Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack hosted a virtual “Wildland Fire Town Hall Meeting” Monday. The Forest Service was apparently expecting a large number of employees to attend and established a 10,000-person limit on the Zoom platform.
Here is how the meeting was described in an email sent to Forest Service personnel:
Employees representing fire operations, leadership, research, and wildfire support operations are invited to engage in a conversation with Secretary Vilsack and Chief Christensen. This meeting is intended to be a focused and intimate dialogue with employees from the wildland fire community across the agency, however all employees are invited. There is a limit of 10,000 participants.
Chief Christensen will welcome wildland fire employees, speaking to the risks and leader’s intent for the fire year. Secretary Vilsack will share his leader’s intent on a variety of issues that include extended fire seasons, fire and climate change, wildfire response during COVID 19, and an inclusive workplace environment that focuses on employee safety and well-being. Employees will have an opportunity to share their fire experiences with the Secretary and ask questions.
The meeting was not open to the public but some of those who attended told Wildfire Today that there were about 15 people on the screen who may have had the ability to speak including the Secretary and Forest Service Chief Vicki Christiansen. Others represented jobs such as Fire Management Officer, Research Ecologist, Wildland Fire Module Captain, Fuels Specialist, Helitack Captain, and Fire Staff Officer on a Forest.
The individuals that spoke introduced themselves and described their job, sometimes at great length, and then asked the Secretary a question.
The subject of converting seasonal employees to permanent came up at least twice. Climate change, the competitive job market, a diverse workforce, work-life balance, and mental health were other topics discussed according to our sources.
If you attended the event and would like to add more information or have an opinion about the usefulness of a virtual town hall meeting like this, let us know in a comment below, or at the top of the article click on “Leave a comment” or “Comment.”
UPDATE May 18, 2021. We found out today that Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland hosted a similar wildland fire management town hall on the same day as Secretary Vilsack’s.
I just watched the Wildland Fire Town Hall on YouTube. The first thing I noticed, the people on the call were all white. So, Mr. Vilsack how can you talk about diversity, when there were no African Americans, Asians, Native Americans, or Hispanics, on your call? Secondly, you talk about suicides, seriously, you want people to come forward? Why? To get ridiculed, retaliated against or fired. You also talked about sexual harassment…ways to avoid it? Seriously? How does one avoid being sexually assaulted by your Chief? This idea to come forward and talk about sexual harassment, rape, and suicide in a safe environment is a falsehood, because it’s not safe to talk about these things in the Forest Service. I have gone to EAP, but what y’all need to know is what you say in EAP is not protected. I encourage people who have been sexually assaulted or raped to speak out, but know the consequences – you will be fired!!! And I’ve said this before, if you are thinking about suicide talk to someone you trust. Do not talk to someone in the Forest Service it is not a safe place!!!
It was a huge let down. I learned more about peoples biographies than what was going on. But hey, we told congress we didn’t need more money, what do you expect.
There seems to be an unlimited amount of money to pay for wars, etc. Maybe levy some serious taxes on the uber wealthy? It might help if some people pay their share.
The key word missing from EVERY conversation is SUSTAINABILITY… It does not currently exist with the path the FS is on but none of the wants/ needs requested are sustainable either. And that goes for printing more money to pay for everything and everyone involved. Folks request more help, benefits, full time positions, higher wages, long term career paths etc… Thats all great to say but until someone can A) figure out what this will realistically cost B) stick to whatever list they come up with ( still not sure who ‘they’ is yet since noone is steering the ship) C) Figure out how to continue to bring new people in to keep fulfilling these roles and positions since so much of our population does not want to do hard physical work anymore and everyone wants to be recognized for their work and earn promotions which = job vacancies where they came from D) How is it going to be paid for? Our current administration seems to love to continue the trend of printing money and extending unemployment benefits which is already manifesting in crazy inflation. How much more can future generations of citizens pay to sustain all the new and higher paid FS positions? Its already ridiculous what the deficit is. Having Zooms and discussing all the issues at hand are certainly a step in the right direction. But its all wasted effort if these politician cant reel in the spending and find a reasonable way for taxpayers to foot this bill. There is no path to SUSTAINABILITY being discussed and that is where it all needs to start
There seems to be an unlimited amount of money to pay for wars, etc. Maybe levy some serious taxes on the uber wealthy? It might help if some people pay their share.
