I can’t speak to all the items you list here, but I will suggest there are some hidden factors that most folks don’t recognize. I’ll touch on one that I’ve personally encountered. Before retiring, I was a Region Wildlife Supervisor for a State agency. I had two National Forests within my region. Both had supervisors with hunting backgrounds. The Sup. for one was young and aggressive. He was willing to push the envelope a little to get the job done. We developed four different State/NF collaborative habitat management partnerships for ruffed grouse, woodcock, turkey, and deer. The second Supervisor was older and more cautious and had inherited some unique financial issues when she took over the Forest. Her ability to develop cooperative projects was limited. There was, however, one issue that cut the legs out from under both of these supervisors: Wild Fire Supression Funding! At least at that time, Congress did not allocate sufficient funds for dealing with the wild fires, primarily in the western Forests. The Forest Supervisors would develop a work plan/associated budget and get them approved, only to see 60% of those funds almost immediately diverted to fighting western forest fires. This was in the Upper Midwest and it is my understanding that every Forest in the Nation went through a similar scenario. The obvious results were that timber did not get harvested, habitat improvement projects were neglected, and road repairs were put on the back burner.
I suspect, that if you are recreating in a Forest in which projects are not getting done, it has as much to do with congressional appropriations and wild fire related budget diversions as it does with Staff attitudes.
