Borderlands Restoration Network, Tucson Bird Alliance and other local nonprofits are scrambling to understand the impact of the January federal funding freeze imposed by the Trump administration on their programs.
The post Federal Funding Freeze Hurts Local Nonprofits appeared first on Patagonia Regional Times.
Kevin Leavitt was just days away from getting reimbursed by the U.S. government for $48,000 when the Trump administration signed an executive order freezing federal funding and stopping payments to farmers across the country.
Leavitt, who owns Farmer Kev’s Organic in West Gardiner, Maine, was authorized to receive money through the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Rural Energy for America Program (REAP). The funding was approved to help with costs attached to a $140,000 project to generate efficient electricity on the small vegetable farm.
The project has been up and running since December, and Leavitt told the Daily Yonder he was on track to get his reimbursement at the end of January. The U.S. Department of Agriculture, or USDA, requires a 30-day waiting period between project completion and reimbursement to verify that the project has been completed, Leavitt said. Since the executive order was signed, he has not heard anything from the USDA about when he can expect to receive the payment.
“It’s getting to be over a month now, and every day that passes, we lose faith in the money coming through,” Leavitt said.
Leavitt is one of approximately 2,252 farmers waiting to be paid by the government for 2024 REAP awards. The amount owed totals $410 million, according to data compiled by Jeremy Fisher using information from USA spending, a government website that tracks federal dollars. Of that outstanding $410 million in REAP payments, just under $300 million is set to go to Republican-led Congressional districts, according to Fisher, who works as a senior strategy and technical advisor with the Sierra Club’s Environmental Law Program.
“This isn’t something that shakes out cleanly along blue or red lines,” Fisher said. “And, this is not large corporations who are making these decisions, these are individual farmers, small businesses that have to put their own money down on the table in order to be able to make this happen.”
If the REAP money Leavitt is expecting doesn’t come through, he will have to foot the bill for the entire project. He said that doing so could put his farm in a vulnerable position to continue operating.
On February 20th, Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins announced that the USDA would release $20 million in contracts that had been paused due to a review of funding in the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), the legislation Congress passed in 2022 that appropriated billions of dollars for clean energy projects across the country. That $20 million represents less than 1% of all USDA funding, according to the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition.
REAP predates the IRA by several decades, though Congress added $1 billion in funding to the program when it passed the piece of legislation in 2022. The purpose of REAP, according to its landing page, is to guarantee loan financing and grant funding to agricultural producers and rural small businesses for energy efficiency improvements and renewable energy systems. Legally, farmers and small businesses are entitled to the money that has already been obligated to them by the USDA for REAP projects.
“These are programs that are meant to save people money, make their lives easier, provide stability and certainty,” Fisher said. “People are entitled to the money that Congress has allocated to this purpose, irrespective of what the administration thinks about any particular recipient.”
Funding from the USDA also supports smaller farms and younger farmers trying to get into the industry, like Leavitt, who is 33.
“To be able to start producing food and do something sustainable, you do need some assistance — farming is a very capital-intensive industry to get into,” Leavitt said.
REAP is just one program under the USDA’s Rural Development umbrella, which encompasses billions of dollars appropriated by Congress for federal spending for rural programs in the form of grants and low-interest loans.
Across the country, Fisher said grant and loan recipients are waiting to hear from the USDA on payments for projects approved under other programs, including the Empowering Rural America (New ERA) program.
Established by the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022, the New ERA program provides $9.7 billion in loan and grant financing for rural electric cooperatives to transition to clean, affordable, and reliable energy. It is the largest investment in rural electrification since President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Rural Electrification Act into law in 1936.
Before the USDA’s funds were frozen, approximately $9.4 billion had been obligated to rural electric cooperatives in 24 states. Overall, the Sierra Club estimates that about 40% of all rural electric cooperative customers in the U.S. are in line to receive funding through the New ERA program. Those dollars have yet to be released by the USDA.
Since the New ERA funds account for around 25% of the total cost of any given project, Fisher said the total investment for rural cooperatives to transition to more efficient and affordable energy is much higher.
“It’s spurring $35 billion, at least, worth of investments across these cooperatives, and in each of those circumstances, substantially reducing costs for customers,” Fisher said.
Beyond USDA programs supporting energy and electricity, the USDA has a host of other programs that go toward supporting farmers and others in rural communities across the country. Sarah Alexander, executive director of the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association (MOFGA), is seeing money frozen for those programs, too.
