The Vallecitos Federal Sustained Yield Unit

The history of the Vallecitos Federal Sustained Yield Unit illustrates the inability of the sustained yield unit approach to meet local community needs. Established in 1947 in the Carson National Forest in New Mexico, the unit's stated purpose was to provide "the maximum feasible, permanent support to the Vallecitos community and nearby areas". With the exception of a few years, the unit's history is one of chronic conflict between local communities and the Forest Service, frustration by local communities over their exclusion by the Forest Service from decision-making about the unit, and the unit's failure to improve economic con-ditions significantly in local communities.

The area of New Mexico in which the unit is located was settled by colonial Spaniards in the 1600s, and many local people are descendants of the early Spanish settlers. In the late 1800s, a federally established land claims court granted the United States Government ownership of the area and, in 1906, these lands were incorporated into the new system of forest reserves and then included in the Carson National Forest when it was established in 1908. Many local people, however, feel longstanding grievances over land which they believe was wrongfully taken from them, including land now administered as national forest.

Although commercial logging came to the area in the early 1900s, grazing remained the primary use of national forest by local residents. The Forest Service perceived overgrazing to be a problem and, in the mid-1940s, initiated a programme of grazing reductions that caused a great deal of animosity towards the Forest Service by local residents. Motivated largely by the hope that jobs created by a sustained yield unit would offset the effects of grazing reductions on local people, the Forest Service designed and established the Vallecitos Federal Sustained Yield Unit. Under the plan developed by the Forest Service, timber from the unit was to be cut and processed by a single designated operator who would establish a local sawmill and employ local residents.

The first operator selected by the Forest Service never complied with the conditions of designation and the owner disappeared within six months. The Forest Service did not designate another operator for the next four years, in spite of strenuous efforts by local people on behalf of one applicant, rejected by the Forest Service because the capacity of the applicant's sawmill was insufficient to process enough timber to achieve forest regulation on the unit. The operator next selected by the Forest Service violated the conditions of designation throughout its five years of operation - which ended when its sawmill burnt down - causing tremendous conflict and animosity with local communities. From 1957 to 1972 the unit had no designated operator. In 1972 the Forest Service designated an operator that had lobbied for the unit to be abolished so as to avoid the unit's special conditions, particularly the need to employ local people. Although continuing as designated operator since 1972, this operator has been accused repeatedly of employment practices that are unfair to local residents.

Through the decades of turmoil and broken promises, the Forest Service has been the unit's architect and manager, relating to the local communities as a "benevolent autocracy" with exclusive authority over the unit. In spite of chronic failures, it has held steadfast to a strategy - dominated by a concern for establishing forest regulation - in which sustained timber flows to a single operator employing local people are foreseen to produce community satisfaction with forest management. While the Forest Service has sought at times to abolish the unit, and thereby escape from a mandate for forest management that benefits local commu-nities, it has never considered an alternative strategy. It has refused every suggestion from its own personnel, from senior USDA officials and United States senators and from local people to establish mechanisms that would ensure that local people can share meaningfully in the unit's decision-making and management processes. The authors argue that the unit would have experienced greater success had the Forest Service, rather than managing the unit for the community, managed the unit with the community by establishing mechanisms for shared decision-making and partnership.