The workforce in the Tongass National Forest has grown a lot over the last couple of years, thanks to some major infusions of federal money.
In a presentation at the recent Juneau Economic Development Council’s Innovation Summit in Juneau, U.S. Forest Service recreation specialist Jason Anderson said new staff will help the agency catch up on a backlog of maintenance projects and keep up with the tourism boom in Southeast Alaska.
Anderson said that since the early 2000s, federal funding to support recreation in national forests had been shrinking.
“We were losing our spending power, we were seeing very diminished budgets and the inability to do work,” Anderson said. “It also translated in the inability to hire people to do that work, whether you’re hiring contractors, Forest Service workforce or partnering. That decline is significant.”