Although its effect on communities can be devastating, wildland fire is a natural and necessary process that provides many benefits to ecosystems, such as maintaining habitat diversity, recycling soil nutrients, limiting the spread of insects and disease, and promoting new growth by causing the seeds of fire-dependent species to germinate. Wildland fire also periodically removes brush, small trees, and other vegetation that can otherwise accumulate and increase the size, intensity, and duration of subsequent fires. Wildland fire occurs in various combinations of frequency and severity, from low-severity events that return every few decades to high-severity fires that occur once every 200 years or more. Over the past century, however, various management practices—including fire suppression, grazing, and timber harvest—have reduced the normal frequency of fires in many forest and rangeland ecosystems and contributed to abnormally dense, continuous accumulations of vegetation, which can fuel uncharacteristically large or severe wildland fires. The impacts of these fires have intensified as more and more communities develop in areas that are adjacent to fire-prone lands—the wildland-urban interface. Federal researchers have estimated that unnaturally dense fuel accumulations on 90 million to 200 million acres of federal lands in the contiguous United States place these lands at an elevated risk of severe wildland fire. The rapid urbanization of forested land in Colorado and Utah has raised concerns about the unhealthy condition of forests in those states and the potential for resulting wildland fires. These forests also have undergone insect and disease attacks of epidemic proportions, further weakening them and contributing to the abundance of fuels for wildland fires. For example, the mountain pine beetle epidemic now affecting the southern Rocky Mountains and other western areas has produced vast areas of dead and dying lodgepole pine forests in Colorado and Wyoming. In recent years, wildland fires in Colorado and Utah have increasingly threatened communities in the interface as well as watersheds (i.e., areas that are drained by rivers or other waterways) that provide water to populated areas in or near forests. The U.S. Forest Service and BLM are the primary federal agencies responsible for wildland fire management—together, they oversee about 450 million acres of forest and rangeland. These agencies take various steps to reduce hazardous fuels (fuel reduction) on wildlands, including mechanical treatments that use equipment to cut vegetation back to desired levels (thinning), planned low-level fires that burn small trees and underbrush (prescribed fire), herbicides that kill unwanted vegetation, animal grazing, or combined treatments that comprise one or more of these methods. Through these efforts, the agencies attempt to restore forest and rangeland ecosystems to their historical conditions and reduce the risk of severe wildland fires. Like their federal counterparts, some state forest services also have an important role in community fire prevention. Such agencies maintain crews that suppress wildland fires, conduct forest thinning and prescribed burns, advise local landowners on ways to build fire-resistant structures, and direct homeowners to local contractors who provide fuel reduction services. They also assist in the development of community wildland fire protection plans that set priorities for fuel reduction treatments and recommend specific strategies to reduce fire risk on public and private land. In addition to efforts to reduce the risk that wildland fires will occur, federal and state agencies take other steps to mitigate the impact of wildland fires. These steps include projects to stabilize damaged areas and rehabilitate them more quickly than would occur under natural conditions. Such projects involve activities such as planting native grasses, shrubs, and trees; protecting waterways from erosion that could introduce sediment into municipal water supplies; and restoring habitat for local fish and wildlife populations. Attempts at widespread fuel reduction and postfire rehabilitation in the wildland-urban interface can be frustrated by the diverse mixture of property ownership typically found in this region. A single forest area may contain tracts of land that are publicly owned, such as national forests and state parklands, as well as tracts that are controlled by a multitude of private owners. This mixed-ownership setting creates the potential for individual pockets of untreated land to exist within a project area if some property owners do not want to join the effort. For example, U.S. Forest Service efforts to treat national forest land may be impeded if access to these areas is dependent upon consent from private property owners. Access to national forest land may also be limited if the project site falls within an area where road construction is restricted. In such instances, areas left untreated can diminish the effectiveness of the overall project. Even if the U.S. Forest Service wanted to join the project, a separate contract with the vendor—containing separate requirements for contract performance—would typically be necessary. Beginning in 1998, the U.S. Forest Service and CSFS began exploring ways to manage land