“The $20 million that was released is just a very small drop in the bucket compared to the national amount that those programs would normally be funding at this time of year,” Alexander told the Daily Yonder. Right now, many of the farmers who MOFGA supports, like Kevin Leavitt, are being told that their grants are under review in accordance with the statement made by Secretary Rollins on February 20.
Alexander said that cuts to the federal workforce, including in local USDA offices, are affecting access to information for farmers trying to track down answers to their funding questions.
“Some folks are calling the office and nobody’s answering. There’s nobody to pick up the phone, or the person that they were in contact with may no longer be there,” Alexander said.
In West Gardiner, Leavitt said that the federal funding he was expecting helps reduce the price of food, like the vegetables he grows. Without it, prices may go up in the coming season.
“If these payments don’t come through, that’s going to add a pretty significant burden to these farms, and it’s hard to see how that wouldn’t end up ultimately impacting consumers,” Alexander said.
The post Farmers Still Owed Hundreds of Millions in REAP Payments After Federal Freeze appeared first on The Daily Yonder.
Workers who had hoped to spend their careers supporting these at-risk local species have been let go. Now, who might take over remains up in the air.
The approximately 360 Montana-based federal Forest Service workers laid off in a blanket federal workforce reduction initiative may soon return to their positions.
The federal Merit Systems Protection Board on Wednesday directed the U.S. Department of Agriculture to temporarily reinstate the thousands of workers across the country who lost their USDA jobs last month after receiving generic emails stating that “based on [their] performance,” their continued employment “would not be in the public interest.” The board considers employment-related claims brought by federal workers to assess the legality of the government’s actions.
The USDA is the largest federal employer in Montana and oversees the U.S. Forest Service, which manages more land in Montana than any other federal agency. Hundreds of Montanans lost their positions with the USFS in a sweeping round of layoffs implemented at the behest of a Department of Government Efficiency federal workforce reduction effort led by tech billionaire Elon Musk.
While many of the Forest Service workers laid off have multiple years of experience with the agency, they were considered “probationary employees” because they were just a year or two into their current position. Among other duties, the laid-off employees were charged with clearing trails, servicing campgrounds and rental cabins, responding to wildfires, controlling noxious weeds, supporting timber sales, restoring fisheries and studying archaeological sites.
Cathy Harris, chair of the Merit Systems Protection Board, issued the order in response to a claim filed on behalf of “John Doe,” a forestry technician who argued that he was terminated despite receiving a “fully successful” performance evaluation as recently as Jan. 15 and being given “only positive feedback” about his job performance.
The Office of Special Counsel, an independent federal investigative and prosecutorial agency that is itself in the Trump administration’s crosshairs, argued that the generic email Doe received was “identical to the mass termination letters” received by thousands of other probationary employees working for the USDA and other agencies. Between 5,700 and 6,000 employees received these emails, according to the OSC.
The USDA should contact laid-off federal workers within five days about a resumption of their employment, according to the Alden Law Group, a Washington, D.C.-based law firm representing the federal workers. The reinstatement restores the workers’ positions through April 18. During that period, Harris will consider whether the agency acted illegally by conducting the terminations without properly considering employees’ performance or going through “reductions in force” protocols for shrinking the federal government’s payroll.
Robert Arnold, a business representative with the National Federation of Federal Employees, a union representing Forest Service workers and other federal employees, cheered the order.
“All those people were fired unjustly, and it’s good that that’s apparent to some in positions of power,” he said. “We hope it sticks.”
Arnold added that he expected additional detail about the Forest Service’s plan to comply with the order in the coming days.
Harris’ order is nonprecedential, meaning MSPB and administrative judges are not required to consider it when weighing future claims.
In a statement about the order, OSC Special Counsel Hampton Dellinger thanked the board for issuing a stay on the firings.
“Agencies are best positioned to determine the employees impacted by these mass terminations,” Dellinger said in the statement. “Voluntarily rescinding these hasty and apparently unlawful personnel actions is the right thing to do and avoids the unnecessary wasting of taxpayer dollars.”
USDA could not be immediately reached for comment on the order.
