A botched Arizona forest deal from 2012 is a reminder as we charge into tariffs and funding delays: The consequences could hurt us for years.

Remember when you almost had to take out a loan to buy lumber during the COVID-19 pandemic?

It’s a bit better now.

But tariffs could easily push the price of Canadian wood products through the roof — making it even more difficult to deliver the affordable housing that metro Phoenix so desperately needs.

Hm, if only we had dense forests nearby to help.

Oh wait, we do. And, had things not gotten so messed up, we’d probably have a functioning plant in Winslow, in northeastern Arizona, to help supply cheaper building materials.

Winslow factory was an elegant solution

Long before the pandemic, in the early 2000s, a group of scientists and businessmen began arguing that forest thinning was too much for the government to take on.

If Arizona had any hope of decreasing the risk of catastrophic forest fire, private industry would have to play a part.

From this debate emerged Arizona Forest Restoration Products, a company that had planned to make a compressed wood product called oriented strand board from the low-dollar trees.

It’s a key component in homebuilding, used for everything from flooring to walls and roofing.

And it would have been an elegant solution for the spindly, low-quality trees that Arizona most needs to remove.

The wood would be cut into strands that are glued and then compressed into sheets, with the unusable bark and branches shipped off to a biomass facility on the Mogollon Rim, where they would be burned to produce electricity.

Forest Service didn't like the plan

Arizona Forest Restoration Products was backed by folks who had built similar plants around the world.

They had lined up investors, city and county leaders and even environmental groups, including the Center for Biological Diversity, to support their plan, which promised to meet the government’s initial goal of thinning 300,000 acres over 10 years.

But, as High Country News detailed in a 2014 investigation , the Forest Service unexpectedly awarded the contract in 2012 to a group it favored, even if they were arguably less qualified and had gathered almost no funding for their proposal.

Pioneer Associates offered a nebulous plan to make things like windows and door frames and produce an experimental form of biodiesel from the leftover branches.

But the plan never lived up to its promises. Pioneer quickly went defunct, and the company that took over its contract, Good Earth, only thinned a fraction of what it promised.

Forest thinning funds have been slashed

Meanwhile, the Forest Service has gone back to the drawing board multiple times to find other private partners to help do this critical work.

A biomass facility remains because Arizona Public Service and Salt River Project have agreed to buy the power it produces, and a sawmill recently opened in Bellemont, about 70 miles west of Winslow , promising to thin 30,000 acres.

But that’s still only a drop in the bucket of what’s needed to lower the risk of devastating fire on 2.4 million acres of overgrown tinder in Arizona’s Coconino, Kaibab, Apache-Sitgreaves and Tonto national forests.

And it’s an open question how long this long-struggling industry might survive, now that the Forest Service has drastically slashed funding for the initiative that was supposed to support its work.

It’s a crying shame.

And a cautionary tale as we fall into a pattern of on-again, off-again federal infrastructure funding cuts and threatened tariffs, which were enacted and then delayed on Canada and Mexico until April.

A cautionary tale as we barrel into tariffs

While the uncertainty could reap immediate consequences for businesses and investors, other impacts could continue to play out for years, even decades — as we are still seeing with the fateful 2012 decision that pulled the plug on Arizona Forest Restoration Products.

A quarter of America’s oriented strand board — an increasingly popular material in housing construction — is imported from Canada , and it is almost guaranteed to cost builders more with markedly higher tariffs and duties.

Arizona would be better off today, presuming, of course, that Arizona Forest Restoration Products could have proven its success more than a decade ago. There are no oriented strand board factories in the West.

Our state’s forests would have been a lot more fireproof. And we’d have a local source of a critical construction material.

Alas, we never got the shot.

Reach Allhands at or on X, formerly Twitter, @joannaallhands .