across ownership boundaries, particularly in wildland- urban interface areas. The two forest services agreed that management activities such as fuel reduction should be undertaken only where community interest and support exists, and, thus, these activities would be driven largely by state, local, and private projects. To facilitate this work, they determined that it would be useful for Colorado state foresters to serve as agents of the U.S. Forest Service for the purpose of conducting projects on federal lands immediately adjacent to state, local, or private lands where similar work was under way. Colorado’s foresters would be authorized to mark boundaries, designate trees for removal, and administer other project activities—including sales of designated trees in the project area—to reduce fuel risk on federal lands as a complement to similar activities on adjacent lands. Because of the collaborative nature of these projects, the proposed program became known as “Good Neighbor.” In the Department of the Interior and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2001, Congress established the program, authorizing the U.S. Forest Service to allow its state counterpart in Colorado to perform forest, rangeland, and watershed restoration services, such as fuel reduction or treatment of insect-infected trees, on national forest lands. The services provided by the state, either directly or through contracts with private vendors utilizing state contracting procedures, were permitted when similar and complementary activities were being performed on adjacent state or private lands. According to the subsequent agreement signed by representatives of the two forest services, the following benefits were anticipated from Good Neighbor authority: national forest, state, and private lands would be at less risk from fuel treatments would provide defensible space for firefighters to occupy while combating fires moving from forests to developed areas, or vice versa; an impediment to cross-boundary watershed restoration activities would be removed, resulting in greater protective and restorative accomplishments; and CSFS and the U.S. Forest Service would demonstrate cooperation as encouraged in the National Fire Plan, the federal government’s wildland fire management strategy. Congressional reauthorization of Good Neighbor authority in 2004 added BLM areas in Colorado to the authority’s scope. In addition, the 2004 legislation authorized the U.S. Forest Service to work with Utah’s forest service to perform similar watershed restoration and protection projects in Utah. Unlike the authorizing legislation for Colorado, however, there was no provision in the authorizing legislation for Utah requiring Good Neighbor projects to correspond to similar and complementary activities under way on adjacent state or private lands. The U.S. Forest Service manages 11 national forests in Colorado, within the agency’s Rocky Mountain Region, and manages 7 national forests in Utah, within the Intermountain Region. Each national forest is divided into ranger districts that conduct or oversee “on-the-ground” activities. BLM lands in Colorado are managed by the Colorado State Office, which in turn oversees BLM field offices across the state. CSFS administers 17 districts throughout the state, each led by a district forester. UDFFSL, a unit of the state’s Department of Natural Resources, is divided into six areas, each administered by an area manager. Under Good Neighbor authority, 53 projects have been conducted in Colorado and Utah as of the end of fiscal year 2008 at a cost to the federal government of about $1.4 million. Colorado Good Neighbor projects focused on fuel reduction activities, such as tree thinning, mostly in the Colorado wildland-urban interface. In Utah, Good Neighbor projects focused on the repair of fire-damaged trails and watershed protection and restoration. In Colorado, 38 projects were conducted under Good Neighbor authority from fiscal year 2002, after the authority was granted, through fiscal year 2008. These projects primarily focused on fuel reduction. CSFS planned these projects in conjunction with the U.S. Forest Service or BLM, as well as private owners, and then contracted with private vendors or state crews to perform the work on U.S. Forest Service or BLM land. Of these 38 projects, 29 were on U.S. Forest Service land. These 29 projects included fuel reduction treatment on about 2,400 acres in 5 of the 11 national forests in the state—the Arapaho, Pike, Roosevelt, San Isabel, and San Juan National Forests––with 25 of the projects conducted in the Pike and San Isabel National Forests. The remaining 9 Good Neighbor projects occurred on forested BLM land covering about 100 acres in Boulder County. The number of acres being treated under individual Good Neighbor projects on U.S. Forest Service land in Colorado ranged from 1 acre to about 300 acres and on BLM land ranged from 2 acres to 21 acres. Figure 1 depicts the number of Good Neighbor projects in each of the Colorado national forests and BLM areas. Costs to the U.S. Forest Service for the 29 projects conducted on its land in Colorado have totaled about $679,000 through fiscal year 2008, while costs to BLM for its 9 projects in Boulder County have totaled $74,000 through the same time period.