Tag Archive for: forest management

Questioning the Political Priorities of the Firefighters Union

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As another summer of wildfires approaches, it is in the interest of every Californian to understand that California’s firefighters’ union, the California Professional Firefighters, is one of the most politically powerful unions in the state. This union has the power to help solve the growing problem of wildfires in California, but to more effectively do so they will have to make some tough and selfless political choices.

As it is, California’s firefighters’ union is a partisan political machine that is not standing up to environmental activists that, for decades, have undermined responsible forest management. At the same time, California’s firefighters receive union negotiated pay and benefits that have exempted them from – to use a term favored by the leftists their union aligns with – the “lived experience” of most Californians.

These problems are related. If firefighters received compensation based more on market rates instead of those rates their unions “negotiated” with politicians the unions helped elect, there would be more money to hire more firefighters. There would also be more money left over to spend on programs to prevent wildfires, instead the money running out every year after spending billions to extinguish wildfires.

Before going further, it is important to establish two things: First, to criticize the agenda of public sector unions does not constitute criticism of all unions, in all circumstances. Second, to question whether current pay scales for California’s firefighters are affordable or appropriate in no way diminishes the respect and appreciation we have for their service.

Today the most recent pay and benefits data provided by the State Controller show that the average pay and benefits for a full time firefighter working for a city in California in 2020 was $256,000. That’s a 24 percent increase in just two years. Note that this average includes administrative and other non first responders that work for these fire departments but make far less, which pulls down the numbers. Among cities that included the back payments to restore solvency to their pension plans as compensation, Santa Clara in 2020 was the city with the highest average pay and benefits for their full time fire department personnel, at $352,000.

These amounts are mind-boggling. The average base salary of a full-time fire department employee in a California city in 2020 was $115,000. To put this in perspective, according to Military.com, a staff sergeant with 10 years experience in the U.S. Army in 2020 earned base pay of $42,000. An Army captain with 10 years experience earned $79,000. Similar rates of pay apply across the U.S. Military. When it comes to including compensation apart from base pay, the disparity between California’s city firefighters and members of the military remains striking. According to a 2021 report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the total cost to the Department of Defense per service member averages $140,000 per year. This is only 55 percent of what it costs to taxpayers in California’s cities to pay their firefighters.

It’s easy enough to say cities with high tax bases like Manhattan Beach or Santa Clara have the financial wherewithal to pay their firefighters whatever they ask. But massive compensation packages for firefighters have financially strapped other cities, such as Placentia that had to completely restructure their fire department in order to get their budget under control. But either way, excessive and unaffordable pay and benefits for California’s unionized firefighters is only half the problem. 

The lesser known fact about California firefighters unions is that the union is not apolitical, but instead, like other public unions in the state, firmly entrenched in progressive politics. The firefighters union backed Prop. 15 in 2020, which would have caused business properties to be reassessed at market rates, eliminating one of the last advantages private businesses have in California. This is also the union that marched with the United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA) in 2019 (pre-COVID), a teachers union that is aggressively pushing to serve up a hard-left program of indoctrination in the already failing public schools of Los Angeles. 

The California Professional Firefighters union engages in politics with an extraordinary degree of political and financial power. A few years ago when asked, off the record, why a Southern California businessman running for city council took campaign contributions from the firefighters union, his response was compelling. “They are either going to spend a million bucks to elect me, or they are going to spend it to elect my opponent.” The financial power of California’s public sector unions is well documented. 

A Tremendous Opportunity

Putting an end to cataclysmic wildfires, which are the result of decades of bad policies, ought to be the top political priority of the firefighters union. But if you visit the California Professional Firefighters website, you can easily find a press release from a few years ago, titled “CPF President Praises Newsom Commitment to Wildfire Response and Prevention.” Newsom does not deserve this praise. Almost all of Newsom’s significant actions are oriented to wildfire response, not wildfire prevention. Here’s what the firefighters union can do that might, within a few years, solve the problem of super fires, and earn the admiration and gratitude of millions of Californians:

(1) Take a public stand that policies and spending on wildfire prevention is as important as wildfire response.

(2) Demand legislative and legal action to streamline the process for property managers and property owners to engage in controlled burns.

(3) Partner with the logging industry to restore responsible logging with a goal of doubling or tripling the annual timber harvest in California. The state’s timber harvest has been reduced to 25 percent of what was being removed in the 1990s.

(4) Publicize and advocate for the successful “uneven-aged” forest management and total ecosystem management practices that saved Shaver Lake’s forests in 2020, and the forests around South Lake Tahoe in 2021.

(5) Aggressively challenge and help defend against the environmentalist litigators and lobbyists that have prevented responsible forest management and allowed California’s forests to turn into tinder boxes.

(6) Politely, but publicly and unequivocally challenge attention grabbing wildfire-inspired stunts, such as new Electric Vehicle mandates, as deflecting from the necessary solutions involving forestry management.

