As the US Forest Service has lost internal capacity to get projects planned, awarded, and managed, it has become increasingly reliant on ‘partners’ – NGO agencies – to do a lot of the work Forest Service employees used to do.
Until she was fired as a part of sweeping workforce reductions being carried out by the Department of Government Efficiency, Tanya Torst was the Northern California Partnership Coordinator for the US Forest Service. Her job was to work with organizations like the Mule Deer Association, California Deer Associations, and ‘Patriot Restoration Ops’ (a nonprofit organization dedicated to assisting veterans in transitioning from military service to civilian life) to get wildfire hazard reduction projects done.
We talked with Tanya about how the firing of staff like herself is affecting the Forest Service’s ability to get work done. Most of the projects she worked on implementing are now on hold, and the partner organizations face having to lay off employees and contractors who were engaged in doing this important work. We also talked about the value of diversity in large, complex organizations. As a business consultant who had worked primarily in private industry, Tanya brought a unique perspective to her new job, trying to get things done within a large bureaucracy staffed largely by people without a business background.
Tanya has a MBA from Chico State, a Master’s Degree in Organizational Leadership from Gonzaga University, and a Bachelor of Science Degree in Business Management from Marylhurst University.
Here is a video of our conversation. A transcript follows.
Zeke Lunder
Hi Tanya,
Welcome to The Lookout.
Tanya Torst
Thanks. I’m a long time listener, first time caller.
Zeke Lunder
All right, I’m glad you called in. Yeah. So I wanted to talk to you about your job that you’ve been doing for the Forest Service, and what the job was and so and about how you’ve been unceremoniously sacked here in the last couple weeks. And just get kind of some of your thoughts on the work you’ve been doing and what you think people in the greater public should know about conditions within the forest service right now?
Tanya Torst
Yeah, those are great questions. So I was the North Zone partnership coordinator for Region Five. That meant I was I worked with six different forests, Mendocino, Modoc, lassen, Shasta, Trinity, six rivers, Klamath, I may have missed one, so yeah, so work with six different forests. And you might ask, what is a partnership coordinator? And everyone asked that, but what we do is we help create partnerships to leverage the limited resources the forests have. And when I say limited resources, one forest, for example, has only got like 600,000 last year for their dollars, yes, to manage 1 million acres. So every forest needs to find ways to get money and bring it in. And as a partnership coordinator, I meet with partners, I put together agreements. I do help on the technical aspect of all the agreements. And all these things are approved by the actual acts to do it are approved by Congress. So we can’t do we just can’t do anything. It has to be something that Congress previously approved. So what I would do, I’d meet with different partners. I’d create relationships. That’s my my strong point. Also, I’m good with spreadsheets, so I do both of that. And then I I would go in and help put together these agreements to get work done.
Zeke Lunder
So who are some of the partners that you would work with?
Tanya Torst
Yes, so it’s Mule Deer Foundation is a big partner. I know in my my zone, we do a lot with also Trout Unlimited. California deer Association has been a big partner. So has Patriot restoration ops, and they’re a nonprofit that helps teach veterans how to do these fuel works. And they’ve done a lot of great things for the forest and. And there’s, and there’s many other ones right now. Sierra Pacific (Industries) is a top partner for the Region Five and Region Six, which is, you know, the west coast of United States.
Zeke Lunder
Okay, so they’re a major logging and timberland owner/sawmill operator…
Tanya Torst
They are. And I heard before this, this freeze happened, and all work stopped, and everything stopped. They they have like $75 million to do work in California, Oregon, and Washington on Forest lands and their lands, both.
Zeke Lunder
Okay, so and then they get paid in logs or, like, how does that work?
Tanya Torst
No, they actually get paid to do the work. So one of the things I did was write many of our stewardship agreements. And stewardship agreements, it’s an authority where any time something’s taken off the land, we have to use it, because people just can’t take something off the land. It has to be recorded and paid for. So yes, in some cases the SPI agreements will, you know, have logs in if it’s been approved, they can do that. But a lot of the ones I did are just straight biomass, which is super inexpensive. It’s like, I mean, I this supposedly is supposed to be 10 cent per ton, okay, but I’m seeing stewardship agreements with one cent a ton.
