Jim Geisinger, executive director of the Northwest Forestry Association, a timber industry trade group, keeps Dombeck's letter in his desk drawer so he can quote it with outrage. Geisinger charges Dombeck with flouting the 1897 Organic Act's call for the agency to provide a steady flow of timber. But perhaps more important than his rhetoric is Dombeck's plan to revise agency financial and promotion systems. Where past agency incentives rewarded managers for producing logs, cows, metals and visitor-days, Dombeck aims to promote those who produce the healthiest streams and forests and most diverse habitats and wildlife. He wants the agency's budget, appropriations and financial management systems to make a parallel shift.
Many people doubt it.
As a leap-frogger he is distrusted within his agency, especially at senior levels. And Republicans on Capitol Hill tend to dismiss him as a puppet for Katie McGinty, who as head of the Council of Environmental Quality was Vice President Al Gore's leading environmental policy-maker in the White House. Thomas is sympathetic to Dombeck's position. A Forest Service chief feels obligations to the agency, Congress, the administration and his conscience, Thomas says. Troubled by charges that he was an administration pawn, Thomas said he sometimes rebelled.