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Mike Dombeck
"Keep them busy,
or they will keep you busy."
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Mike: Talk about the opportunity for leadership and government management agencies taking initiative on issues.
Dombeck: That’s a major gap right now - leadership has been taken away from the agencies. An example of the Forest Service trying to turn this around began with the 1998 moratorium on road building. The road building issue had gone unsolved for more than ten years. The Forest Service had not rolled out a policy of national significance like that in many years. The bureaucracy was not a very adept in creating this kind of large-scale change. If we had not taken initiative and merely talked about a proposed management change it would have played loudly in the press and in the Congress and the stalemate would have continued. In an issue like roadless areas the status quo benefits the traditional extractive industries. The more they can stall, the more they can continue practices that chip away at long-term sustainability.
The origin of our leadership began with a conversation I had with Dan Glickman, who was Secretary of Agriculture at the time. I was basically complaining that all we were doing was going up to the Congress and responding to legislation proposed by various members. An example was Senator Craig from Idaho who was proposing legislation to revamp the National Forest Management Act and thereby facilitate more timber harvesting with less environmental protection. The Forest Service was sitting back and saying, “Well, we agree with the objectives, but we are opposed to the legislation because... ” We were only reacting to the initiative of others. We were not proposing anything ourselves. Glickman gave me the green light, saying, “Go ahead; let’s develop some ideas ourselves.” That was really the genesis of the Forest Service’s Natural Resources Agenda, which came a month after the road moratorium.
This was a tremendous turn around for the agency. It caught Congress and the committee chairs totally by surprise because this was the first time in probably fifteen years that the Forest Service leadership had taken a fairly aggressive stance on difficult issues. We generated surprise, even though a month ahead I called Senator Craig, who was a very strong opponent of the change, and told him what we were working on and what we were going to do. When we announced it, he said, “You rolled a hand grenade under the door and caught us by surprise,” which, in fact, was not the case. But nevertheless, this kind of initiative by the Service was a novel event.
This change had consequences to the agency. Employees complained, “We’re too busy. There are too many things on the platter. We can’t keep up with all this.” My response was, “Are you really any busier than you were before?” My experience was that we had always been very busy. I asked staff if they would rather be busy working on our issues or someone else’s issues? Taking the initiative allowed us to work on our issues and set the agenda. We kept putting forward new proposals, such as reforming the system of county payments - the payment of logging revenues back to the local community where the timber was harvested. Our efforts did generate a lot of Congressional hearings, but these were oversight hearings on our issues not us responding to the issues of others. We were already very busy responding to legislation and proposals thrust upon us by others. Showing initiative put us in a leadership position. Others began responding to our proposals, instead of us continually playing defense.
By taking the initiative there were some down sides. In retrospect, “Would I have done it any differently?” Yes. One of the tactical ‘errors’ we made was that many of the forest supervisors, each responsible for an individual national forest, did not know enough of the details. So, by the time we made the announcement, their phones were ringing and they didn’t know what to say to reporters or local officials. We could have done our internal communications homework more carefully, but the other side is, if we had talked about the issue publicly the conflict industry and the lobby groups would have taken it away from us very quickly. It would have turned into a debate between the preservationist groups and the most entrenched timber interests - just the extremes. Members of Congress would have quickly written saying, “We don’t want you working on this.” That would have put me at a tremendous disadvantage. The element of surprise and timing is very important.
The lesson learned here is that when you’re in an agency dealing with legislative issues, either you keep them busy or they keep you busy. If you don’t you lose your opportunity for leadership.