Nationwide, the workforce reduction is estimated to have resulted in approximately 10% of Forest Service employees losing their jobs, but some national forests were hit harder than others. Mary Erickson, who recently retired from her longtime post as supervisor of the Custer Gallatin National Forest, said approximately one-quarter of the forest’s non-wildfire staff lost their jobs in the “Valentine’s Day massacre.” Erickson criticized the focus on some of the agency’s most vulnerable employees, describing it as an attempt to “demonize and demoralize public servants.”
“It makes me so frustrated when people act as if the Forest Service has never gone through budget cuts or changes. I think, ‘What do people think the Custer Gallatin combination was all about?’ That’s a 3 million acre national forest spread from West Yellowstone to Camp Crook, South Dakota,” Erickson said at a Feb. 25 event in Bozeman she organized to elevate workers’ stories and connect them with community support. “But this time is beyond anything I have ever seen or experienced.”
While wildland firefighters and other public safety personnel were officially exempted from the firing, an untold number of laid-off employees whose primary responsibilities lay in other arenas also served as “fire militia” to support local wildfire operations.
Allison Borges, a noxious weed specialist who was nine months into a permanent position on the Custer Gallatin National Forest when she was laid off, told MTFP Thursday afternoon that she has not yet received any outreach about being reinstated to her position. Borges said she’s reached out to her supervisor and was told that she, too, is awaiting guidance about complying with the order.
Borges said she’s uncertain if she should return to a job she loves and excels at or seek out employment that will offer more of the professional stability she’s long sought. Borges said she appreciates the outpouring of support from sympathetic community members but remains unsure how far that will take her and her colleagues.
“I know people are going to make their voices heard, they’re going to be present. But I’m also watching my agency crumble a little bit,” she said. “Things are happening so fast that by the time our collective voices are elevated to the sort of [administrators] that will help us make change, I don’t know if the agency will still be standing.”
The Montana Department of Labor and Industry on Feb. 28 announced that it has scheduled a “rapid response event” slated for March 12 to help terminated federal employees find new jobs and access workforce development resources. DLI Commissioner Sarah Swanson is encouraging those employees to apply for unemployment benefits and told MTFP that the department would evaluate claimants’ eligibility on a “case-by-case basis.”
The post Labor board temporarily reinstates laid-off Forest Service workers’ employment appeared first on Montana Free Press.
Helping people understand their rights might seem like dry legal work, but working for Jefferson County Immigrant Rights Association (JCIRA) allowed Courtney Morales-Thral, the Multicultural Center Administrator, to make a real difference in the lives of immigrants on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State.
“We heard recently that Customs and Border Protection (CBP) was parked in front of the hospital in Port Angeles, and that stopped someone from going to see a baby in the hospital because they didn’t feel safe,” Morales-Thrall said. “That’s going to make people turn around and go home or go to a different hospital, which may be out here, rurally, an hour or two away”
Despite the Keep Washington Working Act passed in 2019, which prohibits law enforcement from detaining anyone to determine their immigration status and working with CBP or Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers, amongst other rights, immigrants have good reasons to feel nervous.
The immigrant community here still bears the trauma of a campaign waged against them in 2008.
After a suspected terrorist was apprehended at the Port Angeles border, the number of agents increased from four agents to 25. Suddenly, checkpoints appeared on highways, with CBP and ICE agents demanding to see IDs and other documents from drivers and bus passengers. They also monitored public places, like hospitals and schools.
In the 2011 documentary Keep the Border Patrol on the Border, it was reported that between February and November 2008, the border patrol stopped 24,524 vehicles at 53 roadblocks in Washington State. These stops led to 81 undocumented immigrants being taken into custody, though they were unable to find any additional evidence of terrorist activity. “The community was decimated by the amount of deportations, stops, and the trauma of that time in this area,” Morales-Thrall said.
In that same documentary, Pastor John Topal from St. Mary of the Sea Catholic Church in Port Townsend summed up the cultural shift by saying, “The border patrol says it will not apprehend people in churches or schools, but their presence at these institutions nevertheless has had a chilling effect.”
Trump’s recent executive order allowing ICE into formerly protected spaces like hospitals and schools has reignited that trauma for many in the immigrant community, regardless of the State’s new protections.
Dr. Linda Rosenbury, the superintendent of Port Townsend Schools, is working closely with JCIRA to help parents and high school students understand their rights and give them the support and reassurance they need to continue attending school.
The school is also working with staff to understand what types of warrants allow immigration agents into part of the school beyond the main office and what kind of legal support they can get if they have an emergency need.
