Brenna Goth

The Republic | azcentral.com

Arizona's overgrown forests pose a risk to the environment and local communities.

Thinning initiatives in the state are behind schedule, which affects businesses depending on wood.

Arizona senators said private industry will support these efforts if they have consistency.

Bureaucratic delays and a slow start to the nation's largest forest-thinning project could drive the forestry industry out of Arizona when the state really needs it, U.S. Sens. John McCain and Jeff Flake said Friday.

Arizona's overgrown forests — unnaturally dense after a century of fire suppression — are unsustainable, said speakers at a public- and private-sector conference on forestry organized by the Salt River Project as part of the power and water utility's environmental-stewardship efforts.

Overgrowth makes the forests more susceptible to devastating wildfires of the sort the state has seen in recent years. To address the problem, timber interests and environmental groups came together two years ago with the U.S. Forest Service on an initiative to thin Arizona's Kaibab, Coconino, Apache-Sitgreaves and Tonto national forests.

The initiative to thin those forests depends on private industry to use the profit from wood products to cover the cost of tree cutting and removal.

But now, the senators said, forestry businesses are under pressure. In August, one major forest-thinning project in eastern Arizona, the White Mountain Stewardship project, ended. And the new project, known as the Four Forest Restoration Initiative, or 4FRI, has been delayed, leaving businesses without enough wood and enough work, the senators said.

4FRI is the largest forest-management contract with private industry in the history of the Forest Service. The first phase would thin 300,000 acres over 10 years in northern Arizona. The first contractor, announced in 2012, had to be replaced after it couldn't secure financing to thin 30,000 acres per year. Acreage is being thinned under a new contractor, selected last year, but not as quickly as some businesses hoped.

"There's a gap there that we've got to fill," Flake said. "When that investment goes, it likely doesn't come back again."

The initiative is the biggest test case for Congress to see whether wood products can offset the cost of restoration, said Lucy Murfitt, public-lands counsel for the U.S. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources.

McCain called the 4FRI project "Arizona's greatest prospect of correcting decades of mismanagement" of the forests. It's off to a slow start, he said, in part because of the lengthy National Environmental Policy Act process, which must be completed before lands can be touched. The final environmental-impact statement for 4FRI is scheduled to be released in the next two months.

The process to approve new land for thinning can take more than a year.

"It is extremely frustrating to see how slowly it's moving with 4FRI," Flake said.

Much of the conference focused on the willingness of private industry to invest in Arizona's forests if they have the certainty of a consistent wood supply moving forward.

Industry commitment is necessary, McCain said, as Arizona looks to manage its two biggest environmental issues this century: fire and water.

With anxiety and uncertainty about how long the Colorado River can support its users across the Southwest, the senators said, Arizona must work to improve its own watersheds. Thinning forests improves runoff because there are fewer "straws in the ground," Flake said.

And when it comes to forest fires, the science is clear, Flake said. The survival of the community of Alpine during the 2011 Wallow fire is proof that thinning works, he said.