In addition to saving forests, homes and lives by preventing fires, reforming the state’s forest management policies would create new jobs in the timber industry, lower the cost of lumber for home construction, and save billions spent on the fire lines each summer.

One thing the firefighters union is very good at is winning. By using its political power to back critical fire prevention efforts, the firefighters union would score a huge win for all Californians.

This article originally appeared on the website of the California Globe.

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How to Save California’s Forests

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For about twenty million years, California’s forests endured countless droughts, some lasting over a century. Natural fires, started by lightening and very frequent in the Sierras, were essential to keep forest ecosystems healthy. In Yosemite, for example, meadows used to cover most of the valley floor, because while forests constantly encroached, fires would periodically wipe them out, allowing the meadows to return. Across millennia, fire driven successions of this sort played out in cycles throughout California’s ecosystems.

Also for the last twenty million years or so, climate change has been the norm. To put this century’s warming into some sort of context, Giant Sequoias once grew on the shores of Mono Lake. For at least the past few centuries, forest ecosystems have been marching into higher latitudes because of gradual warming. In the Sierra Foothills, oaks have invaded pine habitat, and pine have in-turn invaded the higher elevation stands of fir. Today, it is mismanagement, not climate change, that is the primary threat to California’s forests. This can be corrected.

In a speech before the U.S. Congress last September, Republican Tom McClintock summarized the series of policy mistakes that are destroying California’s forests. McClintock’s sprawling 4th Congressional District covers 12,800 square miles, and encompasses most of the Northern Sierra Nevada mountain range. His constituency bears the brunt of the misguided green tyranny emanating from Washington DC and Sacramento. Here’s an excerpt from that speech:

“Excess timber comes out of the forest in only two ways – it is either carried out or it burns out. For most of the 20th Century, we carried it out. It’s called ‘logging.’ Every year, US Forest Service foresters would mark off excess timber and then we auctioned it off to lumber companies who paid us to remove it, funding both local communities and the forest service. We auctioned grazing contracts on our grasslands. The result: healthy forests, fewer fires and a thriving economy. But beginning in the 1970’s, we began imposing environmental laws that have made the management of our lands all but impossible. Draconian restrictions on logging, grazing, prescribed burns and herbicide use on public lands have made modern land management endlessly time consuming and ultimately cost prohibitive. A single tree thinning plan typically takes four years and more than 800 pages of analysis. The costs of this process exceed the value of timber – turning land maintenance from a revenue-generating activity to a revenue-consuming one.”

When it comes to carrying out timber, California used to do a pretty good job. In the 1950s the average timber harvest in California was around 6.0 billion board feet per year. The precipitous drop in harvest volume came in the 1990s. The industry started that decade taking out not quite 5.0 billion board feet, and by 2000 the annual harvest had dropped to just over 2.0 billion board feet. Today, only about 1.5 billion board feet per year come out of California’s forests as harvested timber.

Expand the Timber Industry

What Congressman McClintock describes as a working balance up until the 1990s needs to be restored. In order to achieve a sustainable balance between natural growth and timber removals, California’s timber industry needs to triple in size. If federal legislation were to guarantee a long-term right for timber companies to harvest trees on federal land, investment would follow.

Today only 29 sawmills remain in California, along with eight sawmills that are still standing but inactive. In addition, there are 112 sites in California where sawmills once operated. In most cases, these vacant sites of former mills are located in ideal areas to rebuild a mill and resume operations.

The economics of reviving California’s timber industry are compelling. A modern sawmill with a capacity of 100 million board feet per year requires an investment of $100 million. Operating at a profit, it would create 640 full time jobs. Constructing 30 of these sawmills would create roughly 20,000 jobs in direct employment of loggers, haulers and mill workers, along with thousands of additional jobs in the communities where they are located.

The ecological impact of logging again in California’s state and federal forests will not become the catastrophe that environmentalists and regulators once used as the pretext to all but destroy the logging industry. Especially now, with decades of accumulated experience, logging does more good than harm to forest ecosystems. There is evidence to prove this.

In forests managed by Sierra Pacific, for example, owl counts are higher than in California’s federally managed forests. Even clear cutting, because it is done on a 60 to 100 year cycle, does more good than harm to the forests. By converting one or two percent of the forest back into meadow each year, area is opened up where it is easier for owls to hunt prey. Also, during a clear cut, the needles and branches are stripped off the trees and left to rejuvenate the soil. The runoff is managed as well, via contour tilling which follows the topography of the hillsides. Rain percolates into the furrows, which is also where the replacement trees are planted.

While clear cutting will not destroy most ecosystems, since it is only performed on one to two percent of the land in any given year, there are other types of logging that can be used in areas deemed more ecologically sensitive. Southern California Edison owns 20,000 acres of forest around Shaver Lake in Southern California where they practice what is referred to as total ecosystem management.

