Jim retired from the Oregon Department of Forestry as their fire program analyst in 2005. He was the project lead on Oregon’s Communities At Risk Assessment and led the staff work on the implementation of the Oregon Forestland-Urban Interface Fire Protection Act of 1997. During his 29 years with ODF, he worked in forest management, forest practices, and fire as both a forester and a manager. His fire experience has been primarily related to fire behavior, planning, and management. He served on state incident management teams for 20 years as a Fire Behavior Analyst, Situation Unit Leader and Planning Section Chief, and as an Air Attack Group Supervisor for the district. He was a member of the national Complex Incident Management (CIMC) cadre. Jim has a BS in Forest Management from Oregon State University.

Jim’s work spans in scale from local to state to regional. Locally, he has completed local and county-level CWPP risk assessments, coordinated two county CWPP efforts and a two-county local coordination group, and is assisting in development of landscape forest restoration assessment and strategy. At the state level, he contributed to the Oregon Wildfire and Poverty Report. Regionally, he recently completed his role as the agency project manager for the West Wide Wildfire Risk Assessment, a project sponsored by the Council of Western State Foresters and Western Forestry Leadership Coalition.