Forests to benefit from state grants

About $1 million in state grants will be distributed to 13 national forest projects across Montana over the next few months as Montana’s first installment of funding authorized in the 2014 federal farm bill.

Four projects in the Flathead and Kootenai national forests will receive a total of $260,000.

The bill created the authority for state governors to nominate up to 5 million acres of “Priority Landscape Areas” in national forests within their states, focused on identifying tracts of land at the highest risk for disease, insect infestation and wildfires.

During the Montana Legislature’s last session, House Bill 354 granted the governor the authority to spend up to $5 million from the fire suppression fund on grants to the U.S. Forest Service to start working on projects within those priority areas for which there is not sufficient funding.

Working for the state’s forestry division, Mo Bookwalter is the liaison between the state and the Forest Service. She said the grants are used to fund a wide range of forestry activities.

“Each project is different,” Bookwalter said. “In some cases, we’re funding just the [National Environmental Policy Act] process, or some of the planning. In others we’ll be funding on-the-ground work. It’s a really interesting portfolio of things the state will be investing in.”

She added that the grants will allow the federal agency to begin working on proposed projects that have not been slated for funding for at least two years.

“They have a lot of acreage and they have their own challenges and capacity issues, so through this initiative we’re trying to step in and be a good partner,” Bookwalter said. “We recognize these issues don’t stop at the boundary lines.”

One such issue is the pine beetle, responsible for die-offs of expansive tracts of forest in Western Montana, leading to stands of dead trees capable of triggering or amplifying wildfires.

Representatives from F.H. Stoltze Land & Lumber Co. met with the Tally Lake Ranger District in 2014 to voice their concerns about a large beetle population moving from Flathead Forest land into the timber company’s adjacent property west of Kalispell.

“The Forest Service doesn’t have much access to that land due to the private ownership surrounding it,” Flathead Forest silviculturist Michael Reichenberg said. “They came to us with their concerns and submitted a formal proposal to the forest ranger and district supervisor. ... It fit in nicely with the Forests in Focus initiative.”

That project will receive $30,000 from the state for botany, soil and old growth surveys, transportation diagnostics and sale preparation. It will open logging and insect treatment on 500 acres, producing 2.5 million board-feet of commercial timber.

Collaboration is a common thread through each of the approved projects, and Bookwalter said the state targeted projects that had strong local support, prioritized restoration and watershed protection, enhanced recreational opportunities and produced commercial timber.

Working closely with the Whitefish Face Working Group, a group that includes representatives from the timber industry, recreational groups and environmental organizations, Reichenberg also secured grant funding for two projects near the city of Whitefish.

The Whitefish Municipal Watershed Fuels Reduction Project will get $80,000 for botany and soil surveys, transportation analysis, fuel and stand diagnostics and sale preparation and planning.

The 1,300-acre project would produce 150,000 commercial board-feet, and 100,000 non-commercial board feet of timber. Located within Whitefish’s municipal watershed, the project would break up contiguous forest areas to mitigate the effects of potential wildfire.

“That project has been in process since 2004, when the city passed a resolution urging the Forest Service to do fuel reduction in the Haskill Basin,” Reichenberg said. “The group met twice a month for the last year, putting forth this proposal to do some fuels reduction, vegetation management and increase recreational opportunities in the Haskill Basin and in the Hellroaring area.”

He said the group originally had worked on a larger project area but, to prioritize the municipal water supply, he broke it up into two applications, including the 2,700-acre Taylor Hellroaring Resource Management Project.

That project area will receive $50,000 earmarked for the same activities as the watershed project. High-elevation logging also will target areas where the agency hopes that nearby stands of whitebark pine, genetically resistant to the white pine blister rust fungus, will expand and reduce the forest’s susceptibility to disease.

Rob Carlin, a planning officer with Flathead National Forest, said the state grant funding will allow the agency to begin work on projects that, while important, often get kicked down the road as the agency’s limited funding is usually spent on large-scale projects with higher timber yield.

“The way some of our funding is provided, it comes with a target [harvest] and it’s much more efficient to go large,” he said. “The cost per unit of output is much higher on those, so we tend to look for the best efficiency we can with our limited funding.”

To the west, the Kootenai National Forest will get $100,000 from the state to evaluate all of the forest’s previously logged forest totaling about 400,000 acres.

Quinn Carver, a planning officer with the Kootenai Forest, said the grant will allow the forest to begin addressing a backlog of areas that need thinning to reduce wildfire risk and promote healthy forest growth.

“It’s pretty neat, because it’s something we’ve been wanting to do for a very long time, but because of our program being what it is, we’ve never been able to tie it all together,” he said. “Working with DNRC to close the gap on this has been huge, we would not be proceeding without their help.”

The grant will provide funding for environmental analyses on a wide range of young forest, from recently-logged tracts of saplings to mature forests where pre-commercial thinning has been delayed for years.

Carver said the variability within the project area precludes an estimate of potential harvest at this time, but likely much of the harvest will go to biomass uses, including wood ethanol production and electricity generation.

All seven national forests in the state, spanning 11 counties, received grant funding through the farm bill program.

Reporter Samuel Wilson can be reached at 758-4407 or by email at swilson@dailyinterlake.com.