual reason, but instead of like being able to drive way up in there, you had to hike from the bottom and it was a heck of a much longer hunt at that point.

• 1:56:04Speaker 05

  But if there's no one to enforce that gate. And people just start going around it and then we end up with like what you see down Alaska when you're flying into your moose spot and the ATV trails just go farther and farther every year and the big swamp buggy trails go farther and farther every year.

• 1:56:21Speaker 00

  Zero enforcement action.

• 1:56:22Speaker 04

  Yeah, it could become like, you know, Wild West lawless stuff, like people doing whatever they want.

• 1:56:28Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:56:29Speaker 05

  Okay, so is that a real worry I should have?

• 1:56:33Speaker 00

  Uh, yeah, I'm hesitant because I don't want to like, hey, this is the year to go out there and do bad stuff.

• 1:56:40Speaker 05

  It's happening right now, though, right?

• 1:56:42Speaker 00

  It's a huge concern because what I've seen and the data shows, the biggest deterrent is just boots on the ground. Doesn't have to be a cop with a gun, doesn't have to be, just that they see a white truck or back in the day, a green truck. People behave more. I mean, it's just the way it is and without those people out there, I absolutely think we're going to have that kind of. There's no one to go to take care of it and then people get frustrated at us. Why aren't you doing anything about that? Yeah. That's the public service cycle I hate to see broken and what I'm, at least at this stage and whatever, you know, reform is being done to our public land agencies, this is.

• 1:57:23Speaker 04

  Is there a law enforcement aspect to the National Forest Service? Like I know we used to see like BLM officers.

• 1:57:31Speaker 00

  Oh, there's Forest Service Rangers, man. There's, there's law enforcement officers. Um, again, it's just part of the culture of our agency. We, we just, we're not the enforcement people and so, you know, our forest, the busiest in the country and the most visitors and the interstate running right through the middle of it, um, there's now one, when we're fully staffed, we have three. So, um.

• 1:57:56Speaker 04

  Pistol pack and Rangers.

• 1:57:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, fully, you know, vested or whatever they call the.

• 1:58:02Speaker 05

  Yeah, they can actually arrest you, detain.

• 1:58:04Speaker 00

  They can arrest you, they are. The state has, they can enforce some state law, you know, state violations and, and yeah.

• 1:58:13Speaker 03

  Because you can also have a lot of people who have the authority to write citations.

• 1:58:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, those are called forest protection officers, FPOs, where you go to a 40 hour class, you could learn how to, so that's good. A bunch of people we fired were the forest protection officers, so that's too bad. So we gotta get more people trained and, and so cumulatively, I'm worried about that.

• 1:58:38Speaker 03

  But it's not part of the, the budget discussion, especially after this last,

• 1:58:46Speaker 03

  I, I don't know, order that, that Schultz sent out. I did like his, uh, letter to the Forest Service, by the way, that was good. But

• 1:58:57Speaker 03

  I imagine it would be a logical discussion to be like, okay, we have point nine cents per visitor to spend on toilet paper. And we can only pump all these toilets once. So what if we close?

• 1:59:10Speaker 00

  Three of them and keep five open, yeah.

• 1:59:12Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:59:13Speaker 00

  That, that is what my predecessors are gonna have to, all of them. That's what's going on across the country is, is the massive prioritization. Again, we're 36 trillion dollars in debt as a nation. We are, every aspect of government should be doing this. 36 trillion dollars. If your kids are not my kid and your kids, your kids, they're gonna deal with this.

• 1:59:37Speaker 03

  Dude, and, and But the thing is, we're not dealing with it like that, right? So prior Biden administration, you'll love this.

• 1:59:45Speaker 00

  Why?

• 1:59:46Speaker 03

  Cause I said Biden.

• 1:59:52Speaker 03

  You know, the infrastructure reduction, or sorry, inflation reduction act.

• 1:59:58Speaker 03

  You know, I, I heard a lot of people inside the Forest Service, I'm really nervous about this influx of cash. Because

• 2:00:08Speaker 03

  It didn't end up gets getting spent on the the boots on the ground stuff, the people, the stuff the people can see and rely on, and it got spent in positions that

• 2:00:23Speaker 03

  are pretty far removed from the end user.

• 2:00:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's absolutely true.

• 2:00:29Speaker 03

  And did those positions get cut during these?

• 2:00:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, they did. And a huge amount of that money is unspent yet. First of all, you throw any that kind of money, I mean, you throw a billion dollars at the Department of Defense, or multi-billion dollars in the case of IRA and bipartisan infrastructure bill, those, that was a huge multi-billion dollar pump to the fore service.