Zeke Lunder
Okay, so basically, you’re paying them to haul off small trees and other material that’s not like something you could sell for lumber.
Tanya Torst
Pretty much, and almost all of my work has been to reduce fire hazard. I mean, one of the big partner partnerships was the one at mule deer around Burney (Shasta County, California) . It’s the “Crossroads Project”, and that was $2.2 million, and it’s all mastication
Zeke Lunder
So mastication is like grinding up brush, grinding up brush as small diameter trees to clean the forest, to prevent ladder fuels. So how did that meet objectives of the Mule Deer Foundation. Like, what do they like about a project like that?
Tanya Torst
What it does is it makes great deer habitat. So when you cut this, the brush down, anything that regrows, is really tasty to deer. Okay, so, and Mule Deer Association is a phenomenal partner, the cool thing about them is they use the local folks. They don’t charge very much to to do the work, I mean, to manage it. And they, they have local timber folks, they have logging companies. They’re the ones that are doing this work. So I’m really terrified. I say terrified. I’m more terrified about the fire danger, but I’m I have a lot of fear for the timber industry in our area, unless you know, this administration lets us do our work, and they’re not letting us. They stopped everything. Okay?
Zeke Lunder
So, can you tell me a bit about like, when the Forest Service started to really rely heavily on partners?
Tanya Torst
You know, this has been something in the past four or five years, I was part of a big hiring push, and I got hired in 2023 to bring partnership coordinators to help with the wildfire crisis landscapes. And those are big areas where a lot of money is going to stop the fire risk. And I know it’s been since 2020 that this started.
Zeke Lunder
So as the Forest Service has less capability, oh yeah, overall, they’re relying more on partners to get the work done?
Tanya Torst
We can’t do it ourselves. We just don’t have the bodies and…
Zeke Lunder
Why is that? Why is why is the Forest Service lost so much capacity? Why is it so hard for them to get work done?
Tanya Torst
Yeah, that’s a good question. Part of it is because Congress does not give them enough money to to hire and even pay our people last year because of the continuing resolution last fiscal year, fiscal year 24 there was, it was very it was a big struggle. We had to stop expense, any expenses. I. Um, we couldn’t do travel to do our work done. I’m not talking about fun travel. I’m talking about travel to get work done. We it. We just couldn’t pay our own bills. And with the continuing resolution of this year, we couldn’t even buy toilet paper. I mean, it’s ridiculous. And you know, we’re talking about forest supervisors, and everyone’s like, Well, looks like, you know, office folks are going to be doing cleaning toilets, and that’s okay, you know what? I think all of us are fine with doing that. We don’t have an issue with that. I, I was on a call with one of the forests, and the question was, how do we keep track of everything when we have four to five different jobs to do where one person is doing the work of four to five people or trying to they’re honestly, some of them are not getting paid over time. No one’s getting paid overtime. It’s like it’s so hard to get anything done. And then I’m gonna just bring it up. NEPA is challenging…
Zeke Lunder
You’re talking about the National Environmental Policy Act?
Tanya Torst
…It’s it takes a lot of work and a lot of time to get things done right. And that’s something that I was hoping, and we were all hoping, that we could help streamline that.
Zeke Lunder
And the Mendocino (National Forest) has been working on this programmatic EIR for the entire forest for, like, what…?
Tanya Torst
like, a decade, yeah, and we signed it last year,
Zeke Lunder
So you’ve got all this environmental hurdles cleared, but now you’re getting shut down right when it’s time to actually do the work?
Tanya Torst
Yeah and all that money, like I brought, like I said before, I brought in $11.9 million (in outside funding), just to the Mendocino for area work on the Upper Thomes (Creek). And a lot of that is to protect Crane Mills Timberland, which is a small industrial timberland owner, but they’ve stopped all work. We can’t do anything, and that’s like just in limbo. Everything is in limbo. So, yeah, oh, not to mention, I have to share one more thing, it has been stopped – all purchasing, like Shasta-Trinity (NF) invested $2 million on reforestation in the Mount Shasta Ranger District that’s been stopped, and they have seedlings that they need to plant, and they’re pretty much going to rot, because at this point, there’s no way, because of the stop, they can’t go and get the contract work to put it in the ground. So that’s major reforestation that’s going to stop and that that’s going to hurt future timber.