@Jackson, Hoby Miller – after identifying many of the land management problems, I think that the Secretary should ask the Chief some really hard questions – why is HR so frigging bad after all these years? Why has the FS centralized and Sovietized many of the essential admin areas – making them absolutely disconnected from the employees and agency that they serve? We see no leadership from the Chief – or even curiosity and awareness of the admin failures – and just the past few years, we’ve become a Can’t Do Agency because of our own internal ineptitude. Very sorry to say this, but we’ve met the enemy, and it’s us.
Biscuits, spot on for format changes and doing it again.
Jackson, HR dysfunction was at top if my list and a bunch of other firfighters on a conference call last Friday. Going to try to find some in-roads to start spitlighting that outside the org, since we seem to be willing to ride the understaffed centralized HR ship to the bottom of the sea. Funny how we used to have those jobs filled when people could live across the country…
Well, as far as the comments already on here, I would agree that it didn’t seem to accomplish much, but few of these meetings do, in one shot anyway. If you had hopes of feeling like we might make a solid connection on an issue or hear about something promising and new coming down the pipe, it certainly fell short. The only real promising takeaways were that the Secretary is now aware of our suicide issues, heard the term work/life balance (even though he didn’t fully understand it), and seemed to genuinely care. (He gave a land management answer, assuming that would fix the problems our employees are having.) Although that is a frustrating starting point, as a commenter above mentioned, it is a starting point to work from. The Secretary seemed a bit uninformed on the extent of the impact of staffing shortages, and the number of temps we are still hiring. Hopefully the Chief and him have a good conversation on that before the next proposed budget.
I understand the reasons for skepticism, but I was pleased with how well the Secretary articulated the wildland fire problem itself. The combination, over the past decades, of neglecting our workforce in forest management (including Rx fire) in favor of exclusively increasing our firefighting was short-sighted and counterproductive. Combined now with climate change, we’re paying the price – much of the fire workload and human stress is of our own making and we need to remediate this – but it will take a decade or more. Our Research has suffered, and our technical capacity to perform work on the land has been greatly diminished. The Secretary did a fine job – demonstrating knowledge well beyond what we expect from most political appointees. Would have been nice to hear about the gross incompetence now of centralized HR, acquisitions, contracting, and, supremely, the CIO. These basic bureaucratic functions will present the greatest obstacle to potential progress on mission-critical issues in the FS.
I didn’t hear anything that I found really earth shattering, but then again, maybe this was really for us to be heard rather than the other way around. Whether we like it or not, politicians are the ones who we need to rely on for change, and that change is slow. He can’t just print a pile of money to pay everyone a wage that reflects the fact that most of us will have a drastically shortened life expectancy because of what we do, and then print another one to hire the additional workforce we will need to stop falling behind in our restoration efforts, and he can’t make the public suddenly be just fine with a couple months of prescribed fire smoke in the spring and fall even though accepting that will probably decrease the amount of more intense smoke they have to breathe in the summer.
Agree that this hour and five was more than we have gotten in a long time. Honestly, for the WO PR people who are reading this, we can just skip over all the intro statements about how great the employees on the ground are. With such limited time for an audience and so much on our minds, let’s maximize the opportunities to let people’s voices be heard. I know it’s nice for the Secretary to have some background on who is asking him questions, but if we ever do this again, I think that could be pared back a lot. Let’s focus on the issues and make the most of our time instead of having people go on about family and what the FS means to us. I’m sure that was just what they were told to do, but we’re a bunch of firefighters and it would mean more to this one at least if we could just cut to the chase. We talk about being a learning culture, let’s learn from this: send out a survey to all employees asking for our feedback on this town hall, and then implement it in the next one, six months from now, when fire season is slowing down, marriages are cracking under the stress of another fire season, and the seasonal workers among us are facing another dark winter of unemployment with its mental and emotional challenges.
All that said, I am grateful that the Secretary and Chief made time for this. I’m serious when I suggest another one in six months. It should be a regular event. And, for the pool of questioners, I would encourage more preplanning from the team that set it up to get involvement from the district and forest level. The turnaround time was awful short and that kind of thing tends to exclude those at the 6/7/8/9 levels.
“Secretary Vilsack and Chief Christiansen placate US Forest Service firefighters with luke warm platitudes”
While I applaud the effort, as in this has never been done before, it failed to meet many of our expectations to actually address the train wreck we are all staring in the face. The Chief and Secretary hinted at deeper issues like pay and classification but quickly pivoted to discussing the four fold increase in project work coming our way to address the reality of our hazardous fuels situations. Who the f*** is going to do this work? My folks are burnt, I’m burnt trying to wrangle fire and fuels, and if you flood me with money, orders, and no more bodies, my disgruntlement will only get deeper. Fire and fuels must be accounted for separately, no more suppression dollars paying for it on the side, and we need a dedicated workforce for fuels work. The reality of getting a project through NEPA, get if funded, find the bodies to do it is 5 years minimum. We need programmatic NEPA to address the WUI and money for full fuels crews, no more bs.