• 2:00:55Speaker 00

  We're not set up to kind of spend that kind of money. Department of Defense, you give me a billion dollars, that's one plane, got it done. We're not set up for that. So that was just poor planning. And now a lot of that money has not gotten to the fuels work.

• 2:01:10Speaker 00

  A lot of the GAOA money, Great America Outdoors money, which, you know, your senator was big in, Senator Danes was getting passed, again, influx of money, and we're not getting it out there to the ground fast enough. That's the restructuring I'd like to see. Why? Let's evaluate what's wrong. Well, we don't have people in the right places. Takes engineers. When you're redoing a campground, you got to have engineers. Well, this forest doesn't have one. So it sits there, and it sits there, and it sits there. So there's

• 2:01:41Speaker 00

  there's plenty to fix and plenty to evaluate. I just I worry too, as we keep going back and forth, this has been the biggest swing, Trump Biden Trump now. Like, these eight years have been like, why, we are going so far. I don't even remember transitions between.

• 2:02:05Speaker 00

  Bush and Obama, yeah, they talked more about this, but they they were seamless. Now we're we're getting these big swings and I think that's like the world we live in, you know, is just more things, you know, in the Biden administration, we had to we had to label everything we did as climate change stuff.

• 2:02:22Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:23Speaker 00

  Oh, really? I didn't know that clearing that trail was, okay, well.

• 2:02:27Steven Rinella?

  We we've talked about that a bunch. You had to take for a while, you had to find a way to do what you felt was necessary, but you had to re-articulate the reason behind it. And it led to just some like some crazy.

• 2:02:39Speaker 00

  Ridiculous.

• 2:02:39Steven Rinella?

  Like very elastic thinking that kind of became almost a self-parody, I thought.

• 2:02:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, and and and and the emphasis on monuments and wilderness areas and stuff, I'm I'm all for that, but it's been done, it's been pushed by the the ends of the spectrums. And now, you know, in this administration, it's it's gonna be oil and gas, livestock and and timber. And there's just something just came out from in the Forest Service where they want a 25% increase in timber production. And and the secretaries declared pretty much every piece of national forest land in the country as an emergency. And

• 2:03:20Speaker 00

  it's called secretarial's emergency declaration. And and what that can do is, now that's designated, the NEPA process, the process changes considerably. There's only two alternatives, either you do it, it's action or no action. So that cuts your analysis. Well, what about this alternative? What about this? Ah, see, there you do it or you don't. There's no objections, you know, that internal process where someone could say, I object to this and we evaluate it and and and we can implement it immediately. And so you either litigate to stop it immediately or it's gonna go through. And it's around fuels, forest health. I don't know if that's

• 2:04:04Speaker 00

  such a bad thing. It's just such a big swing, you know?

• 2:04:06Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, well, I offered my services on land swaps.

• 2:04:09Speaker 00

  Right.

• 2:04:10Steven Rinella?

  I will also offer my services, I will come in and unilaterally be red light, green light on timber projects. And trust me, there are a lot of timber projects that I will give a green light to.

• 2:04:21Speaker 00

  I think you would, too.

• 2:04:22Speaker 03

  I am.

• 2:04:23Steven Rinella?

  So there's, I'm gonna be busy.

• 2:04:24Speaker 03

  Because, you know, it's a free market. Deal like I I'm not lighting my hair on fire over the the timber mandate. Because, I mean, I don't. In a lot of Montana, I don't see anything changing. There's a lot of chunks of forest that people walk into and they're like, oh, my God, this should be cleaned up. Well, you're gonna have to pay out of pocket to have somebody go go clean that up.

• 2:04:50Speaker 00

  Expensive work, couple thousand bucks an acre.

• 2:04:53Speaker 03

  How much?

• 2:04:54Speaker 00

  Oh, a couple grand for fuels work that just that where there's nothing merchantable at the end.

• 2:04:58Speaker 03

  Where it's not merchantable, right? And we don't have.

• 2:05:01Speaker 00

  That's a lot of money.

• 2:05:02Speaker 03

  Right for us, like, plus, like, like, Missoula is such a great example, right? Like, when Steve was going to school there, I was growing up, right? We really had three lumber mills.

• 2:05:13Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:05:13Speaker 03

  Right there. We have zero now.

• 2:05:15Speaker 00

  Right.

• 2:05:16Speaker 03

  Right? There's still a lot of forest around Missoula and a lot that I think people would really argue needs to be.

