Court: Can EPA regulate mud from logging roads?

Court: Can EPA regulate mud from logging roads?

The timber industry is hoping that the U.S. Supreme Court will maintain business as usual on controlling muddy water running off logging roads into salmon streams.

The high court decided Monday to take up a 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruling that federal regulators should treat stormwater on industrial timberlands the same as pollution discharged from a factory, changing the longstanding practice that treats it like water coming off farm fields.

The ruling on an Oregon case would apply to logging roads on state, private and national forest lands throughout the jurisdiction of the 9th Circuit, which covers much of the West. Most of the roads are graveled, but some are paved or bare dirt.

Tom Partin, president of the American Forest Resource Council, said increased regulation would cost money and offer conservation groups new opportunities for blocking logging without producing any cleaner water.

“Over the years, we have been able to continually improve our practices as we have learned more about the environment,’’ he said in a statement. “Water flowing from our forests is high quality,’’

Paul Kampmeier, a lawyer for the Washington Forest Law Center, which represents conservationists, said the high court was presented with arguments urging them to take up the case from 26 states, including Oregon, as well as the timber industry.

“I think the defendant, or the petitioners now, did a very good job of making it sound like the sky is falling,’’ if the ruling stands, Kampmeier said. “Congress is political, and there is political pressure on EPA…I think we will get a fair and impartial ruling from the Supreme Court.’’

The appeals court ruled in 2010 that the muddy water running off roads used in industrial logging is the same as any other industrial pollution, requiring a Clean Water Act permit from EPA. Scientists have long identified sediment running into salmon streams from erosion as a leading cause of habitat loss because it chokes off the gravel beds where salmon lay their eggs.

The case was brought by the Northwest Environmental Defense Center in Portland, Ore., against the Oregon Department of Forestry over logging roads on the Tillamook State Forest.

The Obama administration petitioned the Supreme Court not to take the case. It argued that while it felt the appeals court ruling was wrong, there was no reason for the Supreme Court to get involved, because Congress and the Environmental Protection Agency were taking steps already.

Last May, EPA formally proposed to revise stormwater regulations to say logging roads don’t need the point-source pollution permits that factories must get, effectively blunting the ruling.

Instead, the roads would be regulated under a less stringent system known as “Best Management Practices,’’ where authorities set up guidelines for the design and maintenance of logging roads to minimize erosion that sends mud into rivers. EPA started reviewing how states and tribes handle the issue, and planned to put out new rules by Sept. 30, when an exemption for the timber industry enacted by Congress expires.

Dave Tenny, president of the National Alliance of Forest Owners, questioned the need for EPA to continue developing new regulations for logging roads now that the issue would be decided by the high court.

“The basic question in the case is what kind of deference the courts give an agency to interpret the statutes and their own regulations,’’ Tenny said. “The 9th Circuit interjected itself into the realm of the regulatory agency. And that’s inappropriate.’’

Oregon Department of Forestry spokesman Dan Postrel said the current system has done a good job of protecting water quality for many years without federal permits.

Kampmeier said only roads with trucks actively hauling timber that discharge water into streams would require permits.

“We have confidence the Supreme Court will agree that when the EPA said discharges associated with industrial logging activities requires a permit, EPA is allowed to say that,’’ he said.

Asked whether it would continue working on new regulations, an EPA spokeswoman referred comment to the U.S. Department of Justice, which declined to comment on pending litigation.

The O&C's New Man At The Scene Of The Crime

The O&C's New Man At The Scene Of The Crime
By: Jim Petersen, Co-founder and Executive Director, The Evergreen Foundation

Last week, Oregon Governor, John Kitzhaber appointed Tom Tuchman to be his new man at the scene of the crime that is the administration - dare I say the management - of the revested Oregon and California Railroad Lands, commonly known as "the O&C lands."  

These are federal lands in western Oregon - arguably the finest Douglas-fir timberlands on the face of the earth. They, together with western Oregon's national forests, formed the economic backbone of western Oregon's timber economy for more than 40 years. Then the spotted owl was listed as a threatened species [in 1990] and the entire federal timber sale program came crashing down on those who first gave it life.

It is frequently argued that the 1937 O&C Act - which mandates a sustained yield harvest and an economic return to the 18 counties in which the lands are located - trumps the owl listing. But the argument has fallen on deaf ears. In modern-day America, the draconian federal Endangered Species Act trumps all economic reality. So be it.

Tuchman is no stranger to this conflict. In fact, it was he who led the development of the Clinton Forest Plan which has never been implemented, thanks to impossible to navigate regulations and errant federal court rulings - plus the crushing and misguided political influence of environmental groups that oppose commercial timber harvesting in federal forests to the detriment of rural counties that are now bankrupt or soon will be.

