Admin. hires PR company, Bills Tax Payers.

[mburbank]

For those of you who don't want to read this entire article, here are the most salient points.

1.) The Forest Service hired a private PR firm to sell their new Sierra Nevada Forrestry plan.

2.) They said the work the firm was doing would cost nothing.

3.) As it turns out, 'nothing' is code for $113,000.00 dollars which came out of their budget (and your pocket) at a time when everyone agrees park service infrastructure is falling apart.

Hmmm. If I told my boss something I'd done cost nothing and then gave him a bill for $13,000.00 dollars and said it was a 'missunderstnding', I'd be in trouble.

Forest Service spent $113,000 promoting Sierra Plan

DON THOMPSON, Associated Press Writer
Wednesday, March 10, 2004



U.S. Forest Service officials who had told The Associated Press there was no cost breakdown for a sophisticated promotional effort acknowledged Wednesday they have paid $113,000 to market controversial changes to a Sierra Nevada management plan.

The Forest Service did not disclose the public relations strategy despite a Freedom of Information Act request filed by an environmental group. Craig Thomas, director of the Sierra Nevada Forest Protection Campaign, said someone anonymously mailed him the document in a plain manila envelope last month.

"They didn't include it because they knew it was going to be damaging, and now it's more damaging," Thomas said. "They're keeping things away from us that they don't want us to see, which is illegal."

Forest Service spokesman Matt Mathes said cost figures were compiled only Tuesday, though the contract with OneWorld Communications Inc. of San Francisco was signed in December and shows a partial cost. When the marketing plan was unveiled in January, officials told the AP there was no cost for the "Forests with a Future" promotion featuring a video and wall-sized four-color posters aside from the overall cost of managing the 11 Sierra national forests.

Forest Service officials on Wednesday blamed their earlier statements on a misunderstanding. OneWorld was paid $90,000 and another $23,000 was spent on production and mailing, Mathes said.

Rep. Jay Inslee, D-Wash., criticized the service for "using taxpayer money to spin the public" during a budget hearing of a House Resources subcommittee Wednesday.

Forest Service Chief Dale Bosworth said the public relations firm was hired to help the public "better understand what the decisions are."

Agriculture Undersecretary Mark Rey, who oversees forest policy, denied the public was "spun." Though it was apparently the first time the service hired an outside public relations firm, Rey told Inslee, "There's nothing new here, nothing sinister here."

Rep. Scott McInnis, R-Colo., chairman of the forests subcommittee, said every congressman and senator maintains "spinmasters" who put out communications about their office.

Mathes said the strategy leaked to Thomas was OneWorld's "preliminary response," and wasn't required to be released under the federal public records act. The previously undisclosed Nov. 21, 2003, "public relations sketch-plan" follows an October "media relations strategy and action plan" that Mathes said was public record.

OneWorld's 11-page "sketch" includes a confidentiality clause asking that it not be made public for fear it might be misinterpreted as the Forest Service unveiled its revised plan to manage 11.5 million acres of Sierra national forests. Environmental groups are appealing that new plan.

The secret strategy outlined two "equally important" goals: to promote the Forest Service's plan to triple logging in the Sierra as necessary to prevent catastrophic wildfires; and to counter "an apparent atmosphere of mistrust and cynicism about the government's real intentions" and a public perception the Forest Service was acting "due to some hidden politically motivated agenda."

For instance, "in the present Republican 'pro-business' administration they (the public) may be cynical about the government's motives, such as the long-term health of the Environment being sacrificed for short-term financial gains and votes."

Many of the PR firm's proposals were adopted. Jay Watson, director of The Wilderness Society's wildfire program, called the result "a gross simplification" of the Forest Service's plans to boost logging.

"I guess image was everything, because the plan will not deliver the image that's promised," Watson said. "The whole package was really concocted as a diversionary tactic to draw attention from the fact that they're dumping the (Clinton-era management) framework and replacing it with something that's pseudo-science at best."

Mathes defended what he said is an apparently unprecedented decision within the Forest Service to hire a public relations firm.

"It's kind of hard to oversimplify extreme fire danger, and that's what we were struggling with internally," Mathes said. "We tend to do it in a highly bureaucratic and tedious manner. We feel we weren't getting our bottom-line message across."

The message they settled on, described by regional Forest Service chief Jack Blackwell as the management plan was announced in January, was that overgrown Sierra forests coupled with an inevitable drought pose the same danger as confronted Southern California residents during last fall's record fires.

"Jack does not want to see catastrophic fire in the Sierra Nevada on his watch," Mathes reiterated Wednesday. "We have the same overcrowded forest conditions in the Sierra Nevada that we had around Lake Arrowhead (east of Los Angeles). All that we're currently missing is the drought."