Earlier this year, when the Creek Fire burned an almost unthinkable 550 square miles in Southern California, the 30 square mile island of SCE managed forest around Shaver Lake was unscathed. This is because for decades, SCE has been engaged in timber operations they define as “uneven age management, single tree selection,” whereby the trees to be harvested are individually designated in advance, in what remains a profitable logging enterprise. Controlled burns are also an essential part of SCE’s total ecosystem management, but these burns are only safe when the areas to be burned are caught up on logging and thinning.

The practice of uneven age management could be utilized in riparian canyons, or in areas where valuable stands of old growth merit preservation. The alternative, a policy of hands-off preservation, has been disastrous. Tree density in the Sierra Nevada is currently around 300 per acre, whereas historically, a healthy forest would only have had around 60 trees per acre. Clearly this number varies depending on forest type, altitude and other factors, but overall, California’s forests, especially on federal lands, contain about five times the normal tree density. The result are trees that cannot compete for adequate moisture and nutrients, far less rain percolating into springs and aquifers, disease and infestation of the weakened trees, and fire.

This alternative – manage the forest or suffer fires that destroy the forest entirely – cannot be emphasized enough. In the Feather River Canyon, along with many other canyons along the Sierra Nevada, the east-west topography turned them into wind tunnels that drove fires rapidly up and down the watershed. Yet these riparian areas have been among the most fiercely defended against any logging, which made those fires all the worse. The choice going forward should not be difficult. Logging and forest thinning cannot possibly harm a watershed as much as parched forests burning down to the soil, wiping out everything.

Expand the Biomass Power Industry

If removing trees with timber operations is essential to return California’s forests to a sustainable, lower density of trees per acre, mechanical removal of shrub and undergrowth is an essential corollary, especially in areas that are not clear cut. Fortunately, California has already developed the infrastructure to do this. In fact, California’s biomass industry used to be bigger than it is today, and can be quickly expanded.

Today there are 22 active biomass power plants in California, generating just over a half-gigawatt of continuous electric power. That’s one percent of California’s electricity draw at peak demand; not a lot, but enough to matter. Mostly built in the 1980s and ’90s, at peak there were 60 biomass power plants in California, but with the advent of cheaper natural gas and cheaper solar power, most of them were shut down. These clean burning plants should be opened back up to use forest trimmings, as well as agricultural waste and urban waste as fuel.

At a fully amortized wholesale cost estimated somewhere between 12 cents and 14 cents per kilowatt-hour, biomass power plants cannot compete with most other forms of energy. But this price is not so far out of reach that it could not be subsidized using funds currently being allocated to other forms of renewables infrastructure or climate change mitigation. Moreover, this kilowatt-hour price necessarily includes the labor intensive task of going into the forests and extracting the biomass, creating thousands of good paying jobs. The numbers could work.

If, for example, biomass power capacity in California were roughly doubled to 1.0 gigawatt of continuous output, a six cents per kilowatt-hour subsidy would cost about $500 million per year. This must be compared to the annual cost of wildfires in California, which easily exceeds a billion per year. It also must be compared to the amount of money being thrown around on projects far less urgent than rescuing California’s forest ecosystems, such as the California High Speed Rail project, which has already consumed billions. And if this entire subsidy of $500M per year were spread into the utility bills of all Californians, it would only amount to about a 1.5 percent increase.

Will Politicians Do the Right Thing?

The logic of these steps seems impeccable. Thin the forests. Restore them to ecological health. Adopt time tested modern logging practices and revive the timber industry. Build biomass power plants on the perimeter of the forests. Reissue grazing permits for additional cost-effective brush thinning. Prevent ridiculous, costly, horrific, tragic wildfires. Help the economy.

But these steps have been known for decades, and nothing was done. Every time policymakers were close to a consensus on forest thinning, government bureaucrats obstructed the process and the environmentalists sued to stop the process. And they won. Time and time again. And now we have this: millions of acres of scorched earth, air so foul that people couldn’t leave their homes for weeks, and wildlife habitat that in some cases will never recover. If this failure in policy doesn’t leave Californians livid, nothing will.

The forest management policies adopted in California have decimated California’s timber industry, neglected its biomass industry, turned millions of acres of forest into scorched earth, and are systematically turning mountain communities into ghost towns. This is tyranny, and perhaps even worse, it is tyranny that lacks either benevolence or wisdom.

If the goal was to have a healthy forest ecosystem, that was violated, as these forests burned to the ground and what remains is dying. If the goal was do anything in the name of fighting climate change and its impact on the forests, and do it with urgency, that too was violated, because everything they did was wrong. Even now, instead of urgent and far reaching changes to forest management policies, we get more electric car mandates. That was the urgent response.

California’s ruling elites, starting with Gavin Newsom among the politicians, and Ramon Cruz, the Sierra Club’s new president, may prove they care about the environment by sitting down with representatives from California’s timber, biomass energy, and cattle industries, along with federal regulators, and come up with a plan. They might apply to this plan the same scope and urgency with which they so cavalierly transform our entire energy and transportation sectors, but perhaps with more immediate practical benefits both to people and ecosystems.

This article originally appeared in the California Globe.

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