Comstock's magazine 0619 - June 2019 | Page 66

n forestry “We need forest thinning crews, we need heavy-equipment operators, we need forest technicians, we need environmental planners, we need people that can do the mechanical and logistical work, we need engineers.” — Steve Frisch, president, Sierra Business Council Petaluma-based company, founded in 2007, has worked on several pub- lic-private partnerships to develop its advanced technologies and evalu- ate their commercial feasibility. Paul says his company has a “21st century answer” to the forest-waste problem that meets California emission stan- dards. The company is building a 3-megawatt commercial plant, called the Hat Creek BioEnergy facility, in Shasta-Trinity National Forest, with partial funding from the California Energy Commission. It’s project- ed to be operational in 2021. Paul, originally from New Hampshire where the paper and pulp industry once thrived, says biomass will cre- ate much-needed middle-class jobs. “You bring employment into rural areas,” he says. “In that part of ru- ral California, I mean, there’s great trout fishing, but the population’s not growing in those neighborhoods. You would certainly get local support for the work.” Shifting at least some of the fi- nancial burden of forest manage- ment to private industry could lead to innovative ways to increase the pace and scale. The Blue Forest Con- 66 comstocksmag.com | June 2019 servation, for example, has devel- oped the Forest Resilience Bond, a public-private partnership in which an organization can use bond money to hire private contractors to do fire prevention or restoration work much faster than the government can. The pilot project launched in 2018 in Tahoe National Forest. Steve Frisch, president of the nonprofit Sierra Business Council in Truckee, agrees that forest man- agement activities can reinvigorate rural communities by launching a restoration economy, instead of the resource extraction one that Cali- fornia has relied on for so long. “We need forest thinning crews, we need heavy-equipment oper- ators, we need forest technicians, we need environmental planners, we need people that can do the mechanical and logistical work, we need engineers,” he says. “If we’re also going to be looking at bioenergy, we need energy indus- try workers who could be replaced from fossil fuels to bioenergy who could be moving from one industry that is declining to another indus- try that could be scaling to meet the challenge.” WHO WILL LEAD THE WAY? Battalion Chief Griffis is a burn boss, which means he puts together pre- scribed fire programs and leads crews of firefighters to conduct these fires. He’s coordinating a fuels reduction project on about 2,000 acres in Ne- vada City. Reader Ranch landowners spearheaded it by applying for this work to be done by Cal Fire a couple years ago. Griffis then reached out to neighbors to see if they wanted to participate in a larger effort. Eigh- teen landowners agreed. “Six, seven years ago, most peo- ple just said, no, my property’s fine, don’t bother me,” Griffis says. “But after five years of consecutively larger and more damaging fires, the interest is now coming out. We are getting more people contacting us, saying, hey, what can I do, what can you do, to get my property cleared?” In September, Gov. Jerry Brown signed legislation requiring the Cal Fire Office of the State Fire Marshal, working with the Statewide Training and Education Advisory Committee, to create a certification program for burn bosses to allow private indi- viduals to become certified to burn. Currently, the state government uses