Executive Summary of the Stewardship Contracting Assessment

Prepared by Doug MacCleery
Final November 23, 2004

Overview

At the Chief’s request, the Washington Office carried out an expedited review of the implementation, rules and awareness of stewardship contracting. Regional Offices were asked to provide written responses to a number of questions and 74 interviews were carried out with internal and external people. A number of common and interesting themes came out of this assessment.

People really like the idea of stewardship contracting and what it can do

• People inside and out of the forest Service think stewardship contracting is a great tool with significant potential for carrying out the Forest Service’s vegetation management program.
• People feel that the collaborative process associated with stewardship contracting has been well received by the local public and increases the support for needed fuels treatment and restoration activities.
• They feel that goods for services authority has allowed the Forest to implement resource management projects that it would not have been able to carry out or would have been delayed due to lack of funding.

But there have also been a number of commonly expressed concerns about how stewardship contracting is being implemented

• Stewardship contracting involves a significant learning curve (both internally and externally), including, more collaboration, more complex contracting, sometimes local multi-party monitoring, additional reporting, etc. This learning curve is especially steep for those not involved in the pilots.
• Because there is no new funding for stewardship contracting and it is more complicated and expensive at least at first due to the learning curve, some units have been reluctant to get involved.
• The unrealistic acreage targets that we have imposed have been getting a significant adverse reaction.¹ Acreage targets undermine the learning-by-doing objective and are likely to result in inappropriate decisions on which projects are appropriate for stewardship contracting.
• But it is important that each national forest gets experience with one or more stewardship contracts so that we can further advance the learning curve.
• The assessment found that Regional Office leadership is critical to the success of stewardship contracting. Two key elements of success are; 1) Regional Foresters who are strongly committed to stewardship contracting, and 2) when the Acquisition Management and Timber Sale Contracting staffs are viewed as champions and actively work together to assist the field in getting the stewardship contracting job done.
• Regions should evaluate the effectiveness of their organizations to assist the field in dealing with stewardship contracting and the other new vegetation management tools. R-2 got high marks for the team it has established to assist the field in training and problem solving related to stewardship contracting.
• Many contractors are reluctant to participate in stewardship contracts because of the diverse work often involved. We need to learn from experience and develop contract packages that can be handled effectively by our existing contracting community and that will not result in inordinately high bids or no bids.
• In addition, our propensity to write contracts that limit risk to the government and require large bonds is discouraging contractor interest in stewardship contracting. The Forest Service needs to carefully evaluate what will protect the government’s interest and may need to accept a little more risk to the government as we and our contractors gain experience in stewardship contracting.
• Most people responsible for stewardship contracting have had some overview training (what stewardship contracting is). But more training is needed on what it takes to actually put stewardship contracts out on the ground.
• Some people in the Forest Service feel that the collaboration related to stewardship contracting takes too much time and effort. In addition, some Forest Service people don’t know how collaboration under stewardship contracting differs from traditional scoping and public input. Both direction and training on this was mentioned frequently as being very important by both internal and external contacts.
• The contract situation with service and timber contracts can be complicated. Contracting officer expertise is limited in some areas. Because of this, the quality of contract administration has suffered. The Timber Sale and Acquisition contracting communities are not in sync in some areas and, in others, sometimes hostile to one another. We need to find ways to deal with these issues and conflicts.

Recommendations to Address Issues and Concerns

As part of the stewardship contracting assessment, a number of specific recommendations were offered by regions and those interviewed. The Washington Office intends to work with the regions and our stakeholders to evaluate and prioritize these recommendations and develop an action plan for dealing with them.

Review the Complete Final Stewardship Contracting Assessment >

1/ Current acreage targets for stewardship contracting are 90,000 acres for FY 04 and 270,000 acres for FY 05. In FY 04, stewardship contracting accomplishments are likely to be less than 40,000 acres (they were 14,119 acres in FY 03).

Last modified: Monday, 28-Nov-2011 18:47:11 EST