BY EMERY COWAN
The announcement last month that the Forest Service would be ramping up manpower and money on the region’s Four Forest Restoration Initiative was perhaps most anticipated and most desperately needed in an area far from Flagstaff.
Loggers, mills and wood products businesses on the eastern portion of the project’s footprint are teetering on the edge of survival, according to a Feb. 17 letter sent to U.S. Forest Service Chief Thomas Tidwell.
The letter stated that 90 percent of the log utilization industry in the White Mountains has had to temporarily shut down due to a lack of wood supply. The cause, the letter said, was inadequate acreage being made available by the Forest Service in the form of thinning contracts in the area.