Stewardship Contract Nears End Of Its Run

* Forest restoration in Eastern Arizona.

* Introduce industry to the region.

* Treat 150,000 acres of forest lands.

* Stimulate economic growth.

“It has been a success,” Zornes told the group. He said the stewardship contract is responsible for sustaining 15 local industries and from 300 to 325 full-time equivalent jobs per year.

“The contract had 60 task orders,” said Zornes, which called for thinning from 400 to more than 2,000 acres.

“When we’re done, nothing is left but the stumps of the trees,” Zornes said. He explained that every part of the trees cut is used by the local industries, with the lower tree trunks going to the saw mills, the thinner, upper reaches of the trees going to pellet mills and the branches to biomass power plants like NOVO Power, which is located at the old Catalyst paper Mill west of Snowflake.

“We made $34 million in direct payments for those task orders,” said Zornes. He noted that was the money paid to the contractors over the course of the 10-year contract to get the thinning work done.

“We also paid out an additional $2.5 million per year for prep work to get the task orders ready,” he added.

“We have three large treatment programs in our region,” said Zornes, “the Jemez and Zuni programs in New Mexico, and 4FRI in Arizona. 4FRI is the largest by far.”

According to Zornes, the treatment programs take up 45 percent of his agency’s budget “and 4FRI takes a big part of that,” he said.

Another benefit of the stewardship contract was the added protection it afforded during the disastrous Wallow fire of 2011.

“We only lost 34 structures in the Wallow fire,” Zornes told the meeting. He said the Wallow fire proved the effectiveness of the treatment programs in areas where the treated forests bordered towns, known as the wildland–urban interface.

Now that the White Mountain Stewardship Contract is ending, Zornes said any future thinning treatments will fall under the 4FRI umbrella.

“The White Mountain Stewardship Contract was the fore-runner of 4FRI,” Zornes said. He also noted that the forest product industries which have grown up around the stewardship contract are, for the most part, located in the eastern part of the forest, whereas the ongoing 4FRI work is being carried out in areas 100 miles, or farther, away from the existing wood processing facilities, making transporting the logs to the mills expensive.

Navajo County District IV Supervisor David Tenney next told the group he and Zornes have met with Arizona Department of Transportation officials regarding a pilot program which would allow logging trucks to haul up to 90,000 to 100,000 pounds, rather than the current limit of 80,000 pounds.

According to Tenney, increasing the allowable weight the trucks could haul would be one way to ease the burden of trucking the logs to the mills located in Eagar.

RealAZ Executive Director Hunter Moore then gave a brief presentation on the Arizona Sector Partnership program from the Arizona Commerce Authority.

According to the Commerce Authority’s website, “A sector partnership is an industry-led effort that collectively defines common opportunities and challenges, and connects these businesses with workforce, education, and economic development partners. These employer-driven and regional partnerships create highly customized solutions that improve a company’s bottom line.”

“This is an effort to get people from the major industry sectors to meet and let the economic developers know what they need,” Moore told the group. He noted some sectors present in the Real AZ Corridor area include education, healthcare, mining, forest products, tourism, ranching and power generation.

“I feel like we’re making some progress,” Moore told the gathering.

The next meeting of the RealAZ Corridor group is slated at 12 noon on Thursday, July 10, upstairs at Celebrations restaurant in Snowflake.