Tom Wheeler, EPIC Executive Director
Note: For the past year, EPIC has filed and reviewed numerous Public Records Act requests with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) and CAL FIRE to understand recurring issues in timber harvest plans. After pouring over thousands of documents, we have discovered alarming issues that place California’s native wildlife and ecosystems at risk.
Here’s the backstory: The year was 2020 and things were going poorly. The relationship between CAL FIRE, the state agency charged with reviewing timber harvest plans, and the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, which is tasked with providing advice and recommendations to CAL FIRE concerning impacts to wildlife from logging, had deteriorated. The issues were large and structural, and at their root concerned the degree to which CAL FIRE was obligated to consider the opinions of wildlife experts at CDFW.
Allegedly to resolve issues of disagreements between staff at the two agencies, in 2021 CDFW and CAL FIRE signed a joint memorandum of understanding called the “Communication Protocol for Outstanding Species Concerns.” The protocol, on its face, was “to ensure consistency in the resolution of outstanding questions and concerns related to biological data and species protection measures.” In practice, however, the protocol allows for both agencies to paper over disagreements out of sight of the public record and the public’s watchful eye.
Per the protocol, when an inter-agency disagreement exists—such as whether surveys for northern spotted owls were adequately completed—staffers are supposed to raise the issue to their supervisor. Supervisors from CDFW and CAL FIRE are then to meet to discuss the issue, and if the disagreement persists, it is elevated to higher levels within both agencies. From our review of public records, the communications protocol has been used by CAL FIRE and supervisors at CDFW to hide areas of public controversy in a way that generally benefits the “regulated public.”
In numerous emails unearthed by EPIC, CAL FIRE staffers have used the communications protocol to silence CDFW concerns about wildlife. How this appears in the public record is that a CDFW employee will report to their supervisor that they received a call from CAL FIRE that the forester has disagreed with the opinion of CDFW or has objected to a question raised by CDFW. This “disagreement” then triggers the communications protocol. Within CDFW, employees are directed to maintain the “chain of command” and to voice their disagreements with CAL FIRE to their supervisor. The supervisor then is supposed to articulate the agency’s position to an equivalent supervisor at CAL FIRE. In numerous instances, however, it appears that CDFW supervisors either don’t adequately understand the disagreement or fail to provide a sufficient defense for their agency’s position.
In one Timber Harvest Plan (THP), EPIC found that CDFW staffers recommended that the agency issue a statement of “non-concurrence,” a rarely-invoked situation where CDFW officially disagrees on record with the determination made by CAL FIRE. CDFW staffers believed that the THP would have significant impacts to northern spotted owls, including potential violations of the Endangered Species Act. CDFW staffers raised the issue through the protocol to supervisors. From all indications, it appears that CDFW supervisors failed to sufficiently voice their concerns and the THP was approved without note of the concerns by CDFW.
By using this new protocol, CAL FIRE and CDFW intentionally left the public in the dark about important and substantial disagreements. As one CDFW staffer vented to a colleague in an email obtained by EPIC, “[I]t’s clear to that what we did…is exactly what our ‘coordination training’ was supposed to do, which was to talk about NSO issues offline/separately and minimize the written record.” In the THP where CDFW staff urged supervisors to issue a statement of non-concurrence, the public would have had a difficult time discerning that anything was amiss because the record, maintained by CAL FIRE, contained no discussion of the disagreement. EPIC was only ever able to discover this disagreement by filing a Public Records Act request and sifting through hundreds of emails. That request yielded documents after the THP was approved by CAL FIRE, the trees were cut, and owls were harmed.