Alongside having clear messaging for immigrant families and teaching staff, the school also helps families make plans in case anything does happen.
“When I’ve studied ICE raids in the past, it’s a major impact on a community. If there is an ICE raid at a local employer and then there are multiple children left without caretakers,” Rosenbury said. “If we had to place students in homes, we would follow family plans and ensure that there’s a safe place for every student.”
While the schools are focusing on the physical well-being of immigrant families, JCIRA has found a way to help support both their understanding of their rights and their mental well-being through a trauma-informed therapy program specifically for immigrants.
“We started a mental health partnership with an organization, a nonprofit based in Mexico because therapy is hugely cost-prohibitive for a lot of people and also has a lack of cultural understanding and language proficiency,” Morales-Thrall said.
JCIRA connects local immigrants with a therapist in Mexico who specializes in migration and trauma through a new low-bar support program.
“The majority of the immigrants we work with are Mexican, Latino, Guatemalan, and so that’s the focus, but it’s not just for those people,” Morales-Thrall said. This program brought a resource to rural Jefferson County, whose local hospital has struggled to find the resources to provide even basic language support.
“There’s one doctor that speaks pretty good Spanish, and so that’s really great, but therapists, absolutely not,” Morales-Thrall said. “And even if they had a nice white lady that speaks Spanish, it wouldn’t be the same. Because people need that cultural understanding when you’re talking about immigration.”
The post Protecting Rural Immigrant Populations from Expanding Reach of ICE appeared first on The Daily Yonder.
When the Trump administration first announced a freeze on all federal funding in January, farmers across the country were thrust into an uncertain limbo.
More than a month later, fourth-generation farmer Adam Chappell continues to wait on the U.S. Department of Agriculture to reimburse him for the $25,000 he paid out of pocket to implement conservation practices like cover cropping. Until he knows the fate of the federal programs that keep his small rice farm in Arkansas afloat, Chappell’s unable to prepare for his next crop. Things have gotten so bad, the 45-year-old is even considering leaving the only job he’s ever known. “I just don’t know who we can count on and if we can count on them as a whole to get it done,” said Chappell. “That’s what I’m scared of.”
In Virginia, the funding freeze has forced a sustainable farming network that supports small farmers throughout the state to suspend operations. Brent Wills, a livestock producer and program manager at the Virginia Association for Biological Farming, said that nearly all of the organization’s funding comes from USDA programs that have been frozen or rescinded. The team of three is now scrambling to come up with a contingency plan while trying not to panic over whether the nearly $50,000 in grants they are owed will be reimbursed.
“It’s pretty devastating,” said Wills. “The short-term effects of this are bad enough, but the long-term effects? We can’t even tally that up right now.”
In North Carolina, a beekeeping operation hasn’t yet received the $14,500 in emergency funding from the USDA to rebuild after Hurricane Helene washed away 60 beehives. Ang Roell, who runs They Keep Bees, an apiary that also has operations in Florida and Massachusetts, said they have more than $45,000 in USDA grants that are frozen. The delay has put them behind in production, leading to an additional $15,000 in losses. They are also unsure of the future of an additional $100,000 in grants that they’ve applied for. “I have to rethink my entire business plan,” Roell said. “I feel shell-shocked.”
Within the USDA’s purview, the funding freeze has targeted two main categories of funding: grant applications that link agricultural work to diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives and those enacted under the Inflation Reduction Act, which earmarked more than $19.5 billion to be paid out over several years. Added to the uncertainty of the funding freeze, among the tens of thousands of federal employees who have lost their jobs in recent weeks were officials who manage various USDA programs.
Following the initial freeze, courts have repeatedly ordered the administration to grant access to all funds, but agencies have taken a piecemeal approach, releasing funding in “tranches.” Even as the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Interior have released significant chunks of funding, the USDA has moved slowly, citing the need to review programs with IRA funding. In some cases, though, it has terminated contracts altogether, including those with ties to the agency’s largest-ever investment in climate-smart agriculture.
In late February, the USDA announced that it was releasing $20 million to farmers who had already been awarded grants — the agency’s first tranche.
According to Mike Lavender, policy director with the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, that $20 million amounts to “less than one percent” of money owed. His team estimates that three IRA-funded programs have legally promised roughly $2.3 billion through 30,715 conservation contracts for ranchers, farmers, and foresters. Those contracts have been through the Environmental Quality Incentives Program, Conservation Stewardship Program, and Agricultural Conservation Easement Program. “In some respects, it’s a positive sign that some of it’s been released,” said Lavender. “But I think, more broadly, it’s so insignificant. For the vast majority, [this] does absolutely nothing.”
