The U.S. Forest Service is rebooting its largest-ever forest restoration project, handing the contract for thinning northern Arizona pines to a new company after the original contractor failed to finance a mill or ramp up cutting in its first 16 months on the job.

Pioneer Forest Products will sell its stake in the Four Forest Restoration Initiative (4FRI) to an Omani alternative-fuels company that will keep its recipe for reducing fire threats and enhancing the region’s stunted ecology. That plan calls for using much of the wood to make biodiesel and finger-jointed furniture parts.

The new contractor, Good Earth Power, said it already has financing for a mill in Winslow and expects to have it operating within two years. Its mill would use parts from a closed mill to be purchased from elsewhere in North America, and would not carry the same $230 million price tag that Pioneer’s had. The company pledged to hire locally when possible and to use half of its profits to support local causes.

“We’re very excited about the project,” Good Earth Power CEO Jason Rosamond said in a conference call in which the Forest Service announced it had approved the contract transfer. “We think this thing can actually change the entire region, and we hope it’s a model for the entire country to look at.”

To do so, and meet the terms of the 10-year contract, the company will have to quickly employ logging subcontractors to add to an average 30,000 acres of logging a year. Until this month, the lack of a mill to process wood had prevented the Forest Service from issuing task orders for more than 1,000 acres of work.

From AZCentral.com: https://www.azcentral.com/news/arizona/free/20130913arizona-forest-thinning-contract.html