Zeke Lunder
So you know, I hear some people saying, like, hey, you know, this is just a temporary pause to figure out, like, where we’re wasting money everything else. What do you think is the strategy? Like, why? Why do you think that all this is happening?
Tanya Torst
I do not know, and I should not speculate, but that’s a big but, and I probably shouldn’t say this, but it feels like they’re trying to crush the whole system to rebuild it. I have a master’s degree in organizational leadership. I also have an MBA. I graduate top of my class, and I study some systems, and they it really looks like they’re trying to break everything and build it the way they want to. Systems don’t always work like that. I mean, they’ve done a good job at stopping the systems to protect employees like like me, or they’re trying to stop it, but usually systems bounce back, so I really they’re going at it the wrong way. As someone who used to work in consulting and used to be able to go in and show like the way to work around this problem and stop the bureaucracy. They’re doing it all wrong. They they’re doing it with the purpose of, let’s terrorize the Forest Service employees with these emails, pretty much saying, I’m paraphrasing, but get a real job, right? You’re not worth anything. Tell me five things you did last week that that so we can, you know, decide whether or not to fire you. Oh, and if you’re on vacation, if you’re sick, you’re gonna get fired. That’s kind of what the These emails are sending out. They’re all poorly written. They they’re they’re like, I don’t know what they’re Yeah, they’re trying to terrorize this for whatever reason. And I, I, I was listening to some policy folks from Washington last year that, you know, they were saying, you know, concerns for the Forest Service, if, if this administration came in, that this administration has it out for the Forest Service, that Congress has it out for the Forest Service, because we’re not doing the things they want to do. They. Won’t give us the money to do what what they want to do, but they’re still holding us to that level. And I get it like we should be performing right, but we can’t. You can’t take away all our tools, take away all our people, put laws in to make so we can’t do it.
Zeke Lunder
.. and hurt the partners that you’ve built spent all this time building the trust with…
Tanya Torst
Trout Unlimited, Mule Deer (Association), P.R.O.P.S, everyone is going to have to lay off people the plus all the local timber folks in this North State. Yeah, because they do our work, they do a good job too. Yeah.
Zeke Lunder
So talking to your Have you been talking much with your partners?
Tanya Torst
No, you know, I mean, before this, absolutely, I talked to them all the time, but and they were, they were very upset. So part of the the there’s a stop in anything (funded by) the Infrastructure Act. Going forward, there’s like $6-7 million stewardship agreement that I was working on. There were four projects over three forests, and that is completely stopped. And because of that, I know Mule Deer will have to lay off people as of now, I’m sure they’re laying off people now. Their project managers, you know…
Zeke Lunder
So if, if it was your job to kind of reform the Forest Service, yes, try to make them more productive. Oh, yeah, what would you where would you start?
Tanya Torst
Oh, okay, we need to streamline NEPA, which is National Environmental Protection Act. And I do get that that is most likely what the new administration wants to do and but it just needs to be streamlined at because there’s so much work that goes into getting stuff done and…
Zeke Lunder
(interjects) getting stuff planned not actually done, right?
Tanya Torst
Yeah, we can’t do anything until the planning is finished, right? So we need to streamline that. That would be the top thing. I would think that that’s been the biggest issue I’ve seen and and to be fair, like the process is a good process in a lot of ways. I mean, we get people who are interested in protecting species. They they’re very involved with it, and they want to make sure different species are protected. I are protected. I think this is not my idea, but I’ve heard and I think it’s a good idea. Like, instead of focusing on protecting one species, we need to look at the whole ecosystem to protect it, right? Because there’s ways that we could do thinning and forestry and timber while still protecting right? It is not like and and the whole idea of like we just need to not touch anything,
Zeke Lunder
We see how that’s panned out…
Tanya Torst
We see how that’s panned out, and it’s an insult to every Native American tribe in this area, and because for the past 200 years we’ve stopped any tending of the land which Native American tribes were really good at doing.
