Forest Service Worker Battles Agency Over Alaska Logging Proposal

WASHINGTON — Mary Dalton spent three summers counting eagle nests and bear dens for the Forest Service on Baranof Island in southeast Alaska.

So she was surprised when most of her observations were left out of a formal environmental impact statement prepared by the agency, which concluded that proposed logging wouldn’t harm fish or wildlife on the island, part of the Tongass National Forest.

In 16 years of doing seasonal survey work for the Forest Service, Dalton says she saw few logging sites that appeared more susceptible to dangerous landslides than the steep slopes targeted for clear cuts in deer and bear habitat on Baranof.

She reported the omissions to her superiors last spring.

When they didn’t respond, the forestry and wildlife technician did what she thought any citizen had the right to do. She filed a formal administrative appeal challenging the 2,000-acre timber sale.

That got her a 30-day suspension, followed by a 2,000-mile transfer.

“Forest Service employees may not participate as appellants or interested parties on Forest Service decisions,” Forest Service regional supervisor Phil Janik in Juneau wrote in denying Dalton’s May 4, 1996, appeal.

A month later, forest supervisor Gary Morrison told Dalton her position was “surplus to the needs of the Forest Service” and was being eliminated.

She was placed on a list of surplus workers and reassigned in October to the Coronado National Forest in Arizona.

“They really hammered her,” said Andy Stahl, a lawyer for the Assn. of Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics, an advocacy group for agency whistle-blowers based in Eugene, Ore.

“Most Forest Service employees understand that the agency shoots its messengers,” he said.

Dalton, 43, and the employees group filed a federal lawsuit April 17 in Washington, challenging the Forest Service contention that agency workers are prohibited from filing citizen appeals.

“From our research, it has never been challenged in court,” said Patrick Parenteau, Dalton’s lawyer and director of the Vermont Law School’s environmental law center in South Royalton, Vt.

Dalton, who has a spotless work record, also is challenging her reassignment through federal channels, Parenteau said.

“There isn’t much more they could have done to her,” he said. “Her whole orientation was toward wet, almost rain-forest, ecosystems and they have sent her to an inferno, to a desert fighting fires.”

Dalton declined comment on the case, citing Forest Service rules.

Dalton, who grew up in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains, told We Alaskans magazine last fall that she had come to love the lush forests of the Southeast Alaska coast. She lived in a 10- by 12-foot cedar cabin outside Sitka, Alaska, on Baranof.

“When you go down south after you’ve been here, it seems so bland, so crowded and degraded, and you just want to come back here. It’s so pristine,” Dalton told the magazine in September.

She said Forest Service supervisors first warned her about her activities last summer, after she voiced concerns about the impacts of Tongass logging at a Sitka meeting attended by Sen. Frank Murkowski (R-Alaska), chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee.

Murkowski and fellow Alaska Republicans Sen. Ted Stevens, chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, and Rep. Don Young, chairman of the House Resources Committee, regularly press the Forest Service for increased logging on the Tongass.

Backers of the ban on employee appeals of timber sales say the rule is necessary to bring finality to an already complicated planning process.

“I have a lot of respect for the Forest Service’s field people. They do good work. But it seems to me that if they are employees of the Forest Service, they have a responsibility to work out their differences through the system, through the proper chain of command,” said Jack Phelps, executive director of the Alaska Forest Assn., a Ketchikan-based industry trade group. “For underlings to go around the process doesn’t seem appropriate.”

Dalton had been writing her supervisors about the proposed sale since the fall of 1995, when she saw a draft version of the environmental impact statement, to express concern that field reports were being ignored in favor of computer-generated population projections.

She reported “serious discrepancies . . . from my own field records” and “either willful negligence or serious miscommunication . . . in the interpretation of other field data.”

“My repeated attempts to call attention to errors and misinformation while the field work was underway have only succeeded in branding me as a troublemaker and getting my position abolished,” she told Janik in a May 1996 memo.

The impact report, required under the National Environmental Policy Act, “was an embarrassment to those of us who did work so hard to give a true picture of the area and its resource potential, only to be ignored or overruled by those who spent the least time on the ground and the most time juggling statistics to give desired results,” she wrote.

Some records on file were listed as missing and data “unfavorable to harvest plans has been omitted,” she said in a September 1995 memo to her immediate field supervisor, Forest Service team leader James Thomas.

Missing from the document were observations that included “an eagle nest, with a nestling in it and adults circling nearby . . . two bear-den sites, recently occupied . . . evidence of heavy deer use . . . hawk nest,” Dalton said.

The impact report also ignored evidence that past logging had depleted topsoils and caused erosion into fish streams, she said.

Neither Morrison nor Janik can discuss the case because of the pending litigation, Forest Service spokesman Alan Polk said from agency headquarters in Washington.

“We feel that we’ve done our job in preparing these NEPA [National Environmental Policy Act] documents and will respond through the courts,” agency spokesman Steve Ambrose said last fall.

While Dalton’s population counts are missing from agency documents, Forest Service officials have kept meticulous records of her complaints, noting that her formal appeal letter was received by Janik on May 6, 1996, “at 7:46 a.m.”

In addition to filing an inappropriate timber-sale appeal, Forest Service officials said, Dalton violated agency rules by using an agency computer and fax machine to file her challenge.

“If she had just written a letter, and not said on it ‘appeal,’ it would have just been one Forest Service employee telling her boss what was wrong with a government document,” said Stahl, the lawyer for the whistle-blowers’ group. “These are exactly the kind of people that should be filing appeals--experts in the field who know what is going wrong.”