The truth here is that there is nothing Governor Kitzhaber or Tuchman, the Governor's officially titled Forestry and Conservation Financial Advisor, can do about the sorry state of O&C affairs. Interior Secretary, Ken Salazar, is running this silly show - and he seems to find anathema in the Western Oregon Plan Revision, an exhaustive and scientifically sound idea that he took off the table as soon as the Obama Administration took power. He apparently believes it was a gift from the outgoing Bush Administration to its friends in the timber industry. It was not. In fact, what was left of the industry had already gone to court over the proposed harvest level.

Kitzhaber deserves credit for going through the motions. Appointing Tuchman would seem to be a politically shrewd move. Both are Democrats with long years of front line experience in the region's forest wars. So this would seem to be a good time to reintroduce my late friend, Dan Goldy, another Democrat of considerable renown, and a man who, long ago, actually won a bitterly fought forest war of another kind.

Dan Goldy was Pacific Northwest Regional Administrator for the Bureau of Land Management in the early 1950s. More important though is the fact that Goldy is the man most responsible for preventing the region's largest private timberland owners from hijacking the entire O&C timber sale program, which they attempted to do in the late 1940s under the seductive guise of a series of "cooperative sustain yield agreements" with the Bureau.

The agreements, which were shot down by the Truman Administration, would have granted the big landowning outfits the exclusive right to harvest O&C timber from tracts adjacent to their own lands. Had they succeeded, the technology-driven sawmilling industry that took root in western Oregon after World War II would never have materialized. Why? Because Goldy and his fellow Democrats understood that, minus the presence of innovative, upstart lumbermen, there would be no spirited bidding for O&C timber, no great financial return to the counties and no motivation for the big outfits to modernize their aging and wasteful mills. Today, there are state-of-the-art mills here with overruns above three. This means that for every board foot they buy in log scale, they are cutting three board feet in lumber scale. Lord only knows how many billion board feet of old growth timber have been spared by these remarkable recovery rates.

Goldy was himself a fierce competitor who hated to lose. He thus played a critical but little understood behind the scenes role in the development of the old Western Forest Industries Association, which represented the diverse interests of independent lumbermen for more than 40 years. I know this because I spent more than five years researching a book I've written that centers on the growth and development of the region's family owed sawmills. It is titled The Independents, a word the West's lone wolf lumbermen often used to describe themselves.

But this column is not about my book. It is about what Goldy and the Truman Administration believed concerning the development of the West's federal estate. And what they believed to the depths of their souls was that these vast and productive forests were the greatest economic engines the country had ever seen. They saw their development as the key to the nation's post-war homebuilding boom, and thus the blossoming of middle class prosperity - a first in the nation's history - that followed World War II.

A very solid case can be made for the fact that the fabled GI bill - which guaranteed every returning veteran a low-interest home loan - could never have fulfilled its mission had it not been for the opening of federal forests and the abundance of competitively priced lumber that the Democrat-inspired federal timber sale program provided. Although most people don't know it, very little federal timber was harvested in the West before the late 1940s. Virtually all of the nearly 60 billion feet of timber consumed by our armies during World War II came from private lands because federal lands were still mostly roadless.

I knew Dan Goldy fairly well, but I got to know him better after he died by spending more than a week at the Truman Library in Independence, Missouri. Goldy's voluminous and enlightening papers are stored there, as are those of his boss, C. Girard Davidson, who was Assistant Secretary of the Interior during Truman's first term. It was Davidson who courageously killed the monopolistic cooperative agreements. He later opened a law practice in Portland, and served as Democratic National Committeeman for Oregon for several years, chairing the party's Natural Resources Committee during Jack Kennedy's run for the White House.

Goldy's letters and speeches - and Davidson's as well - should be required reading for every contemporary Democrat. Suffice it to say, there was a time in America when Democrats stood shoulder to shoulder with loggers, lumbermen, miners, farmers and ranchers. No more. Today, save for Southern Democrats, there are few in the party who give a damn about people who get their hands dirty every day, or have the slightest idea where the nation's wealth begins. [Hint: it isn't taxes]

Through an odd set of circumstances, I have more than 100 letters that Goldy wrote to friends in his later years. Mostly, they are chatty notes about his world travels. But last week I came across one I had not read before that I want to quote here in its entirety in the hope that someone will show it to Governor Kitzhaber or Tom Tuchman, who might then be inspired to start acting more like old time Democrats and less like shills for the environmental industry.

Goldy, who died in December of 2000, wrote this letter to the late Mark Hatfield, Oregon's most revered U.S. Senator, on August 28, 1990. It references people most of you won't know, including his wife, Rusty, who lured him to Oregon not long after he got out to the Navy. By then, he was a well-connected Democrat. Among his close friends was Monroe Sweetland, a Molalla newspaper publisher and guiding force in Oregon Democratic Party politics for four decades. Sweetland also played a vital behind the scenes role in the development of the O&C timberlands. Now - without comment - Goldy's letter:

Dear Mark:
Rusty and I have been traveling in Eastern Europe, and since our return I have been riding horses in the wilderness and have been making speeches around the country. This is the first opportunity I have had to focus on the political campaign in Oregon.

