Black Hills forest experts rebuke Republicans after Spearditch roundtable

After a century of fire suppression, a decades-long moratorium on prescribed burns, a lack of environmental litigators and GOP retrenchment the Black Hills National Forest has been broken for decades. The collapse of the Black Hills hydrologic region was forecast in 2002 even as the mountain pine beetle raced to save Paha Sapa water supplies.

So, during remarks to the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee in 2021, US Forest Service Chief Randy Moore outlined a plan to ship logs from as far away as California to sawmills owned by Hulett, Wyoming's Neiman Enterprises.

In June, 2023 an interested party asked former acting Black Hills National Forest Supervisor Jim Zornes to comment on an article appearing in South Dakota Searchlight about the heinous state of affairs on the Forest then Seth Tupper followed up on that piece with another describing the unheard of turnover of supervisors so an interested party asked Dave Mertz to comment on it.

Mertz is a retired natural resource officer for the BHNF who attended a roundtable discussion in Spearditch hosted by South Dakota's lone US Representative Dusty Johnson when he sicced two fellow Republican congress members on Regional Forester Frank Beum and BHNF Supervisor Shawn Cochran. Cochrane was the sixth different leader in 2023 alone and 11th in the past seven years.

After introductions, the panel quickly turned to grilling the two Forest Service officials. It appeared that they were there to browbeat the Forest Service. Johnson participated in these tactics as well. Much of the hour and a half revolved around blaming the Forest Service for not selling more timber and for being ineffective. Repeatedly, panelists stated what the timber industry needs. Never was there any concern for what level of timber harvesting the forest needs. The two Forest Service participants showed up in good faith only to be interrogated. What was the point of all this other than some people enjoying seeing the Forest Service get beat up? No solutions were found that I could tell. [Dave Mertz, We know what the timber industry needs, but what can the Black Hills provide?]

This blogger forwarded Mertz's column to The Smokey Wire where Zornes and Mertz continue the discussion.

But, can you imagine, the FS paying to ship logs, by rail, from California to South Dakota? Remember a few years ago when the old BCAP (Biomass Crop Assistance Program) couldn’t find enough money to even be relevant? This is playing out in real time, and it is absolutely shocking on how The Hills are being mined for volume…. BHNF was cutting more than growth plus mortality, losing suitable and “standard” component acres, and those cumulative effects finally came home to roost! This should have been nipped in the bud in 2016, but the politics, industry tantrums and Agency egos just carried too much weight! And now, we have a mess…..[Jim Zornes]

There are far, far better life choices than working in a sawmill for ten years let alone living in states like Wyoming and South Dakota where workers are commodities so Neiman bought mills in blue states Colorado and Oregon that expanded Medicaid. Earth hating US Senators John Thune and John Barrasso introduced the Save Jim Neiman's Ass Black Hills Forest Protection and Jobs Preservation Act of 2022 but it died in committee. 

It’s some crazy stuff going on here Jim! When you were here, things were just borderline crazy, but it’s full One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest now! It’s almost impossible to find out how much the rail thing is costing taxpayers but it’s likely an outrageous amount. These are supposedly salvage logs, they can’t be worth much. The transport must be costing several times what the logs are worth. It’s hard to believe our politicians can solve big problems when they are devoid of objectivity. [Their] answer is always just get a bigger hammer. It is putting band aids over band aids. They parrot the story that if a mill closes, the Black Hills will burn to the ground. This is not true, other mills will remain. The real fire risk here is the hundreds of thousands of acres of doghair stands of young trees. Not the sawtimber. But sawmills don’t make money on doghair. And so it goes…. With the current state of the forest, there are fewer and fewer options of any kind to properly manage it. [Dave Mertz]

Nevertheless, Republican welfare ranchers ginned up by the likes of South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem, Wyoming's US Representative Harriet Hageman, disgraced former Otero County Commissioner Couy Griffin, American Stewards of Liberty rabble-rouser Margaret Byfield and others are plotting violence against public land managers in the West.

Jim Furnish was deputy chief of the US Forest Service from 1999 to 2002. He believes Neiman will close the sawmill in Spearditch, too.

Historian Paul Horsted, the Norbeck Society, People for Sustainable Logging in the Black Hills and the Black Hills Environmental Coalition have joined the condemnation of Rep. Johnson's attack on the Forest Service.

South Dakota’s junior Republican US Senator has introduced likely doomed legislation in Congress that would increase bureaucracy and open the BHNF to the wholesale pillage of any surviving saw timber.