Big Sky Times

HELENA, Mont. – Governor Greg Gianforte on June 6 hosted U.S. Forest Service (USFS) Chief Randy Moore in Montana to tour federally owned and managed forests and emphasize the need for active forest management.

“I’m grateful to Chief Moore for traveling to Montana to see the severity of the forest health crisis we face,” Gov. Gianforte said. “We must increase the pace and scale of forest management across federal, state, tribal, and private lands to prevent catastrophic wildfire, preserve wildlife habitat, and protect our way of life.”

Following a joint briefing in the governor’s office, Gov. Gianforte, Chief Moore, and Department of Natural Resources and Conservation (DNRC) and USFS officials traveled from Helena to Butte to tour the Basin Creek water treatment plant.

The plant processes 60 percent of water for Butte residents from 7,700 acres of watershed. Ninety percent of the watershed acres are owned and managed by USFS.

A catastrophic wildfire in the area would likely deem the plant “unusable,” warned Jim Keenan with Butte-Silver Bow County.

“Depending on the severity of the wildfire, storms and snowpack runoff in subsequent years, and how much material is mobilized into the reservoir, I think it might take as much as a decade or more for it to recover to a point where we could use this water treatment plant again,” Keenan said.

Bringing more acres in the area under landscape-size active management is a shared priority for the State of Montana and USFS.

In the afternoon, the group toured Labell Gulch for a future potential Good Neighbor Authority (GNA) project in the Bernice Project Area off I-15.

Permanently established through the 2014 Farm Bill, GNA allows states, counties, and tribes to enter into agreements to work as agents of the federal government and conduct authorized restoration services on National Forest System Lands.

While on the ground, the governor emphasized to Chief Moore the need to use readily available tools like GNA to bring more acres under management.

“We’re proud Montana is leading the way in landscape-scale, long-term forest management contracts and strategies,” Gov. Gianforte said. “We must expand the size, scope, and longevity of these agreements, and we can do that by replicating projects that are already successful.”

At the 2023 Fire Briefing in May, Gov. Gianforte called on partners to work with the state to bring more private, state, tribal, and federal acres under management.

Working with partners to increase the number of forested acres treated in Montana is a top priority for the governor. In the governor’s first year in office, DNRC more than doubled the number of acres placed under active management in Montana, adding another 31,000 acres in 2022.

The governor and Chief Moore were joined on the tour by DNRC Deputy Director Kerry Davant, USFS Regional Forester, Northern Region Leanne Marten, and DNRC and USFS officials.

Original source can be found here