As the Montana Wilderness Association gathers in Great Falls next week to celebrate the group's 50th anniversary, some of its members are wondering whether their leaders have sold out the organization's grassroots soul to turn into a million-dollar corporation.

Longtime MWA members Paul Edwards and Russ Titus say they're dismayed over activities in recent years, which include the firing of former executive director Bob Decker in 2004, the closing of three field offices in 2006 and a proposed deal with timber companies that would allow logging in portions of the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest in exchange for the first wilderness designation in Montana in 25 years.

"The character of the board has changed in regards to the hard edge of its drive for wilderness," Edwards, a former MWA board member, said. "The whole idea has become to ingratiate themselves with those in political power, and do everything they can to court them so they can get some good results.

"I appreciate MWA's anxiety and misery with the endless rejection of (new wilderness designations), but I don't think the answer is to collaborate with those who have no desire to see wilderness preserved for its own sake. ... I think they've made a deal with the devil."

Titus, a 20-year MWA member who received its Founders Award in 1994, added that he believes the current MWA council is "damning by faint praise the ideals of grassroots activism," a basic tenet upon which the organization was created.

"They think it's great, but not as effective as it was," Titus said. "I think they're wrong, and other people, if they knew what MWA was saying, would think it's wrong too. There's more opportunity for grassroots now than ever."

MWA Executive Director Tim Baker acknowledges that MWA is changing, and that's not always easy. But he says the organization has to evolve and adapt to keep moving forward. He believes MWA is stronger than ever, and points to membership numbers along with financial support as evidence. MWA had 4,350 members in 2001, and has grown to 5,793 members currently.

"Our outreach is better and stronger than before, and our connection to communities we operate in is better and stronger than in the past," said Baker, seated in his Helena office behind a varnished plywood desk. "MWA has gone through a lot of changes over its 50-year history, and every time those changes happen there are people who feel those changes are in the wrong direction.

"The changes we have gone through are difficult, but in the end, I think the analysis will show we are stronger, more vibrant and more grassroots. MWA has always been about people, and that's never going to change."

MWA touts itself as Montana's largest grassroots membership organization advocating for protection of wild lands. Baker said about 80 to 85 percent of its members live in Montana and almost all have some state connection. The organization operates with a staff of 16 and revenues have doubled in the past decade from around $400,000 to more than $1 million.

MWA's list of accomplishments is lengthy. The group's members toiled long and worked hard for the designation of some of Montana's best-known wilderness areas, including the Bob Marshall, Gates of the Mountains, Selway-Bitterroot, Anaconda-Pintler and Lincoln-Scapegoat.

From 1976-78 they were on a roll, helping secure wilderness designation for the Great Bear, Rattlesnake, Absaroka-Beartooth, Mission Mountains, Welcome Creek, UL Bend, Medicine Lake and Red Rock Lakes areas, as well as protective "wild and scenic" designations for the Flathead and Missouri rivers.

MWA is a leader in the fight to force the Forest Service to maintain the wild character of the seven wilderness study areas in Montana. The group helped protect the Rocky Mountain Front from gas and oil development, and also advocated for fewer roads in a travel plan for the area.

They've partnered with other conservation organizations in opposing recreation fees on federal lands and trying to protect forest lands along the U.S.-Canadian border. They've been a leader in the promotion of "quiet trails" that are off-limits to motorized vehicles.

Despite those successes, the inability to get the needed congressional and presidential approval for any new wilderness in Montana since 1983 -- regardless of the efforts of MWA and other conservation groups -- became a burr under the saddle of MWA's council. In 2004, it decided to make some internal changes.

"We became more of a corporate model, having retreats to talk about what the problems were and began to talk about branding and evaluating ourselves as leadership. We would push paper, do exercises -- the kumbaya stuff," recalls Edwards, an MWA board member at the time. "It began the bureaucratization of MWA."

He said the leadership was frustrated with trying to get then-Sen. Conrad Burns, R-Mont., and Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., to support a new wilderness proposal, and decided MWA Executive Director Bob Decker was too confrontational.

"I argued it was no use making friends or making nice with Burns or (Rep. Denny) Rehberg on wilderness, that they didn't like it and didn't respect it," Edwards said. "But the council's executive committee decided Bob had to go, and they voted seven to one to get rid of him. I was the one who voted to support him."

Decker, who left in December 2004, was replaced in February 2005 by Baker, who had been the MWA philanthropist.

Baker had nothing to do with Decker's ouster, but smiles wryly when told of the members' concerns, noting that it was controversial when Decker was hired since MWA hadn't had an executive director before.

"MWA has gone through a lot of changes, and every time there are people who think we're going down the wrong path," Baker said. "When Bob Decker was hired as the first executive director, people were concerned about a loss of grassroots energy."

Another unforeseen change on the MWA horizon was that its steady increase in revenues peaked in 2004 at $1.3 million, and tax records show that expenses outpaced income by about $200,000 in 2005 and $150,000 in 2006.

So, in November 2006, MWA closed its field offices in Bozeman, Billings and Dillon. The organization retained five field offices, but the eight former employees had to apply for the five open slots.

This caused some hard feelings, especially in the Flathead Chapter area.

