EUGENE, Ore. - A top Bush administration forestry official announced this week the Forest Service will try a new business model for contract work in federal forests to help prevent worker abuse and encourage investment in rural communities.

Mark Rey, Agriculture Department undersecretary for natural resources and the environment, said test programs are planned this year for three national forests - the Colville in Washington state, Shasta Trinity in Northern California, and the Allegheny in Pennsylvania.

The goal is to make forest management projects into long-term projects stretching over 10 years to allow contractors to invest in equipment and training for workers, and to allow them to build stronger ties to the community, Rey and other federal officials said.

"What we're trying to do with this new business model is see if we can respond to some of the problems that the current contracting system creates in terms of making it more difficult for local communities to participate," Rey said.

Bids for work such as reforestation or forest thinning projects typically cover only one year and rely heavily on the lowest bidder - too often a "fly-by-night" or unscrupulous contractor who abuses immigrant workers mostly from Mexico, Rey and other officials said at a public hearing on forest worker conditions at the University of Oregon.

The new business model likely will have to address current law that prohibits the U.S. Forest Service from rejecting bids it considers too low, Rey said.

"In the past we have tried to reject bids like that, suspecting that probably either the work would not get done well or it would get done through the abuse of contract workers," Rey said.

Rey said the administration will reintroduce legislation called the Healthy Forest Partnership "that will in part see if Congress will give us authorization to contract not only with private contractors but with other units of government including local communities."

The hearing was sponsored by the university, the Alliance of Forest Workers and Harvesters and Sustainable Northwest to discuss federal efforts to protect the health and safety of contract workers in national forests.

The Forest Service stepped up those efforts following a series of stories by the Sacramento Bee in 2005 on abuse of contract workers, largely Mexicans in this country legally under what was a little-known federal guest worker program to fill low-paying, non-farm jobs.

In 2006, however, investigations found only four significant cases across the West - two in Idaho, one in Utah and another in New Mexico, said Ron Hooper, the Forest Service director of acquisition management.

"But it's going to be part of a long-term effort," Hooper said.

Rey, Hooper and Alex Passantino, deputy administrator of the Labor Department's Wage and Hour Division, listened to a number of forest workers talk about contractors who refused to pay overtime, failed to provide needed safety equipment or charged the workers for it, jammed six workers into a single motel room on trips, and threatened to fire them or blackball them if they complained to authorities.

Most spoke in Spanish and declined to give their full names.

Enrique Santos, spokesman for the Alliance of Forest Workers and Harvesters, said the hearing would have been packed with hundreds of other workers but they were afraid of retribution. He added that most immigrants are hard workers who take pride in improving forest health.

"There has been an increase in unscrupulous contractors that makes it more difficult for the good contractors," Santos told the panel in brief comments on behalf of the workers calling for even tougher enforcement of federal labor laws.

"If you sting a couple of these suckers, I have no doubt this thing would be straightened out in no time," Santos said.