Zeke Lunder
So native tribes were very active in managing, so when you’re saying that it’s an insult to native tribes to say that hands-off management is the way to go, that is because that ideology disregards 1000s of years of management by Native Americans?
Tanya Torst
Exactly. Sorry, you just said that better than I did. I haven’t been practicing that. I’m just like, I just get mad and think about it. Yeah, absolutely. And yeah, it’s so we need to bring good management back. And the Forest Service has learned they have. They’re doing all this. They’ve done all this research through the research stations they know. They’re learning what to do. They’re learning from Native Americans and indigenous people. I mean, we’re we were working with tribes to put together like native seed banks and. And look at different ways to do things. So we’re learning, and I it seems like some environmentalists, not all, but some of them are still suing us as soon as to do anything.
Zeke Lunder
It seems like some of the people that have been suing the Forest Service forever don’t, yeah, they don’t take traditional ecological knowledge seriously.
Tanya Torst
No, it’s, I hate to say the R word, but if I think about it too much, it makes me wonder …
Zeke Lunder
I’ll say it for you. Like, yeah, mainstream environmentalism has been super racist, right? Like, since the very beginning, right? Yeah, John Muir was, like, total racist, yeah,
Tanya Torst
You know, the tribal crews get singled out by environmental groups. I’ve seen that. You know, someenvironmentalist will will call police on a native person doing work saying, oh, they must be on drugs. They’re not on drugs. They just worked 16 hours, right? They’re exhausted. And people will, you know, folks will get arrested. There’s so much harassment of indigenous folks in this area. I never would have believed it until or because I didn’t hear about it, but until I moved up here, I didn’t realize how bad it is in Northern California and this area.
Zeke Lunder
So tell me more about that.
Tanya Torst
Oh, just, I mean, personally, as soon as I moved to Chico, you know, getting not being served, getting stink-eye, people, everyone assuming I’m native, (I am native, but not from here, you know), I see a lot of racism toward Native American folks, a lot of harassment,
Zeke Lunder
So let’s talk about DEI then, and tribal engagement. Like, it seems like so much of what’s happening right now is just like, full-on white power/white nationalism? Do you feel like this emphasis on (doing away with) DEI is just this extension of white nationalism?
Tanya Torst
Oh, absolutely! And also, first off, people are confusing it (DEI) with affirmative action. Affirmative action is when you bring people in to, you know, for a quota or something. But DEI in the Forest Service and then the government is not like that. The only preference DEI brings is to veterans and to folks with disability like me. So and even with that preferential hiring I got. I still had to compete, and if I wasn’t qualified, I wouldn’t have got it. It just put me on the same ground as someone who’s already in the Forest Service. I still had to interview. I still had to prove what I did. I still, you know, I still have three degrees. It’s not like I’m a pity hire or anything, right? So, yeah, it just makes it easier. Also, what DEI does, at least in the Forest Service, it just opens things up. So we share jobs with people of color, and we open up the forest that, you know, make sure that they’re allowed to come in too, because a lot of times, you know, I’ve been working fires, and I see, you know, white supremacists there. You know, hunting with weapons, it’s a little scary. And I know they’re white supremacists because I recognize their stickers, you know, on their their hunting Jeeps … So, yeah, DEI is a good thing. Diversity is always a good thing. When you look at at organizations, if you have everyone that looks exactly the same and thinks exactly the same, you’re not going to get anything new. You need to have new blood, new opinions. You need to have good, different upbringings. I mean, one of the reasons I’ve been so successful in my job (I’ve gotten several raises. I’ve gotten five different cash awards, strictly for performance, plus, I won the USDA tribal engagement award). One of the reasons I got those is because I come from a diverse background, right? I come from a business background which is so different from everyone else, so business. Organizational leadership, I can use my tools that I got my diversity to cut through the red tape to get these things done. And that’s something that if you’ve been the Forest Service your whole life, it’s a little harder because you’re in the system and you don’t know how to make the changes, right? Yeah. So DEI is a phenomenal thing, and anyone that has a opinion against it. Come talk to me, because I’ll show you so many different, different reasons why.
