Proposed Elliott State Forest land sales pit school funding against environmental conservation

Proposed Elliott State Forest land sales pit school funding against environmental conservation

By Yuxing Zheng, The Oregonian 
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on August 15, 2013 at 6:00 AM, updated August 15, 2013 at 9:35 AM

Environmental activists previously staged sit-ins, road blockades and protests at Elliott State Forest. A bill passed in the Oregon Senate Monday targets tree sitters and others who interfere with state forestland management. (Thomas Boyd/The Oregonian)

A threatened sea bird that nests in coastal forests could impact funding for schools across the state.

Environmental activists are protesting against the proposed sale or exchange of three parcels in the Elliott State Forest, which they say are prime nesting grounds for the marbled murrelet. Three environmental groups in May 2012 filed a lawsuit that said logging in the forest would threaten the bird.

The lawsuit largely tied up logging in the forest, which state officials had originally estimated would net $25.2 million for the state's Common School Fund over the next two years. Now, officials say the sale of the three parcels, if completed, would fetch enough to manage the forest in the current biennium without raising any money for the school fund.

"It just means the Legislature has to draw more on the general fund because it doesn't have as much Common School Fund money to use," said Jim Paul, assistant director of the Department of State Lands for the land management division.

Interest earned from the fund goes to the state's K-12 school districts through the Oregon Department of Education. Last year, the fund paid about $48 million to Oregon schools. The $4.1 million that Portland Public Schools received from the fund last year paid for the equivalent of 48 teachers, according to a state fact sheet.

State officials originally planned to harvest 40 million board feet in Elliott State Forest in the next two years, Paul said. The lawsuit forced officials to revise their projections to 15 million board feet, estimated to fetch $8 million this biennium to cover forest management costs.

The Department of Forestry already laid off seven full-time employees in the Coos Bay office who work on timber sales as part of budget cuts, Paul said.

The three parcels proposed for sale amount to 2,714 acres in Coos and Douglas counties and are not areas included in the lawsuit from environmentalists, said Julie Curtis, spokeswoman for the Department of State Lands. The department is accepting public comments on the proposed sale until 5 p.m. Sept. 3.

The State Land Board is scheduled to meet Dec. 10 to consider final approval of a land sale. Gov. John Kitzhaber, Secretary of State Kate Brown and State Treasurer Ted Wheeler comprise the State Land Board.

The state owns about 700,000 acres of land, from which mineral and timber proceeds help pay for schools.

Environmental activists fear the three parcels in Elliott State Forest will be sold to a logging company.

Activists affiliated with Cascadia Forest Defenders and Cascadia Earth First!staged road blockades, tree sits and protests at Elliott State Forest in recent years andat the Oregon State Capitol in May and June 2012, which led to arrests. The groups oppose an October 2011 decision to increase logging in the forest.

"In a time when the State Land Board should be taking responsibility for the mismanagement of the Elliott State Forest, they are going over the heads of the public and the courts and finding ways to manage our public lands for profit instead of conservation," Erin Grady, a Cascadia Forest Defenders member, said in a press release.

The Elliott protests in recent years spurred the Oregon Legislature this spring to passa law allowing forest contractors to sue environmental activists. A companion bill that would've created the crime of interference with state forestland management passed the House but died in the Senate.

If state succeeds in selling the three proposed parcels, officials would consider selling more, said Paul, of State Lands.

"If the forestlands look like it's no longer going to be a revenue-generating land type, we're looking at possibly divesting in those lands," he said. "Since these are the first parcels, I would still call this a due-diligence phase. The potential is there for us to continue down this path and look at the sale of additional forestlands in the Elliott."

-- Yuxing Zheng

The Oxbow incident: The response to the fire demonstrates excellent forest management

The Oxbow incident The response to the fire demonstrates excellent forest management

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The Oxbow incident

The response to the fire demonstrates excellent forest management

 

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The charred remains of a deer lie in the Oxbow Burn of August 1966. (Paul Petersen/The Register-Guard, 1996)

 

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By John Perry For The Register-Guard

PUBLISHED: 12:00 A.M., AUG. 11

On Aug. 20, 1966, during hot, dry weather with persistent easterly winds, construction equipment working southwest of Eugene on the Oxbow Ridge road in the Coast Range threw sparks that ignited roadside grass and brush.

Gusty winds rapidly spread the fire, burning 2,000 acres of mature forest within the first hour; within a week the conflagration had blackened more than 42,000 acres, most of which was covered with old growth Douglas fir.

Twelve hundred firefighters, 30 bulldozers, 40 fire engines and seven helicopters fought the blaze. One man died.