But I digress, this meeting was supposed to be about firefighters and it devolved into diversity, inclusiveness, fuels, climate change and oh yea if you are thinking about killing yourself don’t do it. While the Secretary felt genuine unfortunately the FS Chief nodded away while he lambasted previous administration misses on budget requests, knowing full well she is part of the problem. While they hinted at pay and classification they steered clear of those topics with any detail. Instead of one hour, this needs to be a week long convention to even identify the nightmare of retention, hiring, on-going vacancies, remote duty station vacancies, mental health, lack of quarters, increased work load, poor pay, improper classification, IMT membership shortfalls, lack of militia, inequities between NFS and WFS employees regarding qualifications for GS levels, increased fire workload, etc. This is not firefighters whining, this is public servants trying to sound the alarm that in five years we will have a train wreck in federal wildland and all hazard response due in part to the above issues.
It was canned as one would expect and it bored me to tears. But it is a start.
Don’t let them placate you. Press the media, press congress, educate your leadership (I know mine is tired of me talking about it but they are starting to talk about it finally). It’s your job, your life, your family, your country, your public lands.
While I would not disagree with SMKJ Bro or SOP, I looked at it from a different angle. The important audience in the room wasn’t the Secretary, it was the Chief. The Chief heard the top concerns of her “Forestry Techs'” directly, instead of the usual sanitized version she gets 6-layers of leadership later. While I agree that nothing may change in the short term, no one in USDA/USFS leadership can now say they weren’t made aware of the issues (mental health, sexual harassment, classification, permeant-full time, etc..) by the employees, including the Chief and Secretary. The one bone I will throw the Secretary is that at least he was willing to sit down and talk with our folks for an hour and five minutes…which is an hour and five minutes longer than we have received in many, many years.
I sure wish they spent anywhere near as much on the ground as they do on useless overhead and buildings and whatever else they claim they need to make it happen… probably 99% waste from my view looking up.
Agree 100% with SMJ Bro. For those of us that were hopeful the meeting would provide some substance and encouragement–it did not. I actually left more disheartened than before it began. If you ask a politician questions you get politician answers…Dodge and deflect.
It’s a nice thought, but two things immediately spring to mind – “same old, same old” – as in, this is a curated group of folks who have the time and bandwith (ie: not the actual labor force of fire); and “why” – as in, this discussion might feel good, but won’t actually move the needle on issues that have been around for DECADES. Without sounding like Whiney Mc Winestein, it literally takes an act of Congress to get things to change, so…again, what is the point here, really?
I don’t know how these folks were chosen, but I do know four of them personally. These guys bust their a–es during the fire season in the trenches with the rest of us and then continue on in the winter finding ways to better their crews and themselves…all while the rest of us drink beer. They are the go-getters of this Agency, volunteering for just about any chance to speak up on our behalf. As a knuckle dragger, I’m happy there are folks’ out there in our ranks who are more articulate and refined than me to advocate on my behalf. To say they don’t represent the workforce I think is disingenuous. The majority of those folks today are the GS-6, 7’s, and 9’s and are the life-blood of this Agency. I hired one of those folks and now they outrank me…and I’m damn proud of them.
It was an unmitigated disaster. The Secretary at one point rambled on about our similarities to fly DNA for minutes without making a point.
At no point did they even acknowledge that there is a staffing crisis or offer any hope for a solution. One questioner asked how we can continue to support prescribed burns, wildfires, and all-risk incidents while maintaining a work/life balance? The question wasn’t answered.
Even when a question seemed to make an attempt, the questioner fumbled and didn’t fully articulate the point, allowing the secretary to venture off into unmanned drones territory, and a variety of other topics that had no relationship to the current stressors on the workforce.
Watch for yourself
https://youtu.be/6RzX8z5xOdg
Good afternoon smoke jumper bro
I want to thank you for the YouTube insert
I did watch a few minutes in it will have to be another time when I really don’t have time or I got free time how’s that
Kelly Martin’s grass root crew and their meeting is far more interesting …interactive and keeps your attention all the way through from beginning to end so I think the moment I get a chance to spend to listen to it all I can give better feedback but right now initially and I didn’t see anything to keep me going … nothing like Kelly Martin and Riva Duncan and that crew …they got some good stuff going on there. I thank you for the video