"Without any advanced discussion of the matter, Mr. Baker and the council said they had to eliminate all of the staff out in the provinces because of financial problems, and we lost two of the best people in MWA," said Titus, a former Flathead Chapter president. "They hired a woman from New Mexico, and she's trying to learn the ropes, but it takes time to develop those relationships these other fellows already had."

Baker understands their concerns, but noted that when you spend more money than you take in, you have to do something about it.

"There were so many (national forest) travel plans being produced in high-profile areas that we felt needed to be addressed that the board decided to borrow from its reserves, but you can't keep doing that," Baker said, adding that his former fundraising job went unfilled for a while, causing MWA to lose touch with some organizations that were providing support.

But they've bounced back, raising about $1.1 million last year, he said, and members will provide about 50 percent of that revenue stream.

The exact amount of donations from MWA members is hard to pin down, since they're grouped in two categories on tax reports to the Internal Revenue Service. The IRS form 990 shows membership fees more than doubled from almost $64,000 in 1998 to $150,000 in 2007. During that same time, "gifts, grants and contributions" -- which include donations from members, as well as from national and international foundations -- went from $350,000 to $755,000, with a high of $1 million in 2004. Information from the online nonprofit reporting group GuideStar and from MWA seem to support Baker's accounting, showing MWA received 19 grants totaling $364,400 in 2006. In 2005, MWA pulled in $402,500 from 12 foundations, $540,000 from 14 foundations in 2004, and $556,000 from 16 foundations in 2003.

That means private foundations contributed less than half of MWA's revenues from 2003 to 2005, and only about one-third in 2006. Figures for 2007 aren't yet available.

Baker said that kind of fiscal support shows that members still support MWA.

"They're voting with their wallets," he said.

A further shift in philosophy became apparent with the recent unveiling of the controversial deal in the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest, in which MWA partnered with timber groups, Trout Unlimited and the Montana Wildlife Federation to produce a plan that generally allows logging and road building on the lower flanks of the forest, but would allow for the first creation of wilderness in Montana in decades.

The proposal is under consideration by National Forest officials. It came as a complete surprise to Titus, which angered him. This wasn't the grassroots, bottom-up organization in which he was an advocate. Instead, he sees it as a top-down compromise at odds with MWA's founding land and wilderness ethic.

"By collaborating with five sawmills and two conservation groups not seriously concerned with wilderness designation, MWA ... (is) seeking fast and painless wilderness tokens at the cost of the most essential element of the wilderness ethic: working and sweating for wilderness support among the people that live near it," Titus wrote in a letter he and fellow MWA member Elaine Snyder sent to the board. "Does MWA intend to continue the current practice of collaborating with any partner offering to help gain wilderness designation in its area of commercial operations in return for our help in gaining access to saw timber in that area?"

He believes this undermines not only the efforts of the MWA members, but also those of other conservation groups, many of whom are opposed to the deal. Edwards adds that the deal was "totally hatched in quiet."

"I was chair of the MWA wilderness committee, and not a word was heard," he said.

Baker counters that the council vote to move forward on the Beaverhead-Deerlodge plan was unanimous, and included Edwards' support.

Both Titus and Edwards call this an "ice and rocks" deal, in which the wilderness advocates get the upper peaks while sacrificing the lower forest lands to the timber industry and motorized vehicle users.

To the staff and board of MWA, the partnership represented putting aside past conflicts and gridlock to move forward to create healthy forests that reduce the risk of wildfire while allowing logging and the jobs it brings. It also includes designating almost 570,000 acres in 16 areas as new wilderness, plus 329,000 acres for non-motorized use.

But the plan put forth by National Forest officials allows for 2,000 miles of new roads in the 3.3 million-acre forest -- something Baker said MWA doesn't support -- and logging on up to 300,000 acres in six areas.

Stewart "Brandy" Brandborg is one of the founding fathers of the 1964 Wilderness Act, and recalls sending "a thousand bucks" to Florence and Ken Baldwin and their friends to start MWA in 1958. He's been watching the disputes among MWA members from the outside, and said that while wilderness designation is a collaborative effort, he's saddened to see MWA compromising its ideals.

"The purists among us, who see wildland needs, see a substantial amount of unroaded lands that have succumbed to logging in a compromise," Brandborg said. "We need a strong, militant MWA.

"If we accept certain kinds of development, fencing, vehicular traffic and those permitted uses, they are in direct conflict with the parent law. When you allow those, you destroy the integrity of the law."

But with a 25-year "wilderness drought" in Montana, Baker said MWA has to try something new to break the gridlock.

"We need to engage beyond the choir, and talk to others about the quality of life and engage other interests in that discussion," Baker said. "When we do that we will find wilderness is back on the table. It's happening across the West; wilderness is being designated in other states.

"It's coalitions that put together wilderness."

He points to four goals in the next two congressional sessions: wilderness designations along the Rocky Mountain Front, in the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest, in the Scotsman's Peak area in northwest Montana and around the Blackfoot River.

"We have vigorous campaigns going on and are building the kind of broad constituency whose support will make that politically attractive," Baker said. "In those four places there are possibilities, strong possibilities. Although you can never forecast what will happen, we'll bring a vigorous campaign that will raise them to the top of the list."

Reporter Eve Byron: 447-4076 or eve.byron@helenair.com