Supervisors Call On Forest Service To Implement Four Forest Restoration Initiative

With wildfires burning throughout the state, a coalition of northern Arizona county supervisors is calling on the U.S. Forest Service to implement a comprehensive forest restoration plan aimed at preventing landscape-scale fires, such as the Wallow Fire currently burning in Greenlee and Apache Counties.

In an op-ed published in the Arizona Republic on Saturday, Supervisors David Tenney, Richard Lunt, Tommie Martin, Mark Herrington, and Mandy Metzger called on federal officials to fully implement the Four Forest Restoration Initiative (4FRI), an historic effort supported by industry, environmental groups, and local elected officials, to restore 2.4 million acres of forest across northern Arizona’s four national forests.

“If implemented properly by the Forest Service, 4FRI has the potential to make fires such as the Wallow and Rodeo Chediski a thing of the past,” the supervisors declared. “As the Wallow Fire continues to burn, Forest Service leadership at the regional and national level has a solemn obligation to unequivocally support these efforts and ensure a full and comprehensive implementation of 4FRI.”

According to the supervisors, what makes 4FRI unique is its call for the Forest Service to partner with private industry to restore the forest across much larger landscapes at little or no cost to the federal government. Whereas previous forest restoration efforts have relied on the Forest Service to pay for restoration thinning, 4FRI recognizes that the agency will never have sufficient resources to restore forests on the scale necessary to prevent unnatural landscape-scale fires like Wallow or Rodeo-Chediski, or the Schultz Fire in Coconino County.

If executed properly, 4FRI would enable the Forest Service to restore nearly 50,000 acres per year throughout northern Arizona, nearly ten times more than the Forest Service is restoring today through the White Mountain Stewardship Contract alone.