Collaborative planning and forest restoration were key parts of the 10-year National Fire Plan, created by the Western Governors' Association in 2000. Through grants and community meetings, the wide-ranging effort sought input from a vast number of parties to create a plan to prepare communities for wildfire. The Healthy Forests Restoration Act superseded much of the NFP's collaborative processes and instituted a top-down management style that consolidates decision making with the Forest Service and to a smaller extent the Bureau of Land Management. Rural towns have been pushed further out of the loop of restoration projects and fire-safety planning.

Hayfork feels especially stung by the government's abandonment because the community played a key role in developing the fire plans now used by the Forest Service. Jungwirth estimated that Hayfork had already raised nearly $3 million in grants and "bake sale money" for fire planning, fire breaks, and fuel-reduction projects.

Jungwirth repeatedly stresses that without appropriating money for planning at the local level, "money never gets to the ground."

"Communities have built these templates, but if there is not funding for that work, and funding for the [Forest Service] agency staff to participate in meetings, then you can't do it, Jungwirth says. "The rhetoric is there, but reality isn't."

A spokesperson for the Forest Guild blasted the Bush administration's 2005 budget for not providing enough funds for restoration activities, noting that "unrealistic expectations will likely drive the Forest Service to cut down merchantable timber to pay for the real cost of forest thinning." Although the budget for 2005 requests the same $760 million as in 2004, Mark Rey, the undersecretary for natural resources and the environment and a former timber industry lobbyist widely described in the environmental community as a "fox in the henhouse," admitted that a majority of that total will come from "reprogramming," or the shifting of funds from other programs. Those other programs are almost certain to include economic development programs.

"There are monies in our annual budget to accomplish that type of work," says Forest Service planning officer Bill Branham, defending the current allocations the Forest Service makes for collaborating with local communities. "Locally we feel there are sufficient funds to have that work, to hold meetings and conduct outreach. There may be places in the nation where there is not enough money, but locally I don't see that as a constraint."

Branham, who plans timber sales out of the Weaverville Ranger Station in Trinity County, Calif., is familiar with the hardships of rural communities and knows that people are hoping to find contract work through the HFRA.

"There is a feeling that the Forest Service has been slow to respond for the demand to put people to work. Some of that is due to the planning timeline to approve projects, and that gets back to the Endangered Species Act. We need to do surveys to comply with that law."

In the case of large timber harvests, Branham explained that the buyer was free to hire any logging contractor it chose. And in turn, the contractor could hire any workers it chose, whether they were local or not.

Branham says the reality for rural communities such as Weaverville or Hayfork is that the HFRA will not lead to significant economic changes over the long term.

"Funding for fuels-reduction work is declining in the next few years, and the money to do the work is declining and going to places with higher priority to do the work, such as Southern California, where there are lots more people, as opposed to Trinity County. The priority is to put the money where the people are."

"The bang is not here for the politician's buck. And at the same time, there is a dramatic need for that type of fuel-treatment work, because we are surrounded by heavy fuels."

Jungwirth says the overall system is biased toward big industry, but that giving in to Big Timber's lobbyists doesn't necessarily mean local job growth. The big companies bring in mobile work crews that clear out brush or cut down marketable timber, and then move on to the next location.

"We decided to look at what the economic opportunities through public land restoration and maintenance were, because we knew it was happening," Jungwirth recounted. "We tracked it on a GIS map and found out that the work was going to mobile crews on the I-5 corridor, and locals were getting only 7 percent of that work. That's when we decided that we've got to change the system and get organized on a national level."

In the grand theme of forest restoration, former logging communities have accepted and embraced the idea that they can survive by positioning themselves as long-term stewards of the forests. Clearing underbrush and overgrown fuels from 191 million acres of national forest land is one of the stated goals of the HFRA, and is where local stewardship plays a major role. Although it is easier for a Forest Service contracting officer to hire one big company so that he manages just one fuel-reduction contract, cutting out the local workforce is ignoring the chance for long-term forest restoration from willing stewards. Forest communities are eager to take on the tough, labor-intensive work, and at the same time they want a more integrated approach to restoration that stresses long-term health for forests and communities.

"What are you going to do afterwards?" Enzer wonders. "It's not just removing the fuels. If you build a fuel break and don't maintain it, that's not an efficient use of your money. You can't just do it once. You need people in place to keep it working."

Enzer envisions generational poverty on an Appalachian scale for Western communities if they are ignored by restoration projects that could help to rebuild a rural working class.

"We did industrial forestry, but I don't think industrial restoration is the right scale to get this done," Enzer says. "Everybody loses doing it that way: forests, local communities and the public, because we're not fixing the problem and it's a very shortsighted approach to forest health."

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