The Wildland Urban Interface (WUI) Stumpage and Tenures Forum was held to gather relevant stakeholders who were knowledgeable of the issues surrounding the opportunities and challenges related to the implementation of WUI fuels treatment programs on Crown lands within the Rocky Mountain Trench region of British Columbia. The Forum covered questions related to the current stumpage and tenures frameworks in the context of implementing WUI operational fuels treatments, and primarily focused on understanding the application of current policies. In addition, new policy options were suggested to offer potential solutions to old problems. From the Forum discussion, there were many options identified for working within the tenure system. One promising new tenure available is the WUI Forest License to Cut (FLtC), however from the discussion, it was evident that there are many procedural issues at the Ministry's District level that may affect the speed of implementing this new tenure. Offering the new WUI FLtC would require an allocation of District staff resources and a mandate to manage the new WUI tenure, which would require planning and silvicultural obligations to be an assumed responsibility of the District Ministry staff.

The proper pricing of Crown timber by reducing WUI stumpage to reflect the real market value of the fibre is warranted in many WUI fuels treatment stands on Crown lands in the Cranbrook area. However, a proposed policy change could face significant challenges in terms of making the necessary justification to support an amendment of the Interior Pricing Manual in a WUI stumpage context, and would be difficult to justify due to the low volume of WUI timber within total overall TSA timber volumes.  A specific pricing mechanism for WUI timber is only one alternative for increasing WUI fuels treatment financial feasibility. Alternatives such as treatment contracting, long-term stewardship contracting, establishing a special stumpage account for WUI timber that would support fuels treatment operations, and offering the new WUI FLtC with a 'no-bid' marginal cost approach would be a more appropriate means to implement fuels treatments; these alternatives were suggested to be explored in further detail.

Better information based upon a fuels treatment prioritization map should be developed that would allow decision making to be more strategic and avoid opportunistic "cherry picking". Without this type of analyses, one-off WUI fuels treatment projects could increase long-term fuels treatment costs.