New Angeles Forest Chief Surveys the Job

As the new supervisor of the Angeles National Forest, Jody Cook controls more than a quarter of Los Angeles County’s land and most of its open space.

Still, the 39-year-old engineer, who began her assignment Aug. 14., is just learning the layout of the 656,000-acre, fractured swath of earth that separates the Los Angeles Basin from the desert.

In some ways, the San Gabriel Mountains are a world apart from where she came--the larger, more rural Plumas National Forest north of Lake Tahoe. There, the main issues ranged from grazing rights to fire control and timber production.

Here, just about everything relates to the ever-encroaching urban sprawl and the 20 million people who live within an hour’s drive of the mountains. It is a forest both used and abused: polluted by throngs of day campers, stripped and poisoned by clandestine marijuana farmers, and hiked and biked by more than 30 million visitors a year.

Just last month, rangers and sheriff’s deputies removed more than 68,000 marijuana plants from forest plantations, some as big as 15 acres, officials said.

And last year at this time, the Forest Service was heavily criticized for permitting an all-night rave party, after which five teenagers--with methamphetamine and Ecstasy in their systems--died after the car they were in left Angeles Crest Highway and plunged 1,200 feet.

The “urban-wild land interface presents an added challenge to me,” Cook said in an interview Friday. The forest “does not strike me as a vacation destination, but as a city’s backyard.”

An increasing number of subdivisions abut the more barren foothills, and homeowners often complain about bears and coyotes that wander into their yards from the interior--a treacherous, steep terrain of deep canyons and pine-clad slopes. The forest extends from the 10,000-foot peak of Mt. Baldy on the east to Ventura County to the west, and roughly from Pasadena to Palmdale.

Cook will head a perpetually cash-strapped agency of more than 250 full-time employees, and earn between $90,000 and $93,000. She was deputy forest director in Plumas for six years after working five years in Michigan and six months in Washington, D.C., for the Forest Service.

“Jody brings a wealth of experience and a varied background to her new position of running one of the most heavily visited national forests in the nation,” Brad Powell, head forestry official for the Pacific Southwest, said in a news release.

But critics say her tenure in Northern California was stormy and that she left a slew of employees disgruntled over her leadership and unwillingness to listen to subordinates.

“She has a lot of pluses,” said Bob Dale, field director for the nonprofit Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics. “But in the Plumas we have employees who are beaten down and live in an atmosphere of mistrust. I’m worried that could be exported to the Angeles, and that’s why we opposed her promotion.”

The Forest Service in Plumas, with Cook in the No. 2 seat, has taken flak from a grass-roots coalition of loggers, environmentalists and business leaders. Called the Quincy Library Group, it developed a forest management plan for the area and pushed it through Congress. Its strategy included methods of reducing the threat of catastrophic fire and reviving the local timber industry.

But according to reports in Northern California newspapers, the plan is now mired in bureaucracy, and some group members accuse the Forest Service of trying to sabotage it.

Officials denied that charge and Cook downplayed the general criticism. “It’s the nature of this business when you’re a decision-maker. There are going to be people who like the decision and others that don’t.”

In fact, Cook said, the Quincy Library controversy has prepared her for the Angeles National Forest, where many competing interests and users come together on a relatively small range of mountains.

Cook said one of her primary goals is to work on better educating the public on how to respect the land. “The more conservation ethic we can build, the better it is going to be for the forest,” she said.

Last week, she took a tour of San Gabriel Canyon on California 39, the most traveled and damaged gateway to the mountains. On summer weekends, an estimated 10,000 people drive up the canyon from Azusa to barbecue, swim, drive off-road and lounge under the alders.

They also litter with food, trash and diapers, creating a persistent and serious pollution problem for the upper San Gabriel River.

State water quality officials issued an order last October for the Forest Service to clean up a heavily used section of the river’s east fork.

“It was a wake-up call for the Forest Service to do some different management up there,” said John Bishop of the California Regional Water Quality Control Board.

The board recommended more trash cans, more signs in English and Spanish and more forestry staff devoted to curtailing the problem.

Critics have said the Forest Service has done little to teach the river-going public in San Gabriel Canyon--many of whom are immigrants and may not have experienced Woodsy the owl and other anti-litter campaigns--to properly discard their waste.

“I think the No. 1 void in the Forest Service is education,” said Glenn Owen, a cabin owner who routinely works with forestry officials. “No one is trying to educate the public on how to use our mountains.”

Owen is a frequent Forest Service critic and local figure known for a sign he posted above Sierra Madre that reads: Take Care of the Land; Someday You’ll Be Part of It. He said he was impressed by his first meeting with Cook on Thursday.

Paul Ayers, a Glendale attorney and environmentalist who campaigned against Cook’s appointment, said he nevertheless hopes she can bring changes to an agency he likens to a “Soviet bureaucracy” that is unaccountable to the public.

Ayers has spent six months trying to get public records from the Forest Service about a bungled repair job in Rubio Canyon that buried six roaring waterfalls under an avalanche of debris.

“The Forest Service doesn’t take into account its constituency,” he said.

Cook said this is a problem of perception and that part of her education priority will be to teach the public how the Forest Service itself works.

“We need to do a much better job of making what we do visible, of trying to make our agency as transparent as possible,” she said.