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Forest official faces combined task Mike Lunn will oversee merger of Rogue River, Siskiyou staffs By PAUL FATTIG GRANTS PASS -- During his 31 years in the Forest Service, Siskiyou National Forest Supervisor Mike Lunn has survived his share of wildfires, protests and litigation. But Lunn, although he plans to retire at the end of the year, still faces one of his toughest tasks: combining the Siskiyou and Rogue River national forest headquarters staffs. "This is a big challenge, but I see it as doable," said Lunn, 54, who becomes the supervisor of both forests June 20. "I see it (the merger) as something where we can provide some real benefits, not only to the public, but also to our employees," he said, adding, "The alternative of doing nothing is much worse than whatever we might do in terms of bringing the two forests together." The goal is to save about $1 million annually by combining the staffs, officials said. Before he was named deputy regional forester for the Forest Service's Southwestern Region in Albuquerque, N.M., Rogue River Forest supervisor Jim Gladen had been slated to take over both forests. He leaves June 18. Budget cuts and their accompanying staff reductions mean both forests cannot afford the luxury of having a stable of specialists, as each has had in the past, Lunn said. "Yet our complexities are going up, so we are going to have to have those scientific and technological skills," he said. "We just have to find ways to share them." Combining national forest headquarters to streamline budgets and staff is not uncommon in the Pacific Northwest, where federal timber harvests have fallen along with forest budgets, Lunn observed. "We've already begun sharing staff," he said of consolidating human resources and engineering departments. "As we get vacancies, we'll fill them based on the needs of both forests." There are about 225 full-time employees on the Siskiyou and roughly 250 on the Rogue forest. A decade ago there were nearly 1,000 full-time employees on both. Lunn, who assumed the Siskiyou forest leadership in 1990, plans to keep his Grants Pass office but will spend two days or so a week at the Rogue River forest headquarters in Medford. A search is under way for a deputy forest supervisor who will be based in Medford. Since that person probably won't be selected until late in the summer, an acting deputy forest supervisor will be appointed during the interim. Despite the merger, the two forests will continue to have separate identities, Lunn said. Only Congress has the authority to create one forest out of the two, he added. The forests, created shortly after the turn of the century, have much in common, Lunn said. "We can bring together the management of the Rogue River from its headwaters all the way to the ocean," he said. "Many of our issues are on a watershed basis. "What doesn't make sense anymore are the earlier proclaimed forest boundaries. Those boundaries don't mean much to our public anymore." There are no plans to change district ranger offices. But in the year 2003, the Forest Service plans to build a new headquarters for both forests on Bureau of Land Management land at 3040 Biddle Road in Medford, the site of the BLM's Medford District office. The plan is to sell the Forest Service's property on McAndrews Road in Medford, then use the receipts to build the agency's own office as part of an agreement with the BLM. Mail Tribune Copyright � The Mail Tribune 1999, Medford, Oregon USA