Forest Chief Seeks To Restore Credibility All Sides Watch Low-Key Dombeck Warily

When Mike Dombeck was a student at his rural Wisconsin grade school, the future Forest Service chief was a polite boy who didn’t make a whole lot of fuss.

“Mike was not one that either made waves or stood out,” said Pat Palicki, Dombeck’s McClain Country School classmate. “You could depend on him. He wasn’t in trouble or loud.”

Now, 40 years later, Dombeck heads an embattled agency with 35,000 employees, managing an area the size of 16 states that includes some of the most hotly contested land in the country. And the two groups most interested in the agency’s operations - environmentalists and the timber industry - are watching him warily.

The 48-year-old fisheries biologist grew up in the Chequamegon National Forest, in the heart of Wisconsin’s lake country where T-shirts promote the mosquito as the state bird. He worked 11 summers as a fishing guide and still goes fishing whenever he can.

He is still dodging trouble by keeping quiet. He kept a relatively low profile for 2-1/2 years as head of the more political Bureau of Land Management.

In an interview in his high-ceilinged office, a smiling, low-key Dombeck avoided being pinned down on controversial matters.

He says he agrees with “mainstream America’s” view of forest management.

“They don’t want to see a mountainside of dead trees, as a result of an insect infestation or whatever. They don’t want a mountainside that is black (from fires). They don’t want to see a mountainside that is clearcut, and we don’t do that anymore.”

He went a step further in testimony before Republican Rep. Helen Chenoweth’s forests subcommittee, saying the 1995 “Salvage Rider” - a controversial suspension of environmental laws to clear away diseased timber - has hurt the agency’s credibility. Forest health, he argued, doesn’t mean “log it to save it.”

He’s more elusive on specific policy matters.

The Forest Service must heal public distrust by keeping out of the most controversial or “red zone” areas, he said.

“It is simply common sense that we avoid riparian, old growth, roadless areas,” he told the Senate Energy Committee in February.

When pressed, he said he doesn’t have a “no-roads” policy, believing instead that the agency should decide whether to log unroaded areas with as much local input as possible.

“What you don’t want is a broadbrush policy from Washington that puts strict bonds on what people have to do,” he said.

Critics claim Dombeck’s appointment has further politicized the Forest Service, one of the most independent of all federal agencies until recent years.

Andy Stahl, a former agency staffer and executive director of Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics, said the White House is setting a dangerous precedent by heavy-handed meddling in agency operations that for decades have remained above politics.

Stahl said the February departure of two Forest Service deputy chiefs, Gray Reynolds and Mark Reimers, with 72 years combined experience, proves that point.

Last Wednesday, Dombeck told a Senate subcommittee he didn’t fire the two veteran foresters, but merely asked them where else they would like to serve as he assembled his management team. Another senior assistant is retiring in July.

“I hardly think three out of 35,000 is a purge,” he said.

But under peppery questioning recently from Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, Dombeck admitted he did ask Reynolds and Reimers to leave their posts.

While Dombeck denies that the White House is running the show, he says people should remember, “we work for the executive branch.”

Timber lobbyists are taking a wait-and-see attitude to the new forest chief. Doug Crandall, of the American Forest and Paper Association, said when Dombeck was first appointed some in the timber industry worried he would be a mouthpiece for the administration or Vice President Al Gore.

“We are optimistic that is not the case,” said Crandall, who added, “He’s got a big job ahead of him.”

In his first few months in office, Dombeck is playing up the positives about the Forest Service. He talks frequently about “collaborative stewardship,” in which local input and Forest Service expertise combine for better timber policy.

Even when discussing Idaho Republican Sen. Larry Craig’s proposed National Forest Management Act, which would force a major overhaul of the way his agency works, Dombeck stresses where the two men agree.

“You tell me who is for soil erosion, or who is for poor water quality?” he asks.

But when pressed, he will admit he’s against the transfer of control of federal lands to the states, one element of Craig’s proposal.

“Public lands should remain in public hands,” he said.

Dombeck is also against Craig’s proposed $10,000 fine for those who file logging sale appeals with “improper purpose.”

“How do we evaluate people’s intent?” he asked in an interview.

Craig said he respects Dombeck’s talent and intelligence and believes the new chief is well-liked on Capitol Hill. But Idaho’s senior senator worries the administration’s meddling may hurt Dombeck’s ability to manage his agency. He fears growing conflict as the agency moves away from its longstanding policy of catering to industry needs.

The environmental community welcomed Dombeck’s December 1996 appointment, but is now skeptical. John McCarthy of the Idaho Conservation League is worried the new chief won’t back his conservation rhetoric with action.

McCarthy wants to match Dombeck’s comments about avoiding old growth areas with a pending sale in the Boise National Forest. Some 40 million board feet of timber is up for auction on the Deadwood River; the area has 13,000 acres of old-growth forests.

“In Washington (D.C.) he says one thing, but in Idaho, the National Forests are doing the exact opposite,” McCarthy said. “My conclusion is that whatever we hear from Dombeck is happy talk, window dressing.”

Dombeck could suffer the same fate as his predecessor Jack Ward Thomas, who “came in with all these high hopes and didn’t deliver,” McCarthy said.

Barry Rosenberg, director of the Forest Watch program for Spokane’s Inland Empire Public Lands Council, called Thomas a “great disappointment.”

While some of Dombeck’s statements are encouraging, Rosenberg said, “conservation was severely betrayed by Jack Ward Thomas and it makes us wary.”

Rosenberg is watching the Deadwood timber sale and a proposed 27 million board feet timber sale in Idaho’s Clearwater National Forest.

“I don’t want to condemn him until we see how he behaves on this,” Rosenberg said. “I don’t just judge a man by his words. I judge a man by his actions.” , DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color Photo

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: MIKE DOMBECK Age: 48 Born: Stevens Point, Wis. Education: Ph.D., fisheries biology, Iowa State University. Most recent position: acting director of Bureau of Land Management.