US to work with San Carlos Apache Tribe to cut wildfire risk in Arizona forests

The federal government will pump $32 million into a partnership with the San Carlos Apache Tribe this year to thin forests and reduce wildfire risks in eastern Arizona over the next five years, the Biden administration announced on Thursday.

The San Carlos program is among 11 Western landscapes chosen to receive funding from the Inflation Reduction Act this year. In all, the government announced new commitments of $490 million.

The announcement follows on last year’s pledge of Bipartisan Infrastructure Law funds to expedite forest health work in northern Arizona’s Four Forest Restoration Initiative and Salt River Project’s watershed protection program around Cragin Reservoir. That reservoir is a major water supplier for Payson, and also holds some water that flows to the Verde River and customers in metro Phoenix.

Between the two spending bills, the administration has dedicated more than $3 billion to reducing the rising risk of catastrophic wildfires across eight states. Within Arizona since the turn of the 21st century, two megafires burned across more than a million acres. The fear of more such fires across the West as the climate warms and dries has made fuel reduction an urgent priority.

“The crisis is now,” said U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, whose department includes the U.S. Forest Service.

Protecting communities, cultural resources

The San Carlos partnership will work across 3 million acres, including tribal and national forest lands in and around the San Carlos Reservation east of Phoenix. The tribe will use the funds to treat 100,000 acres on the reservation, mostly on its northwestern and eastern flanks. Those areas near the Mogollon Rim have grown dense with ponderosa pines.

The Forest Service will treat another 87,000 acres on neighboring tracts of the Tonto and Apache-Sitgreaves national forests, and south of the reservation in the mixed-conifer forests of the Pinaleño Mountains of the Coronado National Forest.

The work is intended to protect communities, the environment, cultural resources and regional water supplies. Part of the project will minimize the risk of a fire that could rage up Mount Graham, threatening an international telescope observatory, telecommunications installations, and an endangered endemic red squirrel species.

Other partners working to restore the forest lands include the Arizona Department of Game and Fish, the Arizona Department of Forestry and Fire Management, and SRP. A portion of the zone reaches to the south side of Roosevelt Lake, in the watershed SRP uses to serve customers around Phoenix.

A secondary goal is to help the San Carlos Apache Tribe staff up so it can work across more of the 3 million acre zone, according to materials the Forest Service published for the announcement.

The tribe is building a lumber mill that will use thinned trees as a way to help its long-term management goals, Tribal Chairman Terry Rambler said. At a news conference that the Forest Service arranged near Saguaro Lake on Thursday, he thanked the Biden administration for the funds and said they will help preserve not just the reservation’s ecology but the tribe’s culture. Forest thinning will help preserve oaks that provide acorns, which the 17,000 residents consider a dietary staple.

“We can’t be greedy in our time,” he said. “We’ve got to leave something for those that we love.”

'That day as finally come'

Forest Service Chief Randy Moore attended the event at a guest ranch below cliffs along the Salt River. The San Carlos program is among 134 high-priority fire zones the agency has identified, he said, and the legislation making billions of dollars available has for the first time made it possible to imagine treating them all over the next decade.

“My entire career I’ve talked about, ‘What if?’” he said. “And that day has finally come.”

In a phone interview, Mitch Landrieu, senior adviser to the president and coordinator of infrastructure projects, told The Arizona Republic that Inflation Reduction Act funds will keep flowing to projects like this unless Congress decides to pull that funding.

“There’s no reason they should stop it,” he said, when so many communities have faced wildfire and other calamities for so long.

“The president’s bringing receipts today,” Landrieu said.

Longtime participants in 4FRI, the state's largest forest restoration project in the pine forests above the Mogollon Rim, said last year's infusion of federal cash appears to have decisively moved work forward.

For the Four Forest Restoration Initiative, last year’s $54 million commitment over five years helped reinvigorate a program that for years had languished far behind its goals in northern Arizona, according to Ethan Aumack, who as executive director of the Grand Canyon Trust has participated in that program’s planning for decades. The initiative is meant to counteract a century of fire suppression that left expanses with hundreds more pines than would have existed in natural conditions.

The program has never come near its annual goal of 50,000 acres of mechanical thinning per year. Now, though, Aumack and others expect it will soon reach past recent benchmarks of more than 20,000 acres to as many as 35,000 a year, and perhaps to 50,000. That optimism reflects both an increase in a Bellemont mill’s capacity to use timber and new funds for such logistical needs as forest roads and timber sale preparations like tree marking. Those investments should help loggers exceed 50,000 acres a year in coming years, Aumack said.

“I’m as confident as I’ve ever been that the pieces are in place for 4FRI to finally meet its original goal,” he said.

Brandon Loomis covers environmental and climate issues for The Arizona Republic and azcentral.com. Reach him at brandon.loomis@arizonarepublic.com or follow him on Twitter @brandonloomis.

Environmental coverage on azcentral.com and in The Arizona Republic is supported by a grant from the Nina Mason Pulliam Charitable Trust. Follow The Republic environmental reporting team at environment.azcentral.com and @azcenvironment on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

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This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: San Carlos Apaches get federal funds to reduce Arizona wildfire risk