Zeke Lunder
So is tribal engagement then being targeted as being some sort of DEI?
Tanya Torst
I suspect it is because I was about to teach a class on working with tribes and all the tribal stuff in the USDA AgLearn (online class list), most of it got taken away.
Zeke Lunder
So they took the DEI stuff off their class offerings online?
Tanya Torst
They took off a lot of stuff offline related to engaging tribes.
Zeke Lunder
Yeah, yeah. I think some tribal (forest management) projects on the Klamath are being shut down right now because they had funding from the infrastructure act. Talk about Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK)?
Tanya Torst
TEK = Traditional ecological knowledge. I’m not an expert in it. Like, if you want to talk to an expert, Ali Meders Knight is a great expert. We also have Tom Campbell. We have a lot of folks who are really good at that, like Frank Lake. My job as a partnership coordinator is not actually with TEK, but I work with tribes. So I helped, for example, Redding Rancheria put together a master stewardship agreement and stewardship supplemental permit to do work in their ancestral territory.
Zeke Lunder
So they could work on National Forest lands?
Tanya Torst
Yes, and these territories are much larger than, like, whatever their property is, right? I mean, part of the the issue, like Paskenta/Nomlaki territory runs, you know, there they have area all the way up in the Mendocino National Forest, but they have different areas. They may have been seated here on the valley floor during the winters while they, you know, for millennia, but you know that those were their hunting grounds in the mountains, and that’s how it is for a lot of the tribes in California. But for me, what I did is I work with tribes. I worked with of, you know, okay, first thing work with tribes is not supposed to be DEI. Tribes are sovereign nations. And there is very specific Indian law. There’s treaty law that applies to them. That being said caliph, you know, a lot of the treaties that were put in place in the 1860s were never ratified and were torn up. But it doesn’t matter. They’re indigenous sovereign nations, so because of that, they’re treated differently. So I can’t just go talk to tribal council. We have to go through the line officers and and it has to be nation to nation. It is not like me going, Hey, what’s up? Let’s talk about this. I mean, I can talk to them casually, but we can’t go and do that. So it’s very specific.
Now, one of the main projects I did is there was something called the Nome Cult Walk, and that’s 100 mile walk. It’s also known as the Koncow Trail of Tears. And what happened is 470 Native Americans here in Chico were rounded up and forced to march over 100 miles up over Mendocino national forest into Covelo, and like 270 of them survived. That’s it. Everyone else died and didn’t make it. And every year, several different tribes come together, and they walk that and it’s it’s an amazing thing. It brings healing to everybody, and I was able to bring the forest into that. So last year we had patrol teams with the firefighters help us direct traffic, and it was an incredibly healing experience for both the tribes and then the descendants of the settlers who drove the people off originally. So it’s really an amazing thing. Because of that. I won the 2024, USDA tribal engagement award with the forest. I helped drive this. So I was a big this was a big part of what I did, and I loved it, and it it’s we have nation to nation, and then we have people to people. And because not every tribal member is going to be on the council, so it’s bringing local people and having them meet for service. So for service, folks open their eyes to these people are still here, and these people have survived. So that’s something I love doing. I just love working with tribes, yeah, yeah, yeah. They’re amazing. And I, I’ve, you know, we work with Ali, we work with the Mechoopda Tribe. We’ve worked with a lot, with Paskenta Band of Nomelaki Indians around Valley, Robinson Rancheria. One more thing I wanted to bring up, too,
So the other thing that’s going on and, and I maybe it’s just pause, but they’re taking back all the (USDA) community wildfire defense grants.,
Zeke Lunder
Yeah, that affects the work I do, like, we have, yeah, four different projects right now that are funded by that, and three of them are frozen.