• 2:05:22Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 2:05:22Speaker 03

  Something's gotta be done here.

• 2:05:24Speaker 00

  I I don't know this for a fact because I'm not an expert in the industry, but there were no tariffs on Canadian timber.

• 2:05:31Steven Rinella?

  No, I thought there was.

• 2:05:32Speaker 00

  I mean, they had.

• 2:05:32Steven Rinella?

  That's what led to the emergency order.

• 2:05:34Speaker 00

  Uh-uh. They, at the end, they pulled out a timber lumber was not.

• 2:05:38Steven Rinella?

  Oh.

• 2:05:39Speaker 00

  Tariff because we don't have the capacity. We we can't produce enough lumber here in America to keep the builders going. So the builders must have got to someone and said, hey, don't do this because you're gonna jack the prices through the roof.

• 2:05:51Steven Rinella?

  Dude, there was recently a big, there was, they wrapped it up, but there was a big clear cut in, um,

• 2:05:59Steven Rinella?

  it was a big clear cut in our area where we hang out in Southeast Alaska.

• 2:06:03Speaker 03

  Oh, I thought you were gonna talk about my spot there in Wisconsin.

• 2:06:05Steven Rinella?

  No, oh, yeah, he's, yeah, he's, yeah, he's private clear cut.

• 2:06:09Speaker 03

  Knocked down like 12 trees.

• 2:06:11Steven Rinella?

  There was a big clear cut in Southeast Alaska and um, it was tribal land, but there was a bunch of land swaps to put the package together.

• 2:06:20Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:06:21Steven Rinella?

  Okay, so it wound up being that.

• 2:06:22Speaker 00

  I worked on that land.

• 2:06:23Steven Rinella?

  State moved to federal and federal moved to tribal and the tribal moved to state, whatever the hell. And in the end, they put together a cut. And we got to watch this cut over the summer and over many summers. And I'll tell you, man, that wood, okay, those trees go into the ocean cutting logs with the bark on.

• 2:06:44Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:06:45Steven Rinella?

  And then they go onto a barge and they do not touch American soil.

• 2:06:49Speaker 00

  Nope.

• 2:06:50Steven Rinella?

  That shit is overseas.

• 2:06:52Speaker 00

  Used to be, used to be not allowed.

• 2:06:54Steven Rinella?

  It doesn't even get like, I mean, if some bark falls off in the ocean, that's as much processing as that wood is getting in the US, dude. And it's gone. And then you hear about losing our capacity on lumber and stuff. It's like, dude, it's going over in the round.

• 2:07:09Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah. It used to be.

• 2:07:12Steven Rinella?

  And I don't even know where to begin. Like you can look and be like, well, that seems crazy, but I don't even know where to begin to start. Like, I don't even know how to begin addressing a problem like that.

• 2:07:22Speaker 00

  Well, it used, Tonga's lumber used to not be, they've approved special provisions to send it in the round overseas. It used to have to be manufactured at least on three sides, you know, in, in America. But the, the industry's in such dire straits up there. And I mean, the reality is the old growth industry cannot survive.

• 2:07:44Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:44Speaker 00

  Period. I mean.

• 2:07:45Steven Rinella?

  Well, th- this same outfit, um, the, the same tribal court that did this clear cut.

• 2:07:51Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:07:52Steven Rinella?

  Um, they not, they announced a 99 year moratorium on old growth.

• 2:07:57Speaker 00

  Oh, no kidding?

• 2:07:57Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. I don't know if they'll stick to it.

• 2:07:59Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:08:00Steven Rinella?

  They, there was internal strife. They announced a 99 year moratorium and they closed that cut early.

• 2:08:05Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:08:06Steven Rinella?

  So, uh, I, I, I want to, go ahead. Then I want to ask a last question. I just want you to clarify a point.

• 2:08:14Speaker 00

  I, I just wonder, I've, I've thought a lot about, I don't know if it'll be fixed, but you know, how much advocacy and environmental groups and stuff own some of the extremes? And I, I think people have got to really look in the mirror and start saying, what are we really fighting against? Is it fighting against something we're really concerned about? Or is it, this is a really good way to keep our money flowing? Um, because this model has worked really good. You demonize, say the sky is falling, find an enemy and then say, send us money. We'll save, you know, whatever. And, uh, I, I think about that a lot. And I think about if I can work on that in my retirement to try to, you know, bring more collaboration to these discussions about, about forest management, but, uh.

• 2:08:59Steven Rinella?

  I want, I want to ask you a retired guy question.

• 2:09:01Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:09:03Steven Rinella?

