Emergency Salvage Sale Program

In 1995, Congress established an emergency program, commonly known as the salvage rider, to boost sales of salvage timber by easing environmental regulations, eliminating the administrative appeals process, and expediting judicial reviews. GAO found that although the Forest Service slightly exceeded its target for salvage timber sales, the volume could have been significantly greater. In July 1996, for example, USDA placed restrictions on the criteria used to classify sales as salvage sales under the rider, which delayed 224 sales containing 722 million board feet that the Forest Service had planned to offer for sale. In addition, in December 1996, USDA told the Forest Service not to advertise any salvage sales under the rider after that date. This delayed 27 additional sales involving 29.7 million board feet. This report also discusses whether (1) four provision of the salvage rider helped the Forest Service to offer salvage timber for sale more promptly and (2) salvage sales of concern to environmentalists met the definition of salvage timber under the salvage rider and Forest Service guidelines.

GAO found that: (1) under the emergency salvage program, the Forest Service offered for sale a total of 4.6 billion board feet of salvage timber, which was 1.2 billion board feet more than the Forest Service had planned to offer before the rider; (2) the total volume offered under the rider was about 2 percent more than the target of 4.5 billion board feet specified in the Secretary of Agriculture's letter to the Speaker of the House of Representatives; (3) the volume of salvage timber offered for sale under the salvage rider could have been significantly greater; (4) four selected provisions of the rider had little effect on either expediting the preparation and award of salvage sales or increasing the volume of the salvage timber offered for sale for the four forests GAO visited; (5) two of the provisions, eliminating the appeals process and expediting judicial review, were of little help because, traditionally, the Forest Service experiences few appeals or legal challenges when selling salvage timber; (6) the rider required that for each salvage sale, the national forest shall prepare a document that combines an environmental assessment and a biological evaluation; (7) this provision was implemented by simply attaching the documents together; (8) Forest Service officials believed that by continuing to prepare separate documents, they could plan and prepare their salvage sales faster and that combining the two documents resulted in an excessive amount of detailed information that was not needed for decisionmaking activities; (9) at the four forests GAO visited, only one retired employee was rehired and a few contractors were used; (10) nationwide, 10 retired employees were rehired and no statistics are available on how may contractors were used: (11) GAO reviewed 14 salvage sales for which the Forest Service had received complaints from environmental organizations that the sales contained excessive volumes of green timber, live and healthy trees, and thus did not comply with the definition of a salvage sale under the salvage rider; (12) GAO's analysis of the contract files for all of the 14 salvage sales showed that they contained sufficient documentation to support the Forest Service's conclusions that these sales met the salvage rider's definition of a salvage sale and the Forest Service's guidelines for implementing the rider; and (13) however, the Forest Service delayed offering 6 of the 14 timber sales until after the salvage rider had expired because of the more restrictive eligibility criteria for salvage sales set forth in the Secretary of Agriculture's memorandum.