A week later, USDA secretary Brooke Rollins announced that the agency would be able to meet a March 21 deadline imposed by Congress to distribute an additional $10 billion in emergency relief payments.
Then, on Sunday, March 2, Rollins made an announcement that offered hope for some farmers, but very little specifics. In a press statement, the USDA stated that the agency’s review of IRA funds had been completed and funds associated with EQIP, CSP, and ACEP would be released, but it did not clarify how much would be unfrozen. The statement also announced a commitment to distribute an additional $20 billion in disaster assistance.
Lavender called Rollins’ statement a “borderline nothingburger” for its degree of “ambiguity.” It’s not clear, he continued, if Rollins is referring to the first tranche of funding or if the statement was announcing a second tranche — nor, if it’s the latter, how much is being released. “Uncertainty still seems to reign supreme. We need more clarity.”
The USDA did not respond to Grist’s request for clarification.
Farmers who identify as women, queer, or people of color are especially apprehensive about the status of their contracts. Roell, the beekeeper, said their applications for funding celebrated their operations’ diverse workforce development program. Now, Roell, who uses they/them pronouns, fears that their existing contracts and pending applications will be targeted for the same reason. (Federal agencies have been following an executive order taking aim at “Ending Radical And Wasteful Government DEI Programs.”)
“This feels like an outright assault on sustainable agriculture, on small businesses, queer people, BIPOC, and women farmers,” said Roell. “Because at this point, all of our projects are getting flagged as DEI. We don’t know if we’re allowed to make corrections to those submissions or if they’re just going to get outright denied due to the language in the projects being for women or for queer folks.”
The knock-on effects of this funding gridlock on America’s already fractured agricultural economy has Rebecca Wolf, senior food policy analyst at Food & Water Watch, deeply concerned. With the strain of an agricultural recession looming over regions like the Midwest, and the number of U.S. farms already in steady decline, she sees the freeze and ongoing mass layoffs of federal employees as “ultimately leading down the road to further consolidation.” Given that the administration is “intentionally dismantling the programs that help underpin our small and medium-sized farmers,” Wolf said this could lead to “the loss of those farms, and then the loss of land ownership.”
Other consequences might be more subtle, but no less significant. According to Omanjana Goswami, a soil scientist with the advocacy nonprofit Union of Concerned Scientists, the funding freeze, layoffs, and the Trump administration’s hostility toward climate action is altogether likely to position America’s agricultural sector to contribute even more than it does to carbon emissions.
Agriculture accounted for about 10.6 percent of U.S. carbon emissions in 2021. When farmers implement conservation practices on their farms, it can lead to improved air and water quality and increase soil’s ability to store carbon. Such tactics can not only reduce agricultural emissions, but are incentivized by many of the programs now under review. “When we look at the scale of this, it’s massive,” said Goswami. “If this funding is scaled back, or even completely removed, it means that the impact and contribution of agriculture on climate change is going to increase.”
The Trump administration’s attack on farmers comes at a time when the agriculture industry faces multiple existential crises. For one, times are tight for farmers. In 2023, the median household income from farming was negative $900. That means, at least half of all households that drew income from farming didn’t turn a profit.
Additionally, in 2023, natural disasters caused nearly $22 billion in agricultural losses. Rising temperatures are slowing plant growth, frequent floods and droughts are decimating harvests, and wildfires are burning through fields. With insurance paying for only a subset of these losses, farmers are increasingly paying out of pocket. Last year, extreme weather impacts, rising labor and production costs, imbalances in global supply and demand, and increased price volatility all resulted in what some economists designated the industry’s worst financial year in almost two decades.
Elliott Smith, whose Washington state-based business Kitchen Sync Strategies helps small farmers supply institutions like schools with fresh food, says this situation has totally changed how he looks at the federal government. As the freeze hampers key grants for the farmers and food businesses he works with across at least 10 different states, halting emerging contracts and stalling a slate of ongoing projects, Smith said the experience has made him now consider federal funding “unstable.”