Tanya Torst
It is ridiculous. This is really hurting the local people, the people in rural areas right now. One of the partners of the Forest was working with to protect the town of Upper Lake. That’s been stopped, right? That is, that is a bad area. If there’s fire, you know, better than me, your work’s been stopped. They’re stopping plumas every forest. They’re stopping all this, all this work. And honestly, it really feels like they’re trying to break the system, like I said before, yeah. Oh, and then the work in Bernie. I mentioned before, you know, we had $2.2 million that Mule Deer (Association) was working on. It was IRA funds that’s been stopped. And the town of Burney is like, I it’s close to my heart. They’re an amazing town and good people, and we need to get that work done. We need to protect them, yeah, and every town we need to protect.
Zeke Lunder
Well, it’s hard, I think, because, like so much of this work is work that it should just be like locals going out with chainsaws and cutting firewood, and it’s like, we’ve made it so complicated, yeah, like, where you have to, you know, survey for rare beetles before you cut down a lodge pole or something. And it’s hard to see, you know, I look at a lot of like the fire safe council work and other work that gets done. And it’s like, it’s hard to imagine a more inefficient process than giving out grants and doing all this regulatory work, and it’s hard to see how, unless we really radically reform the way that this work gets done, how it will ever be sustainable?
Tanya Torst
Yeah, I have to agree with you again. I think if they look at the whole forest ecosystem and not one specific species is specific, that will help, yeah, but unfortunately, at the other hand, like, it would be great if local people could just go cut, you know, stuff for firewood. But we also have seen so many times where people have done that and like, you know, knock down. Own a 300 year old oak tree with their truck, and come back, I’m gonna get it. You know? It’s yeah, people, we have to have a balance, right? We don’t want to be overly like legis regulated. We don’t want to. We don’t want it. And I gotta say, I believe it or not, I’m a libertarian at heart like I believe in free market and I believe in yet at the same time, I believe in mutual aid. I believe in us helping each other. And you know, we need to create the systems where it works well, and we don’t have that. Now, I can tell you, I am concerned about the new administration. I know they’re using the project 2025 playbook. I didn’t know very much about it. I mean, I heard about it, but there’s different trackers now that shows everything they do and what page and the playbook of 2025 is it’s related to, and it scared me. So when I looked up the Forest Service in that they are looking at streamlining NEPA, I think that would be a really good thing.
Zeke Lunder
I feel like disruption is needed. It’s just that these guys are doing it in a really sloppy way.
Tanya Torst
I think maybe, like in a lot of stuff about 2025 I absolutely do not agree with if they were to do that in a good way. That would be great that are not doing that. They’re, they’re trying to, you know, the weird thing I heard is they’re, they’re wanting people to do polygraph tests for loyalty to the President Trump. That has nothing to do with what we’re doing. Has nothing to do with the oath to the Constitution we took, and we take that very seriously. So I mean, if, if, if you’re going to hire people based on the, you know, loyalty to a person, and not our Constitution and not to our people, something’s wrong there. That’s not going to help us. Yeah, yeah. I think it’s about ego and not about, really, the forest.
Zeke Lunder
Yeah. Well, I think one of the problems too is just that these systems, as you know, are so complicated, yeah, and, and especially, like, the timber industry, like, no one’s gonna build a new sawmill based on, like, what Trump says today. Like, people need, like, a 30 year guarantee of, you know, hey, the Forest Service is going to be stable for 30 years for us to cut logs in there, yeah, before they’re going to go build a mill. And so there’s so many of these things move so much slower, yeah, and they could privatize all the forests tomorrow. I mean, the timber industry isn’t even asking them to do that,
Tanya Torst
no, no, no. And, you know, it’s funny because I we talk to the timber industry. Every year on the forest, they come and talk to us, and we talk to them, we listen to what they need, and we try to do everything we can to help them within our power. And I say that, like, like, we’re not going to do anything illegal, like, you know, go against NEPA or laws, but you know, we there are constituents. We want them to do well, we’re in this together. So, you know, they say, well, we need more sales. We need to be able to go in and get more timber. And yes, that’s true, but we’ll go and put things for sale, and they won’t bid on it, and I get it because they have to. They have other forces. They have market forces to worry about. But there’s got to be a way that we can come together, that we don’t destroy old growth forests, that we can keep, that keep the ecosystems have a healthy forest, have them happy and us happy? It doesn’t have to be one or the other. It doesn’t have to be it’s not a zero sum game, right? We can both figure out a way to do this. So, yeah, that’s my, my opinion. Yeah,
Zeke Lunder
well, yeah, screwing over the partners, seems like, you know, it’s just not good business.