  In all these conversations that are happening right now, I just want to clarify a personal, like a personal guiding strategy here. In these conversations that we're having, I've tried to, in issues about federal land management agencies, I've tried to be like, to remain somewhat cooperative. Because I've been very clear over the years about like, the things that matter to me, right? Things that matter to me is like hunting and fishing issues and wildlife habitat. And I joke about if I was the emperor of the country, what I would do, and it would be all wildlife all the time, right? And I would if I was the emperor of

• 2:09:45Steven Rinella?

  the country, but I'm not, and no one's asking me to be. So, I've tried to look at this issue and say, okay, there are economic troubles in the country. We overspend, right? There's problems in the country at a macro level. So, instead of saying that business as usual is the only acceptable path, I've tried to like, find a way in my mind to be a little more constructive, and say, okay, what are the objectives? What are we trying to achieve? What are the objective realities here? And how could it be done in a way that doesn't,

• 2:10:23Steven Rinella?

  that is less negative for Americans in my community who use natural resources and raise their families and spend their time in, you know, in nature, okay? With that rambling sort of precursor, what I'm going to say, I'm just like, setting this question up. If someone had come to you, based on what you know about the Forest Service, if someone had come to you and said, "We need to find efficiencies, like, we have to find efficiencies. We have to spend less money. We have to save money."

• 2:11:02Steven Rinella?

  And we don't want to impact the American taxpayer who's utilizing these lands. We want to have minimized impact on that taxpayer, like our customer, so to speak. And they said to you, here's the 10% cut package. Okay, bring me a 10% cut package. Bring me a 20% cut package. Bring me a 30% cut package. At what percent would you start to be like impossible?

• 2:11:37Speaker 00

  Wow, my colleagues are still working, probably kill me when they hear this.

• 2:11:46Speaker 00

  40%.

• 2:11:47Steven Rinella?

  Really?

• 2:11:48Speaker 00

  30 to 40. And here's why.

• 2:11:51Speaker 04

  Is that you, like specifically for White River or Forest Service?

• 2:11:55Speaker 00

  Forest Service, yeah. There are things that we need to come to grips with. Did an analysis before, this cool thing about computers and SharePoint sites and stuff. Did an analysis that, so Forest Service has a Washington office. It has nine regional offices, Denver, Missoula, Albuquerque, Salt Lake, blah, blah, blah. And then there's the field, and there's the forest, and then the forest has districts.

• 2:12:28Speaker 00

  35% of our employees, of all our employees, non-fire, gotta set fire aside.

• 2:12:34Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 2:12:35Speaker 00

  Because none of this discussion had anything to do with fire. 35% of our employees had worked at a Washington office or a regional office. That seems high. Because people in Washington regional offices make a lot more than people on the ground. It's well over 50% of our.

• 2:13:00Speaker 00

  Salary costs as an agency are not where we deliver this. It's not the mission delivery.

• 2:13:07Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:09Speaker 00

  That alone, there's no company that can survive on those numbers. I mean, service companies are different, but if you're producing something or if you have a service to deliver, I mean, I know Skier is really well. I know for a fact that if they put over fifty

• 2:13:24Steven Rinella?

  That's a great point.

• 2:13:25Speaker 00

  percent of their, you know, Vale Resorts or City or corporate offices in Broomfield, it's on the mountain because that's where the money's made. That's where the mission is delivered. So there's a problem. I think, I've said it a couple of times, we got upside down is where our mission was. We just delivering the mission and all the things you want to protect from your constituents, our communities, our clean water and all that stuff, that all happens on the ground for cheap. Now, fuels projects and stuff are get expensive when you, you know. The other thing I think you have to look at is big things. You know, we have, and again, my colleagues would kill me. We have a huge research department in the Forest Service.

• 2:14:10Speaker 00

  Created because when the, back then, there was not a single university in the country that researched any natural resource or forestry issues. So we created, we have a state and private division, a whole thousands of people because there were no state foresters. Now, every state in the country has a whole state forestry division, but yet those were legacyed in over years and years. So thirty percent, forty percent, between thirty. It's just, I just believe in the people on the ground and I'm biased because that's the work I did. Do we need policy people?

• 2:14:48Speaker 00

  Do we need, you know, CIO and, but that's the cheap part of the job. So.

