Fish and Wildlife report suggests improper use of federal wildlife funds

Marshall Helmberger

REGIONAL— A recently released report by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, or FWS, provides stunning conclusions on what appears to be a wholesale violation of a federal grant program by the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources. The draft report, completed nearly four years ago, was only made public last month in response to a Freedom of Information Act request by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, or PEER, which made the document available to the Timberjay.
The 28-page report provided the conclusions of a series of visits by FWS biologists in early 2020 to three state wildlife management areas, or WMAs, in order to investigate complaints that the DNR was misusing its federal funds to support logging urged by the timber industry. The federal funds obtained by the DNR were specifically dedicated to benefit wildlife and wildlife habitat yet appeared to be used instead to pay for hundreds of commercial timber sales that the DNR’s own biologists said provided little benefit to wildlife or were even detrimental due to the environmental damage caused by the logging activity.
As the Timberjay reported last August, the FWS has been at odds with the DNR over its use of federal wildlife funds for what appear to be purely commercial timber sales since 2021. The FWS had actually suspended its funding to the DNR for a time, but that funding was restored this past September after the DNR agreed to do a better job of documenting the wildlife benefits of its management activities.
DNR and FWS supervisors have, for the most part, sought to portray the matter as a misunderstanding over paperwork. DNR Division of Fish and Wildlife Director Dave Olfelt said the FWS had placed conditions on the grant that required documentation of the wildlife purposes for forest habitat work covered by the grant. “Unfortunately, this change in the language for the 2021 grant was not fully clear to DNR,” said Olfelt. “As a result, DNR and FWS were operating for a period of time with different understandings regarding the scope and timing of required documentation of wildlife purposes for forest habitat management activities.” 
The 2020 report suggests a far more serious and systemic issue, however, in which the DNR’s Division of Forestry effectively usurped the authority of the DNR’s Division of Fish and Wildlife to utilize federal wildlife funds to support commercial timber harvest.
Olfelt notes that the recently-released document was a draft that was never finalized, and that the DNR had disagreed with some of the investigators’ conclusions. “Among the challenges we had with the 2020 draft report is that it included some unfounded preliminary conclusions that did not tie to clear protocols or standards and did not reflect an understanding of our broader forest management framework,” added Olfelt, who noted that the FWS never concluded that the DNR misappropriated federal funds or that the forestry division had taken over management of the wildlife funds.
Those views generally run contrary to the findings in the report, however, and it is also in contrast to the views of many within the DNR division that Olfelt leads.
“It appears the primary purpose of the observed timber harvests were commercial,” concluded the FWS report. “DNR Forestry seems to be planning and implementing timber harvests on WMAs with little or no Fish and Wildlife oversight. This appears to constitute a loss of control of federal grant funds…” In addition, because the federal funds must be matched by Fish and Wildlife license revenues, the report concluded that those funds, which typically come from the state’s hunters and anglers, were being diverted to pay for commercial timber harvesting that frequently provided no benefit to wildlife, or to the hunters or anglers who helped pay for them.
Wildlife staff express deep dissatisfaction
The possible misuse of federal wildlife grant dollars by the DNR appears to have come as a consequence of a 2018 change in DNR policy to substantially boost timber harvests in response to pressure from the timber industry. The new policy, known as the Sustainable Timber Harvest Initiative, or STHI, came under fire from the start from wildlife officials who argued that the harvest targets in the initiative made it difficult, if not impossible, to meet the DNR’s obligations to provide adequate and appropriate wildlife habitat on DNR-managed lands.
That change has devastated morale among DNR wildlife managers. An internal survey conducted by the DNR last fall found that 90 percent of its wildlife officials reported being either “very or somewhat dissatisfied,” primarily as a result of the new focus on commercial…