Tanya Torst
It is not and it breaks my heart, because I know these folks. They’re good people, you know, and you know. And just so you know, I’m not partisan, but I know most of the people in this area, the people that are going to be affected this are tend to be more red leaning, they’re more conservative, they’re more Republicans, yeah, and they’re the ones are going to be hurt more than folks in the cities. So it really breaks my heart, and I think, you know, and with me being let go like I was fired, unceremoniously, it called on a Saturday by my fourth supervisor. I was sobbing on the phone. I had the worst panic attack. We thought I had to go to the hospital because I was so devastated. And I’m not just devastated because of me. I’m devastated for everybody. And I, you know, we were both here for the campfire. Yeah, and I watched flames from my porch, and I I heard people calling, thinking they’re going to die, and cars on fire going down and that horrific thing that happened. I’m going to do everything I can so that never happens again. I’m just one person. I’m only GS 12. I’m not a policy maker, but that should never happen again. We know. We know what we need to do. We know what we need to do, and this and we’re not doing it right now. Everything stopped, and this makes me so mad. This makes me so mad, and I it’s funny. I just did a interview with action news now, and it was mainly because I’m worried about all this, the fire fuels, work not being done. And people are like, you know, if you did a good job, you wouldn’t be fired. And I’m like, I did the best job. I was the rock star of the forest, if not the zone, right? I was, and I’m happy to show you my vows, the words I’ve got. Yeah, I am not one to toot my own horn. I’m someone that brings everyone else up as a servant leader. That’s my job to bring other people up, but I kick ass, and they didn’t even they didn’t even care. They just fired me because I’m a schedule, a disability. I had one month left before I could start getting more protections, and they fired me for that, and then they lied to a judge and said that they looked at metrics and they did not.
Zeke Lunder
So I hope you get your job back. We need you.
Tanya Torst
I hope so too. I I mean, I have started looking, I’m not gonna lie, because we can’t afford to live without one when, you know, on one income, you know, my husband works for the state, it’s, it’s hard, right? We have a house to pay for. We have student loans. I have a lot of stuff I need to pay for, and so I have to get another job. But I really want my job back, and I really want to be able to jump back in and do this work. And, yeah, I may just be a partnership coordinator, but what I do affects people and affects these communities. And on top of that, I’m have a red card. So you know who this one people are? Like, well, they’re not firing fire folks. Yeah, they are. This is the we’re called the militia, and that may not be the best term for it, but we’re a fire militia. So anytime there’s a fire, we’re the ones that go out. You know.
Zeke Lunder
What kind of work did you do on fires?
Tanya Torst
I was a driver, and then last year I was so busy trying to get all the stuff done, I didn’t get to go out. But I’m also a PIO trainee, although, after this video, that may not work(!), and also business, incident management, business support, yeah, because that’s, that’s my background – business.
Zeke Lunder
I’ve been a wildfire contractor for the Feds for over 20 years, and we need to get paid! They’re letting go people that sign our invoices when we’re working on fires.
Tanya Torst
Yeah, yeah. And they’re letting go the people. And they’re letting go the people who are qualified to do things that it’s hard to get qualifications right. So a lot of folks are being fired that are the only ones in the region that can do something
Zeke Lunder
… like a equipment time recorder or finance section chief?
Tanya Torst
Even aviation folks, like a lot of those I’ve been seeing getting fired. And you know, we’re, we’re all, we all work together for this. No one works for the government for paycheck. I’m going to tell you that right now. We all do it because we want to support our communities. We want to save our forests.
Zeke Lunder
Well, thanks for talking me!
Tanya Torst
Thanks for having me. It’s good to see you again.