Judge orders BLM to sell more timber

Judge orders BLM to sell more timber

Judge orders BLM to sell more timber

June 26, 2013, 6:10 p.m. PDT

AP

GRANTS PASS, Ore. (AP) — A federal judge on Wednesday ordered the U.S. Bureau of Land Management to sell more timber in Southern Oregon, and vacated a system federal scientists use to avoid harming the northern spotted owl.

The ruling out of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia came in a case filed by the timber industry against the Department of Interior.

Judge Richard J. Leon ruled that BLM has failed to consistently offer as much timber as called for in its 1995 resource management plans for the Medford and Roseburg districts since 2004.

And he found that a computer model used by government agencies to estimate spotted owl numbers in timber sale areas was adopted without input from the public, as required by the Administrative Procedures Act. He prohibited government agencies from using the protocol until it goes through a public comment process. The ruling did not address whether timber sales that have been sold based on the invalidated owl estimation protocol, but not yet cut, were still valid.

That portion of the ruling leaves the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service without a scientifically valid method of estimating whether spotted owls, a threatened species, can survive the harm from losing a portion of their forest habitat to logging, said Andy Stahl, director of the Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics, a conservation group. An earlier method was struck down in an earlier court ruling.

"It means, I suspect, that they will actually have to go look for them, which is something they have not wanted to do," he said.

BLM and Fish and Wildlife had no immediate comment on the ruling.

The timber industry called it a clear win, validating their longstanding position that a 1937 law known as the O&C Act sets timber production as the top priority for the BLM forests.

"This is clearly a victory for timber dependent communities in southwest Oregon, and it's a victory for the forest, that has not been managed appropriately," said Anne Forest Burns, vice president of the American Forest Resource Council, a timber industry group involved in the lawsuit.

The judge ordered the agency to fulfill its obligation to meet 80 percent of the amount set in management plans in future years. The next fiscal year begins Oct. 1.

Burns estimated that BLM will have to offer double the timber it now sells on the Medford District, and increase it by 55 percent on the Roseburg District. The extra 54 million board feet would be enough to fuel more than 400 logging and mill jobs.

She noted that the extra timber will come too late for one of the plaintiffs, Rough & Ready Lumber Co., which shut its O'Brien sawmill last month for lack of logs.

But conservation groups that intervened in the timber portion of the lawsuit said BLM would have a hard time offering more timber for sale without Congress increasing their budget, and without violating other environmental laws, such as the Endangered Species Act and the Clean Water Act.

Kristin Boyles, an attorney for Earthjustice, which represented conservation groups, said she felt an appeal was likely, from the government as well as conservation groups.

Where were they 20 years ago???

By Ralph Saperstein, NWTimberBlog

The Oregonian published an Editorial “Taking an ax to rural Oregon”.  In the piece the authors admonish President Obama’s Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack, who during a recent trip touting President Obama’s Jobs Plan, predicted an end to county timber payments.

 

“Listening to Vilsack, it's not clear that he or anyone else leading the Obama administration fully understands the challenges of keeping county governments and schools operating in places where the U.S. Forest Service owns more than half the land and about the only economic activity it generates is whatever is spent putting out the wildfires that flare every summer.”

 

No kidding.  Since President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore came to Oregon to hold a timber summit in 1994, the federal government has failed to address the reality of rural Oregon’s dependence on the scientifically sound management of our federal forestland.

 

Instead, President Clinton’s Northwest Forest Plan has failed to maintain the economic and social viability of the rural communities in the Pacific Northwest.  Lately, elected officials urge continuing county timber payments. 

 

They decry the “broken promises” of discontinuing the county timber expenditures, or welfare payments, for all Western Counties that have lost the economic activity federal forestlands once provided.

 

This scream of “broken promises” misses the most important point.  The federal government, through the Departments of Agriculture and Interior promised rural communities that they would provide a Sustained Yield of raw materials for the independent timber industry.

 

Through the sale of timber, the federal forests would generate county revenue for schools and roads, and family-wage jobs for foresters, loggers, truckers, tree planters and thousands of mill workers.  That ‘community stability’ is the real broken promise of every Administration since the timber crisis began in the 1990’s.

 

Worse, while rural communities have been thrown under the bus, the forests continue to lose Northern Spotted Owl and other fish and wildlife habitat as a result of burning from uncharacteristic wildfires that result from the exclusion of scientifically sound forest management.

Taking an ax to rural Oregon

Published: Wednesday, September 28, 2011, 4:15 PM     Updated: Wednesday, September 28, 2011, 4:18 PM

By The Oregonian Editorial Board  

 

It's just as well that Portland was Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack's only Oregon stop on his tour this week promoting President Obama's jobs act. No audience in rural Oregon would have appreciated Vilsack's bleak view of the future of federal payments to counties.

Vilsack predicted that the expiring program that provides a lifeline to timber counties in Oregon and 40 other states will not survive the congressional supercommittee and its charge of making at least $1.5 trillion in spending cuts. If he's right -- and we hope he's not -- the payments arriving in Oregon in the coming days will be the last.

