The Early Days

The Francis Marion National Forest was at one time land that was in cultivation to grow rice. The stock market crash of 1929 set the stage for many of the rice plantations to go belly up and by 1936 the Federal Government ended up with much of the landholdings that created the Francis Marion National Forest. By the early 80’s, the Francis Marion was boasted as being the most productive forest in the U.S. Forest Service. The conversion from cropland back to timberland meant that little hardwood competition was present in the dominatly Pine forest of Longleaf and Loblolly. Clear cuts were indeed clear as the Low Country forest had been under a quality prescribe burning program for years.

This bit of history is given to help the reader understand the sites and conditions we worked in. Our bid for our 1st Tree Injection contract was $16.59 per acre for 762 acres. The contract time allotted was 180 days and the original award was for $12,565.38. In the pre-work the Contracting Officer, John Garrett, expressed concerns that we could not perform the work at such a price and speculated that he would be back in a month to default us. Well, 30 days later to Mr. Garrett’s surprise he was signing our first Contract Modification adding another 339 acres to the contract. Then 30 more days later he issued our 2nd Contract Modification for another 260 acres to bring the total acres treated to 1,313. The contract total came to $20,302.09 adding another $7,736.62 to the contract at the conclusion of 4 modifications. The final payment of $428.74 was approved on 9/24/84. With the Notice to Proceed being issued in early May it took us five months to completed nearly twice as much as the Government had expected of us.

Once it became clear that we could treat an acre in 30 minutes or less and once they saw the effects of the chemical Tordon 101R taking effects in the trees, our inspector Mr. Bill Gause let me in on a little secret. It cost him $65/per acre to do the same work with his in-house TSI crew. We saved Uncle Sam $50,000 on our first large scale contract.

This was the era under President Reagan in which the President wanted to promote the use of small businesses and cut waste inside the Government. We certainly did our part and the roll we started lasted for more than 12 years but like a roller coaster it had its ups and downs. We were underfunded when we tried to enter the machine planting market a year later and nearly lost it. But that curve soon passed and we recovered only to hit the next downward run and that was the unchecked use of undocumented workers in the forest.

By the late 1980’s, the labor market in the forest industry had turned Hispanic and the majority of the workers had fake papers. By 1993 we had a mixed crew of legal, Amnesty workers mostly from Guatemala and three or four men from Mexico who had fake papers. We had supported all legal efforts to open avenues to obtain legal papers for these men and Judith Harrington being bilingual assisted many in obtaining a green card via the 1985 Food Security Act that also created the new Conservation Reserve Program.

Yet the battle within Government between those who saw no evil in paying cash payrolls to undocumented workers whether on the farm picking crops, or planting trees for Uncle Sam or Georgia Pacific versus those who believe that a modern, advanced society should and can afford the cost of legal recognition of workers went on for years. For us the situation came to head one winter day in the early nineties when our van broke down in Gainesville GA as we were coming in from a day of tree planting. Blocking traffic, a Gainesville officer stopped and asked if he could assist. He drove me up to Auto Zone to get a battery and as we were in route stated that he was not even going to ask to see ID’s on my crew.

The passing of legislation that now made it a felony to hire an undocumented worker, (legislation I had supported) had me in a precarious situation, I knew some of the men had fake papers, and all we were doing was making an otherwise honest living planting trees, this had to change! This was a situation I was not going to put up with any longer. While it took me 3 years and cost me over a $100,000.00, I ended up opening the H2B Temporary Guest Worker Visa Program.

As faith and fate would have it, I site prepped by hand chemical application and hand planted a tract of land south of Wrens GA for a family who was related to then Attorney General Janet Reno.

This cousin of Ms. Reno’s spent a good bit of time with us as we worked his land and I explained to him the mess that our Nation’s Immigration Policy was in and that I had worked very hard to support opening legal doors for workers. In time, I was asked by him to write up my concerns in a letter and what solutions I thought were needed. When I asked Mr. Cain “why, who did he know”, he returned with a smile and simply said, Attorney General Janet Reno is my cousin.”

Within a month of my letter being hand delivered to Mr. Cain, my phone rang on a Sunday afternoon and to my shock it was Attorney General Reno. She told me that my letter was one of the most concise statements explaining a wrong that needed correcting. She also told me that she was going to place an assistant, Teresa Logue, to work this out with us and get this program up and running if my information did in deed check out.

It did not take long, for within a couple of months we had our first approved H2B Visa Petition Approved.