Things are finally starting to move along for landowners seeking financial relief from last spring’s ice storm.
A federal program offering reimbursement for the cost of restoring millions of acres of damaged forest is beginning to process applications.
But many landowners and foresters say that follows months of near-silence from the federal agency in charge of the program. And some are still worried that cleaning up their woods in the wake of the storm has made them ineligible for the money.
Neil Haney is one of those people.
He says it’s taken some adjusting to get used to the woods in Boyne Falls after the ice storm. There’s less shade. There are new views with the forest thinned out. And it’s a lot noisier than before.
“At camp, you didn't hear road noise. You'd hear semis occasionally, but you never heard pickup trucks. You never heard small vehicles driving by,” he said. “Now you hear everything.”
Haney is the executive director of Lake Louise Christian Community, which includes a summer camp and vacation cottages, and suffered damage to about 1,700 acres of its woods from the ice storm.
For years, the organization has factored logging money into its budget to lower the cost of camp. To avoid losing that money, Haney says the camp’s forester hired logging crews to salvage as much storm-damaged timber as possible as soon as possible.
“He joked with me that we'd get our first check before we got power back. He was off by a day. We got power back a day before we got our first check,” Haney said. “He had one crew here harvesting red pine that Friday after the storm.”
The organization pocketed the money from the sale and intends to use it as it normally would over the next several decades, since it could be that long before logging revenues begin again.
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Not long after the storm, in June, Haney applied for the Emergency Forest Restoration Program, or EFRP. It’s a federal program through the USDA’s Farm Service Agency. Landowners can get reimbursed for up to 75% of the cost of restoring their woods after a disaster. That includes things like replanting trees, removing invasive species and taking out woody debris that poses a fire risk.
Haney finally had a meeting about his application with the feds last week.
“I was pretty much told that it would be denied because we have done salvage harvesting before an environmental analysis could take place,” Haney said.
But if he and other landowners had waited to salvage that timber, they risked rot and pests, which can set in within a few months, making certain logs worthless for sale.
And this is where red tape runs into the realities of a forest.
Federal workers administering the program have to adhere to certain regulations when determining whether land is eligible, including several environmental standards.
“Nature doesn't wait,” said Bryce Metcalfe, who’s the forester for Lake Louise Christian Community. He was also contracted to do site visits for FSA, inspecting storm-damaged property for which landowners are seeking relief funds. It's one of the first steps in approving emergency funding applications.
Metcalfe said he's pulling out of the program after concerns about how long it’s taking to implement and how confusing the requirements are. He’s worried that the sluggish response will make it much harder and more expensive to replant trees for his clients.
“There's a lot of work that goes into trying to plant trees and get them to grow. You have to babysit them. And the longer you wait, the more herbicide you have to use to knock back the competition, and the more work it becomes,” he said. “Nobody's going to do anything perfect, but there's been enough time to get some results, and it hasn't happened.”
Northern Michigan’s forests will regenerate on their own if given enough time, but Metcalfe believes federal money could be crucial for diversifying species, keeping invasives at bay and replanting red pine, which often requires human intervention to grow.
As of this week, the Farm Service Agency, or FSA, has assigned about 100 site visits to contracted local foresters. That’s out of about 1,200 applications.
Christian Stevens is one of the only contracted foresters who has conducted site visits to inspect damaged property for the program. He says the program is moving along.
“They're still working around the clock trying to get these applications through, and everything that I've heard from FSA has been [that] we could expect to see these applications moving forward soon,” Stevens said.
This is the first time Michigan has used this emergency program on so large a scale, which is one reason it might be taking so long.
The Michigan office of the federal Farm Service Agency declined to comment or provide information about the timeline or status of the program for this story. In an email to IPR, a representative wrote, “There just isn’t time in our schedule for this interview currently.”
Mike Smalligan, the forest stewardship coordinator for the Michigan Department of Natural Resources, isn’t involved in administering EFRP. But he has helped contract local foresters like Stevens and Metcalfe to inspect damage on behalf of FSA.
“This is a good use of public dollars to restore private forests, because private forests produce many public goods, like clean air, clean water, wildlife habitat and contribute to Michigan's forest products economy,” he said.
Right now, it’s some of the only federal disaster assistance available to help restore the millions of acres of forest damaged in the storm.
Smalligan said he’s confident landowners will eventually get that money. And he’s hoping working through the kinks this time will make EFRP money easier to access down the road.
“I hope that the program is well funded by Congress many years into the future, because as [the] climate is changing and rainstorms in January become more common, it is likely that we will be needing this program more,” he said.
FSA could soon assign those other 1,100 site visits and applications may start moving along in the next month or two.
Back at the summer camp in Boyne Falls, Neil Haney is hopeful he’ll be among that group. Some trees have already started growing back at Lake Louise Christian Community, but a little extra help would make a difference, he says.
“The regeneration we're seeing is not the diversity that we want to see. So that's [what] we're wanting some money for,” Haney said. “I can go out and buy a whole bunch of white pine seedlings fairly inexpensively, but if I want to go buy some oak trees and some walnut trees and hickory, the costs start going up. And we can afford a few of those, but enough to properly reforest is out of our cost range.”
Haney is still holding out hope these emergency dollars can help with that, even 10 months after the ice storm that undid decades of careful management.