All told, the freeze isn’t just threatening the future of Smith’s business, but also the future of farmers and the local food systems they work within nationwide. “The entire food ecosystem is stuck in place. The USDA feels like a troll that saw the sun. They are frozen. They can’t move,” he said. “The rest of us are in the fields and trenches, and we’re looking back at the government and saying, ‘Where the hell are you?’”
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Slim margins, climate disasters, and Trump’s funding freeze: Life or death for many US farms on Mar 5, 2025.
CHEYENNE—Rep. John Eklund thought back a half century, to an era when commercial sawmills processing Wyoming timber abounded and logging was the Equality State’s third-largest industry.
“We should be able to get back to that,” the Cheyenne Republican said Tuesday morning in the Wyoming Capitol.
It’d be a monumental recovery.
Commercial logging in national forests around the country, including Wyoming, has fallen off dramatically from its heyday. Cut and sold timber has stagnated at a fraction of what it was from the 1950s through the 1980s for three decades running, U.S. Department of Agriculture data shows.
Eklund made the remarks during the Legislature’s annual “forest health briefing,” a gathering that convenes state and federal foresters with state lawmakers to discuss the status of Wyoming’s forests. There was talk of current events, like Wyoming’s largest wildfire year since 1988, but much of the discourse Tuesday revolved around the reeling state of the timber industry — and what the second Trump administration might be able to do about it.
Sen. Bob Ide, a Casper Republican, who has qualms with the very concept of federal land, asked the foresters in the room what they thought of Trump’s executive order dropped over the weekend intended to stimulate logging.
The order, titled “Immediate Expansion of American Timber Production,” streamlines permitting processes and outlines steps that can “move projects on the ground faster,” Wyoming State Forester Kelly Norris told Ide.
Among other steps, the order compels new Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins to identify timber-cutting goals within 90 days for Bureau of Land Management and U.S. Forest Service property. Within 180 days, Burgum and Rollins are also on the hook to develop new “categorical exclusions” to the National Environmental Policy Act that could enable logging projects without time-consuming reviews of the impacts.
Trump’s order isn’t the only prospective policy change afoot that could revitalize commercially cutting American forests. The “Fix Our Forests Act,” a measure from Rep. Bruce Westerman, R-Arkansas and co-sponsored by Wyoming Rep. Harriet Hageman, has passed the U.S. House of Representatives and moved to the U.S. Senate. The bill, proving divisive in big commercial timber country, would further expedite environmental reviews — and could potentially have immediate impacts in Wyoming.
“I’m optimistic that the Fix Our Forests Act is going to pass,” U.S. Forest Service Rocky Mountain Regional Forester Troy Heithecker told lawmakers in attendance. “And we’re ready. We have projects lined up as soon as that bill passes.”
Later, Heithecker pointed toward the Shoshone National Forest’s Dunoir area, which he called a “high-risk fireshed,” as an example.
“If Fix Our Forests [Act] goes through, all those high-risk firesheds have a whole bunch of exemptions where we can streamline work,” he said. “And we have funding through the Wildfire Crisis Strategy … to help fuel reductions in that fireshed.”
Still, reviving Wyoming’s logging industry in a place like the Wind River basin faces big headwinds. Dubois’ timber mill has been closed for decades, and, out of necessity, the community has moved on economically.
“It is more challenging in that part of the state, because the infrastructure is already lost,” Norris, the state forester, told lawmakers.
Today, only two mills hang on in Wyoming: One in Saratoga, the other in Hulett. The farther geographically a timber-cutting project is from those mills, the tougher it is to pencil out.
Representatives for both Wyoming’s mills attended the Legislature’s forest health briefing on Tuesday.
“I think all sawmills in [Forest Service] Region 2 are at a crossroads, at the tipping point,” testified Jim Neiman, president and CEO of a company that operates mills in the Black Hills region. “We can’t be arguing about how many trees we’re going to cut. We need to focus right now [on]: ‘Do we want to retain industry in Region 2, or not?”
Neiman, who’s the cousin of the Legislature’s speaker of the House, said he believes the industry’s hit the bottom and that “emergency action” is needed to keep mills running. Wyoming, he told WyoFile, once housed 11 or 12 sawmills and even the Black Hills region alone had seven as recently as the late 1990s.
“Now we’re down to two, and they’re both running one shift,” he said. “Ponderosa [pine] has low value. You can’t survive on one shift. It’s got to run two shifts.”
The post Lawmakers, loggers long for Trump-driven revival of Wyoming’s dying timber industry appeared first on WyoFile .
