We asked the Forest Service what it does to protect America's water supplies. We're still waiting for answers
In late 2019, USA TODAY Network journalists began an extensive review of a system of thousands of special-use permits that allow water users to build structures that divert water from millions of acres of public land managed by the U.S. Forest Service.
Aided by a grant from The Water Desk, an independent journalism initiative based at the University of Colorado Center for Environmental Journal, journalists in Arizona, California, Colorado and Utah spent months reviewing the Forest Service's water management practices on drought-stricken forests across the West.
The review showed that many permittees have been allowed for decades to divert water with little to no review of their actions' impact to forest health — sometimes on permits that are expired or never expire.
While the Forest Service's budget for fighting wildfire has more than quadrupled in the past 30 years, ecological advocates say that fight has come at the cost of programs that could better equip federally managed forests to stand up to increased water demand and the threat of climate change.
Those advocates, state water management officials and others who represent the more than 40 million people who rely on the Colorado River basin for water worked with our journalists to bring on-the-ground perspective from across the West to this series.
Farmers, ranchers, municipal leaders and environmentalists all spoke of the importance of the health of Western headwaters to their ways of life.
Getting information out of the Forest Service, however, was a different matter.
Agency officials repeatedly denied interview requests from reporters and editors over the span of nearly two years, directing reporters to submit written questions to spokespeople instead. Those questions, ostensibly sent to subject-matter experts and managers within the Forest Service, went unanswered for months. Many more remain unanswered as of publication of the project.
MONTHS OF SILENCE
While it's not atypical for leaders of large federal agencies to deny interview requests, even getting reliable data from the Forest Service proved difficult.
A February 2020 request for permit data, revised in July 2020, was not answered until May 2021. The Arizona Republic asked basic questions over the course of the next month. Instead of producing answers, the records custodian said the agency’s data specialists would make a new, more “user-friendly” spreadsheet.
The custodian said on June 7 it would be a quick turnaround because the documents were already in hand. The updated spreadsheets didn’t come until July 16.
The records custodian said it took a lot of time for everyone involved to review the records so they’d be able to answer potential questions from the reporter.
But those questions then went unanswered for weeks. Finally, in September, the agency allowed a short interview with data experts.
In that interview, which the agency limited to 30 minutes, data experts told reporter Caitlin McGlade that they use the data to keep tabs on permits, and particularly when they are set to expire. They said they notify local officials at each forest — every year — of any permits that have been expired for more than three years.
Yet officials at the Shasta-Trinity National Forest, which has one of the highest rates of expired permits in the nation, later told reporters they had never received any such notice.
When McGlade followed up with the agency’s press officer to ask about that, she got no response. Other questions also remain unanswered.
Reporter Jacy Marmaduke spent months researching across multiple Western forests, but she too got few answers from the national agency. She made an initial request for an interview about water-related permits in June 2021. She inquired again twice in July and three times in August, to no avail.
After McGlade's September interview with data experts, the reporters consolidated their follow-up questions to again seek answers from the national press office.
They lodged requests and reminders on Sept. 15, Sept. 21, Sept. 27 and Oct. 1. An editor made follow-up requests in writing with Forest Service officials three times in October.
On Tuesday, Nov. 2, Forest Service National Press Officer Babete Anderson promised responses "by the end of the week." On Friday, Nov. 5, she said she was still "waiting for response for a few of our subject matter experts."
It was the last email the press office sent to the news organizations.
WHAT THE DATA MAKES CLEAR
A team of more than 20 reporters, photographers, editors and designers worked to bring these stories about how Forest Service inaction and congressional limitations placed on the agency are hampering efforts to address the declining health of our national forests.
Delays in receiving reliable data or answers to questions about missing information, along with leaders' continued denial of interview requests and the difficulties of reporting during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, delayed reporting of this project by more than a year.
While the agency's data suggests huge gaps in its monitoring of water use on public lands, and while it largely failed to respond to questions about how it handles water uses, an investigation of the Forest Service system made several things clear.
The agency allows many water users to continue taking natural resources while deferring on oversight of how much water is actually taken.
It continues to issue permits for these uses, either renewing old authorizations or allowing new ones.
And it does so at the same time that its own data suggests its water supplies — and the water supplies of America — are running out.
The Forest Service's own climate modeling, based on a future with optimistically low carbon emissions and a "wet scenario," still predicts major declines from some crucial Western territory, possibly as much as the entire amount of Colorado River water delivered to Arizona annually.
Regardless of the difficulties in modeling future precipitation, there's no question rivers are yielding less water, major reservoirs are in decline and Western water planners are already worried about the future.
The Forest Service has, in modern history, been responsible for stewardship of the source of much of that water. What the agency will do to serve in that role in the future is a question the Forest Service has yet to answer.
***
This article was supported by a grant from The Water Desk, an independent journalism initiative based at the University of Colorado-Boulder’s Center for Environmental Journalism.
This article originally appeared on Fort Collins Coloradoan: Forest Service's inaccurate data, denied interviews delayed reporting