 

Brian Feulner/The Oregonian

 

If those payments are not renewed, and nothing is done to promptly provide the counties with more revenues from public forests, Oregon will have a rural catastrophe on its hands. Federal payments pay for essential services across timber country; without them, some county governments are likely headed for default.

Listening to Vilsack, it's not clear that he or anyone else leading the Obama administration fully understands the challenges of keeping county governments and schools operating in places where the U.S. Forest Service owns more than half the land and about the only economic activity it generates is whatever is spent putting out the wildfires that flare every summer.

Yes, there's a federal budget crisis. But the argument for support of communities surrounded by public forestlands has not changed in more than a century. One way or the other, through timber receipts, direct payments or another source -- the government is obliged to share the costs of schools, roads and other public services in places where federal ownership of land cuts deeply into local tax bases.

The Agriculture secretary repeated a lot of the same tried-and-failed economic ideas of the past 20 years -- that yet another forest rule will get things moving, that recreation is the answer for rural counties, that there's more money and investment coming, just you wait, from energy and other activities.

Well, new forest rules have come and gone, all to no particular effect. And while some communities -- Bend, Sisters, even Joseph -- have made themselves over into tourist towns, recreation hasn't proved an economic panacea. It hasn't helped, either, that the feds have cut spending on recreation.

Look, no one likes county payments, which are more or less welfare checks to over 700 counties. All these places would prefer jobs and sharing logging revenue and other strong economic activity from neighboring federal forests. Before Congress and the Obama administration leave county payments on the cutting-room floor, they have an obligation to deliver real alternatives.

There are promising ideas. Rep. Peter DeFazio, D-Ore., is promoting a plan to separate productive forests formerly owned by the O&C Railroad into two trusts, one that would protect old growth, the other that would be available for active commercial harvest. Others have proposed creating a new payment formula based on factors such as the counties with greatest need and rewarding counties for actions that bolster forest goals, such as reducing development near fire-prone areas.

Oregon's timber counties are surely open to change. But all these reforms seem distant, and the last county payment checks soon will be in the mail. It's wrong to cut the counties off before anything is done to increase revenue from forests, especially now, when rural communities are fighting for their very existence.

US Agriculture official: Sawmills needed to help Forest Service fight bark beetles

Thanks to Doug McDonald, Timber Data Co.

COEUR D'ALENE, Idaho — A viable timber industry is needed to help the U.S. Forest Service deal in an economical way with bark beetle infestations that have been ravaging forests in the Rocky Mountain West, an official with the U.S. Department of Agriculture said.

Robert Bonnie, a senior advisor to Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, said Thursday that the Forest Service is relying on the timber companies to thin stands of unhealthy, crowded trees.

"The Forest Service is going to have to pay someone to do it, if they can't sell that timber," Bonnie told a receptive audience at a small-diameter log conference in northern Idaho, The Spokesman-Review reported. "We need forest management for the health of the landscape and the economic stability of rural communities."

But officials say many rural communities have lost sawmills due to various reasons, including a sagging U.S. housing market.

John Konzen, county commissioner in Lincoln County, Mont., said a lack of sawmills there means trees cut on the Kootenai National Forest are trucked out of state for processing. The nearest mill is at Moyie Springs, he said.

The Forest Service last year pledged $54 million to fight bark beetles, which since the late 1990s have killed 5,550 square miles of lodgepole pine and spruce forest in the Rockies. The money is intended to thin trees to reduce wildfire danger near rural communities while restoring watershed health.

The beetles are blamed in Idaho for killing trees from Lolo Pass to Lookout Pass along the Idaho-Montana border.

The costs of thinning projects escalate if the Forest Service has to pay someone to do it rather than selling the timber, Bonnie said.

Conservation groups are starting to understand the role that timber companies have in keeping forests healthy, and taking part in collaboration efforts, he said. If fewer timber sales are delayed through legal action, mills have a steadier stream of timber from federal lands, Bonnie said.

That allows timber companies to continue operating and strengthen local communities, he said.

Jonathan Oppenheimer of the Idaho Conservation League said one of the main problems with attempting to log beetle-killed stands is that it's not profitable for timber companies.

"The fundamental core issue with pulling out beetle-killed timber is that it generally doesn't pay its way out of the woods," Oppenheimer told The Associated Press on Friday.

Conservation groups are looking at areas where collaboration is possible, he said.

"In general, we need a multifaceted approach," Oppenheimer said.

The destruction caused by beetles also extends farther south down the Rockies.

A recent aerial survey by the U.S. Forest Service and the Colorado State Forest Service showed the epidemic has spread across 4 million acres of trees in Colorado and Wyoming, devastating entire forests in Colorado's Summit, Grand and Eagle counties.

There's some indication that the timber industry is responding.

A Utah company plans recently announced that it intends to operate a sawmill in Encampment, Wyo. — a small town near the Colorado border — to process beetle-killed trees from the Medicine Bow National Forest.

Thompson Logging of Kamas, Utah, said it expects to employ 15 to 18 people by mid-April at the sawmill, The Rawlins (Wyo.) Daily Times reported this month.

Company President Terry Thompson said he expects to be able to operate for years in the area because of the massive amount of beetle-killed timber.