At first, many feared the fire would keep going until it got to the coast. People in Reedsport prepared to evacuate.

At the time, the Oxbow fire was Oregon’s fifth largest fire of the 20th century (after the three Tillamook fires of 1933, ’39 and ’45 and the 1936 Bandon fire). And it was the first large fire to be contained without benefit of a major change in the weather, testimony to the tenacity of the firefighters.

The Oxbow Ridge fire burned a swath roughly 6 miles across by 15 miles long, encompassing about 66 square miles (42,274 acres). Federal O&C timberlands, managed by the Bureau of Land Management, comprised 57 percent of the total acreage burned, International Paper Company owned 42 percent, while other private lands made up the remaining 1 percent.

After the fire was extinguished, salvage logging of the blackened and dead but still usable trees began in earnest in a cooperative effort on both BLM and International Paper lands. Logging contractors were brought in from across the state. During the subsequent three years, dozens of salvage logging operations produced an average of one truckload of logs leaving for Eugene and Reedsport area sawmills and plywood plants every minute from dawn to dusk.

The last salvage logging was completed by 1971. Then the reforestation effort shifted into high gear.

In 1974, I hired on with International Paper as regeneration forester, and on the first day I drove to a ridgetop on the edge of the Oxbow burn and looked out over the biggest clear-cut I’d ever seen. By then, much of the replanting had been accomplished, but not all. And there is a lot more to successful reforestation than just planting trees. For the next decade and more, the Oxbow Burn was a big part of my life.

Every Oxbow Burn acre was reseeded by helicopter, hand planted or both. Due to delays caused by the salvage logging effort and initial shortages of Douglas fir seed suitable for the area, shrubs and other competing vegetation got a three- or four-year head start, presenting a major reforestation challenge. Herbicides were the answer, and virtually every acre owned by IP was sprayed by helicopter at least once.

Another serious problem was animal damage. Rodents and deer rebounded exponentially after the fire, causing significant mortality among tree seedlings. Several thousand acres needed replanting after initial seeding efforts came up short. But by 1978, the Oxbow Burn was declared “reforested.”

Some of the reforestation efforts overachieved, in that too many seedlings became established. That was remedied over the ensuing years by pre-commercial thinning by chain saw to get the young stands down to about 300 trees per acre. Afterward, to increase growth, the properly spaced stands were fertilized with urea delivered by helicopter.

Then, by the late-1980s, the new Oxbow forest was deemed “free to grow” — and grow it did.

Last month, after a 15-year absence, I drove from west to east up the Smith River and through the Oxbow area, and I was awed by the transformation. What was once a vast expanse of hillsides covered by brush and blackened stumps is now a beautiful, vibrant young forest approaching financial maturity.

Just east of the Oxbow Divide, I was pleasantly surprised to come upon an active logging operation, the first in the Oxbow burn area as far as I know. A contractor for Roseburg Lumber Co. (International Paper sold its timberland to Roseburg in 1996), Iron Horse Logging of Florence, had clear-cut about 50 acres of nice second-growth timber right in the middle of what once was “the burn.” A high-lead yarder, a de-limber and log loader were positioned on a landing abutting the main Oxbow road, along with several log decks.

None of the trees in the stand being harvested are older than 45 years, yet they are yielding very nice sawlogs.

Some people want to stop all logging, or at least stop clear-cutting. They claim the only genuine forest is an old growth forest and that industrial tree farms aren’t real forests.

I disagree. The new Oxbow forest is a shining example of the rapid renewability and value of Western Oregon forests and a showcase of successful forest management after a catastrophic fire.

Roseburg Lumber expects to harvest 600 million board feet from its 17,000 Oxbow acres over the next 10 to 15 years. If it takes 15 years, that works out to 40 million board feet annually, or about 13,333 log truck loads per year. Those 13,333 loads of logs represent a lot of good family-wage jobs in the woods and mills and will generate substantial tax revenue to help pay for government.

The BLM soon plans to begin commercial thinning its Oxbow acreage. Federal ownership in the Oxbow area is part of the revested O&C Railroad land included in Sen. Ron Wyden’s and Rep. Peter DeFazio’s proposal to break the region’s timber supply logjam.

If adopted, the BLM’s 24,000 acres in the Oxbow forest would be part of the 1.5 million acres dedicated to timber production, while another 1.5 million acres of old growth elsewhere would be preserved (until the next big fire, anyway).

