The workforce in the Tongass National Forest has grown a lot over the last couple of years, thanks to some major infusions of federal money.
In a presentation at the Juneau Economic Development Council’s Innovation Summit in Juneau this week, U.S. Forest Service recreation specialist Jason Anderson said new staff will help the agency catch up on a backlog of maintenance projects and keep up with the tourism boom in Southeast Alaska.
Anderson said that since the early 2000s, federal funding to support recreation in national forests had been shrinking.
“We were losing our spending power, we were seeing very diminished budgets and the inability to do work,” Anderson said. “It also translated in the inability to hire people to do that work, whether you’re hiring contractors, Forest Service workforce or partnering. That decline is significant.”
But recent federal legislation has reversed that trend. The Great American Outdoors Act in 2020 brought $62 million to the region for long-deferred maintenance of things like trails, cabins and roads.
And the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law in 2021 added another $36 million for other recreation projects, like the construction of 25 new public use cabins across the Tongass.
“It’s huge. It’s time to celebrate,” Anderson said.
Since 2020, the new funding has supported a boom in workforce development for the Tongass. In his presentation, Anderson said the U.S. Forest Service has doubled the number of jobs for recreation operations, which includes a range of positions from custodial staff to people focused on trail and cabin maintenance.
The agency has also nearly doubled the number of positions for their Heritage Program, which focuses on preserving historic and cultural resources on public lands.
And they’ve introduced 8 new staff positions for the special uses program, which mainly does permitting.
“There are a variety of activities that we permit in the national forests,” Anderson said. “Research, guided recreation, things that are incredibly important to our communities and our economy.”
Lately, there’s been a major permitting backlog, and that’s been especially frustrating for people trying to start new recreation businesses to take advantage of the growing number of tourists.
Anderson said that traditionally, the small staff in district offices had to process dozens of permit requests on their own, which caused major delays.
“They might have an administrator, right? A single permit administrator, doing all of the permit activities,” Anderson said. “If that person became overloaded, if they retired, if they went on maternity leave – whatever the reasons are — we might have a hard time meeting expectations.”
Now, they’re introducing a Tongass region-wide team of permit administrators dedicated to working through the backlog and keeping up with new permit requests.
The team will include people with specific expertise on some of the particularly complex types of special use permits, like the ones needed for large hydropower installations.
It will also include a staff member who works directly with the Juneau Economic Development Council’s visitor products cluster working group. That group, formed with federal funding from the Southeast Alaska Sustainability Strategy, focuses on boosting regenerative tourism opportunities and integrating Alaska Native heritage into tourist attractions, among other things.
According to Anderson, filling and maintaining all the Forest Service new positions will be the next challenge. Thirty percent of the jobs on the new permitting team are still vacant, and the Forest Service has struggled with up to 20% staff turnover in recent years.
Correction: A previous version of this article misstated the number of new positions for the special uses program.