• 2:15:01Speaker 00

  You know, I don't know what's gonna happen. You guys don't know what's gonna happen. This is kinda crazy times in our country, but I always tell people, public lands are not in the Constitution. Nowhere in the Constitution are they. And yet, I believe it is one of the great experiments in democracy. No other country in the world says, here's what we're gonna do. We're gonna take whatever, 7% or whatever the percentage of our country's land base, we're gonna put it in public trust, manage for everyone, owned by everyone. And what an experiment in democracy. And so far, 125 years, we're doing alright. But

• 2:15:39Speaker 00

  I remind people, it's not in the Constitution. There's no guarantee that it can stay. And so, the end game is stay involved. Pay attention. I guess, I'm not ready to light my hair on fire and say, the public lands are going away, they're gonna sell them all. I'm going to pay attention now, obviously. But I think your listeners should pay attention. I think there are things in the system now that require, especially for hunters and anglers and people who enjoy it the way we do, pay attention. This is a time to pay attention. You know, get involved with that NEPA process a little more. Make sure your voices are heard, because there is no guarantee in the Constitution that this crazy experiment will continue.

• 2:16:27Steven Rinella?

  Thanks for coming out, man.

• 2:16:28Speaker 00

  Pleasure to be here.

• 2:16:29Steven Rinella?

  What are your hobbies? What are you gonna do now?

• 2:16:32Speaker 00

  Turkey hunting starts Saturday, so, you know, I love to hunt and fish and get outside. You're gonna stay where you're at in Colorado? For a while.

• 2:16:46Speaker 03

  I mean, you're sitting here right now because you're on a fishing tour, right?

• 2:16:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, a visit some friends tour. But, yeah. My brothers and I, you know, I'm from Wisconsin, and...

• 2:16:59Speaker 00

  And listening to you talk about how you grew up with your brothers, identical.

• 2:17:05Steven Rinella?

  Is that right?

• 2:17:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, we were just across the pond from you.

• 2:17:07Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:07Speaker 00

  Wisconsin side and we're building, we're almost done. We're building the cabin in the UP.

• 2:17:13Steven Rinella?

  Oh.

• 2:17:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, up in west of Watersmeat. That's where we went as kids that, you know, there was, with six kids and a cop salary. There was no Disneyland vacation. So, uh, we're just, they're just about done. I write the checks, I write checks to pay for things because they do.

• 2:17:29Steven Rinella?

  They do the work.

• 2:17:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, because they're there. I mean, they're, they're back there and so be doing that and I don't know. I, I'm not ready to not be involved. I, I've gotten some calls about some work and we'll see. I'm gonna, you know, take two months to see what's out there and then, uh, I, I'd love this stuff too much. I like to mix it up too much and.

• 2:17:51Steven Rinella?

  Man, I, well, just the fact that you're, the fact that you're passionate about the forest, you're passionate about public lands, you put in a lot of years.

• 2:18:03Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:18:03Steven Rinella?

  You have opinions. I can't vet whether all of your opinions, I mean, you know enough, you know more than I know. So I can't say that all your opinions are right or wrong or whatever. But, um, just the fact that you care, I would sure hope that, um, people that need to start, the people that do need to make decisions about where money goes and what money is there. I, if I knew that they were reaching out to guys like you to get an opinion that they could give in an honest way now that you're not there anymore, I would be like, well, that sounds like a good idea to me. So hopefully some conversations will happen for you.

• 2:18:39Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:18:40Steven Rinella?

  You know, where someone can say like, well, now I could tell you what I actually think. And here's what I think.

• 2:18:43Speaker 00

  Right.

• 2:18:44Steven Rinella?

  And no one's gonna fire me for it.

• 2:18:48Speaker 00

  Good feeling.

• 2:18:48Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. You know, we always have a hard time having agency people on the show because they're so paranoid, but it's nice to have, um, the, like you're here in a post paranoid sense.

• 2:18:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, I, I would have come on and said most of this while I was working. That's what I got my reputation for. Although I would have got in trouble, but not fired. But, uh, I, I don't think what I, what I had to say was all that controversial.

• 2:19:13Steven Rinella?

  You're not saying, you're not.

• 2:19:14Speaker 00

  I'm not hacking on anyone. I just, I think, you know, there's changes coming and some of them are good. Some of them gotta be, watch for.

• 2:19:22Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, I want to talk to the guys that are like, um.

• 2:19:27Steven Rinella?

  That recognize a reality and recognize how can we do this in the best way possible? Right. And not in a ways that are kind of like ham handed, knee jerk reactions. So, thanks, man. You bet. Glad to be here. No, appreciate it. Thanks for coming on. Thanks, Scott.

• 2:20:13Steven Rinella?

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• 2:20:57Steven Rinella?

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• 2:21:40Steven Rinella?

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