See it for yourself. From a mile south of the community of Crow southwest of Eugene, take Wolf Creek Road to its end. Then continue southwesterly on the BLM road entering the Oxbow burn area about three miles past Alma (where the Lane County Sheriff’s Office has a mothballed work camp facility).

A white-painted message on the blacktop indicates precisely where the 1966 fire started. Continue past the logging site mentioned above, cross the summit divide, and drop into the Smith River drainage.

Continue down the river about 40 miles, eventually coming out on Highway 101 at Gardiner, just north of Reedsport.

The Oxbow burn is gone. Now it’s the Oxbow forest, which over the coming years will produce a large amount of forest products along with many high-wage jobs and significant tax revenue. Then, the logged-over land will be reforested and the cycle will repeat.

And it can and will be done while protecting fish and wildlife resources and habitat.

John Perry, a retired forester and former state fish and wildlife commissioner, lives on his Brownsville area wheat and Christmas tree farm.

Interior halts selection of scientists for peer review of wolf delisting proposal

From Greenwire, Energy & Environment

Interior halts selection of scientists for peer review of wolf delisting proposal

Phil Taylor, E&E reporter

Published: Monday, August 12, 2013

The Interior Department is putting the brakes on a scientific peer review of its proposal to remove Endangered Species Act protections for wolves after discovering it had improper knowledge of the scientists who would be participating in the review.

The Fish and Wildlife Service was able to deduce which scientists its contractor AMEC was proposing to review the delisting proposal, a fact that runs afoul of the agency’s peer review standards, an FWS spokesman said.

The peer review selection process has been put on hold pending further review, said the spokesman, Gavin Shire.

“We’ve decided that [it] doesn’t meet the standard for independent peer review selections,” he said.

The decision is likely to come as a relief to wolf advocates who had criticized the agency for suggesting that AMEC exclude from the peer review three scientists who had signed a May 21 letter raising scientific objections to a leaked wolf delisting proposal (Greenwire, Aug. 8).

Today, one of those three scientists said the agency was wrong to recommend he be excluded from the peer review team.

John Vucetich, a professor at Michigan Technological University who has conducted extensive research on wolves at Isle Royale National Park in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, said his past criticism of the agency’s delisting proposal should not disqualify him from the peer review team.

Vucetich, Roland Kays of North Carolina State University and Robert Wayne of the University of California, Los Angeles, were among 16 scientists who signed the letter. AMEC proposed that all three be included in the peer review.

But Fish and Wildlife in a recent email to the firm — which had been selected to lead the peer review — said signatories to that letter would not be appropriate for the peer review, though it is not entirely clear why. The agency has not provided a copy of that email.

“Everyone who signed that letter was qualified and knowledgeable,” Vucetich said in an interview with E&ENews PM today. “People should be more concerned with the qualifications of a person rather than their final judgment.”

The opinions expressed in the May 21 letter are exactly what’s expected of peer reviewers, Vucetich added.

“If you pass judgment but don’t offer any reasons or if you pass judgment and simply aren’t qualified to, that’s inappropriate,” he said in a separate interview with the California Wolf Center that was posted to YouTube. “I and several others passed judgment, but we passed judgment after becoming familiar with the materials and based on our qualified knowledge of the topic. I don’t think that’s advocacy.”

Vucetich said FWS easily knew that he was among the scientists AMEC was proposing to take part in the review.

The firm had submitted the resumes of the scientists it was proposing for the review with the names removed. However, any reasonable observer could have identified Vucetich’s resume given that his name is cited about 100 times in the resume for the publications he has helped author, Vucetich said.

Wayne’s resume would have also been readily apparent, Vucetich said.
“It’s simply a lie,” he said, to suggest the agency didn’t know who was on the peer review list.

Vucetich was also picked to participate in the peer review by Atkins Global, another environmental consulting firm, which bid for the FWS contract but lost.
The agency’s handling of the peer review last week drew complaints from critics who argued it was trying to stifle scientific dissent.

“It seems like reviewers are being cherry-picked,” said Dan Thornhill, a scientist for Defenders of Wildlife who holds a Ph.D. in ecology from the University of Georgia and has been involved in peer reviews for more than 15 years. “It’s not like a jury. You really want things to be vetted by the best and brightest scientists.”

Defenders and other environmental groups have opposed the delisting proposal, arguing that wolves should be allowed to occupy more of their former habitat in the southern Rocky Mountains, the Pacific Northwest and the Northeast.
Vucetich said the Endangered Species Act suggests that to be recovered, a species has to be “somewhat well distributed throughout its former range.” Currently, wolves occupy about 15 percent of their former range, he said.

The FWS solicitation for the peer review sought experts with backgrounds in wolf ecology who are sufficiently independent from FWS and who have not been engaged in advocacy.

“Peer reviewers will be advised that they are not to provide advice on policy,” the FWS solicitation stated. “Rather, they should focus their review on identifying and characterizing scientific uncertainties.”

FWS said it did not order the removal of any particular scientists from the peer review panel, though it did send an email to AMEC raising concerns over whether the signatories to the letter would be sufficiently independent and objective.

“Objective and credible peer review is critical to the success of threatened and endangered species recovery and delisting efforts,” agency spokesman Chris Tollefson said last week. “For this reason, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service takes every step possible to work with our independent peer review contractors to ensure that selected scientific experts have not prejudged the proposals they will review.”

The FWS delisting decision was hailed by Western states, livestock groups and hunters who agreed with the agency that wolves are no longer in danger of extinction after being nearly eradicated from the lower 48 states (Greenwire, June 7).

More than 6,000 wolves roam the western Great Lakes states and Wyoming, Montana and Idaho, up from nearly zero when they were listed in the 1970s.

Oregon legislators optimistic they can reach deal on timber harvests in western Oregon

Oregon legislators optimistic they can reach deal on timber harvests in western Oregon

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By Jeff Mapes, The Oregonian 
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on July 31, 2013 at 4:36 PM, updated July 31, 2013 at 10:19 PM

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A log truck navigates a road in Southern Oregon's Curry County, which has been hard-hit by a loss of timber revenue.Jamie Francis/The Oregonian

A sweeping federal forest bill that would hike timber harvests in western Oregon cleared its first major congressional hurdle on Wednesday.

The controversial bill has been eagerly sought by rural Oregon counties hard-hit economically by the decline of logging over the last two decades, but denounced by environmentalists as a return to the days of massive clear-cuts on federal lands.

The House Natural Resources Committee approved the bill, which also calls for major increases in logging on federal lands throughout the country. It incorporates separate legislation sought by three Oregon congressmen -- Democrats Peter DeFazio and Kurt Schrader and Republican Greg Walden -- to increase timber production on lands once owned by the now-defunct Oregon & California Railroad.

"Today was the first really big step in putting in place a long-term solution for the solvency and prosperity of the O&C counties in Oregon," said DeFazio, who this month became the ranking Democrat on the Natural Resources Committee.

Walden, a member of the House Republican leadership, predicted that the House would take up the bill in September after a monthlong recess.

If the bill passes the House, it will set up negotiations with the Democratic Senate -- where Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., who chairs the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, has vowed to develop his own O&C legislation.

Wyden said he too wants to provide some additional logging, but not at the expense of sweeping aside federal environmental laws.

Putting together a compromise that could pass both chambers and be signed into law is widely regarded as a tough task, but on Wednesday, Wyden and the Oregon House members sounded optimistic.

"Everyone feels the same sense of urgency about creating jobs in rural Oregon and provide O&C counties with a stable source of funding while protecting water, old growth and critical habitat," said Wyden spokesman Tom Towslee. "Sen. Wyden is confident that the details of how we get there can be worked out over time."

DeFazio said the Senate is unlikely to accept provisions in the overall House billthat would mandate higher logging levels in national forests. In fact, he said he didn't yet know whether he would support the bill in the House because of several "problematic provisions" that Democrats on the committee were unable to change.

But DeFazio said a compromise could be crafted around provisions in the House bill aimed at improving forest health and reducing their vulnerability to massive fires. He noted that Wyden and the House resources chairman, Rep. Doc Hastings, R-Wash., met earlier this year to begin laying the groundwork for a compromise.

Watching nervously is the environmental community, which argues that harvest levels can only be increased modestly on the O&C lands without damaging the habitat.

"Oregonians should be outraged that the first thing Rep. DeFazio has done as ranking member of the Natural Resources Committee is to partner with one of the most anti-environmental legislators in Congress on a bill that represents the worst threat to the nation's public lands in a generation," said Sean Stevens, executive director of Oregon Wild, in a statement.

DeFazio countered that the O&C legislation includes important new environmental protections for the Molalla, Rogue and Chetco rivers as well as additional wilderness designations.

Under the House bill, about 1.6 million of the 2.8 million acres of the Oregon & California lands would be placed in a trust managed by the state for more intensive logging. Officials estimate the bill would increase harvests from less than 200 million board-feet annually to more than 500 million board-feet.

In addition, the House bill also would extend the now-expired federal program to provide federal payments to timber-dependent counties to support local services.

--Jeff Mapes