I am enclosing a contribution for your re-election campaign. As a Democrat, I find it rather easy to sit on the sidelines this year and to keep my checkbook in the drawer. I find few Democrats worthy of support. In your race, I feel that no less than the future of Oregon and the Pacific Northwest is at stake. Harry Lonsdale admits he is politically unsophisticated, but this is no excuse for aligning himself with the most radical elements of the preservationist movement to lock up the forest resources of the Northwest.

It is my view - which I have been asserting in speeches around the country - that the Vento's, Jontz's. Adkins', Yates' and Leahy's of the Congress will, if they are successful, inflict an environmental disaster on the Northwest. To lock up all of the old growth timber and permit nature to manage it in its brutal fashion with fires, insects and blow-downs, is a formula for catastrophe. Moreover, their insistence that only the young second growth be harvested means that we will be depriving the region of any forestry future, and will shortly exhaust these limited resources of young timber that are keeping our mills going for the moment. Indeed, I have heard from industry sources that at the rate their young second growth is behind harvested, it will all be gone in four to five years.

Aside from the devastating effects of this approach on the economy of the Pacific Northwest, I find it appalling that these members of Congress do not understand the economic significance to the entire United States of eliminating its wood basket. Even our own people are surprised to learn that approximately 50 percent of the total softwood lumber consumed in the United States comes from Oregon, Washington and northern California; that two-thirds of what is domestically produced in the United States comes from these three states [the difference being what is imported from Canada].

Recently, I have consulted with the experts in the various wood products associations in this region to get an estimate of the size of the cutback we are facing in Oregon, Washington and northern California. Taking into account the initiatives on the ballot in California, the impact of the spotted owl listing on private lands, and the reduced sales levels from national forests called for in the House markup of the 1991 appropriations bill, we expect a reduction in timber harvests of about nine billion feet. This translates into 14.4 billion board feet of softwood lumber if all of those logs were put through sawmills. That is about one-third of total U.S. consumption. These estimates, bad as they are, do not take into account the likelihood of mass appeals of federal timber sales when Section 318 expires September 30.

That much lumber cannot be withdrawn from the U.S. market - even at its present depressed levels - without producing a large inflationary spike in prices. It would increase enormously the median price of a house in the U.S., and would make housing unaffordable for more than a million additional families.

I have recently had a meeting with Dale Robertson and George Leonard and pointed out to them that a reduction in wood products from this region of this magnitude cannot be made up from other sources. Now that the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service guidelines on the owl are being applied by the states to private lands, there appears to be no way that the cutbacks in federal harvests can be compensated for by increased harvests from private lands. Moreover, their statements to Congress that Canada can make up some of the difference is refuted by their own 1985 study of British Columbia which predicted a precipitous drop in harvest levels as past overcutting and failures in forest utilization practices catch up with the Canadians. The Canadian experts in the B.C. forests have recently reported we can expect a reduction in magnitude of about 7.5 billion board feet in harvests sometime in the next five years.

You are in a unique position as the ranking Republican on the Senate Appropriations Committee to provide the leadership to achieve a national solution to this problem. I never understood what possessed the Oregon electorate to give up the enormous clout and constructive influence that Al Ullman exercised on our behalf when he was Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, or to retire Bob Duncan despite his growing influence on the House Appropriations Committee. It would be an even greater act of insanity to substitute an extremist like Harry Lonsdale for a seasoned leader like you.

Rusty and I want you to know that we want to be as helpful as possible in your re-election campaign.

With warmest regards and best wishes,

Daniel L. Goldy

9th Circuit creates laws 'out of the vapors'

9th Circuit creates laws 'out of the vapors'

Editorial cites Judge Milan Smith Jr. "chastising the 9th Circuit for repeatedly creating 'burdensome, entangling environmental regulations out of the vapors."  The Oregon forest roads NPDES permit decision, awaiting both U.S. Supreme Court and Congressional action, also made Judge Smith's list of rulings out of vapors:

A recent ruling that requires timber companies to get Environmental Protection Agency permits for stormwater that runs off primary logging roads, even though the agency's regulations exempt them. "The result? The imminent decimation of what remains of the Northwest timber industry."

Editorial From Capital Press

It's not often we find ourselves agreeing with anything coming from the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, but criticism of the court written by one of its judges in a dissenting opinion in a mining case is right on target.

Earlier this month, the court ruled in favor of the Karuk Tribe of California in a lawsuit against the U.S. Forest Service. The tribe alleged the Forest Service had failed, as required by the Endangered Species Act, to consult with federal wildlife agencies before it allowed recreational gold mining on the Klamath River to proceed under a Notice of Intent.

A trial court ruled against the tribe, a decision that was upheld by a three-member appeals panel. That ruling was overturned by an 11-member panel representing the full court.

Judge Milan Smith Jr. disagreed with the majority, arguing the court had disregarded its own precedents in finding for the tribe. Then he went further, chastising the 9th Circuit for repeatedly creating "burdensome, entangling environmental regulations out of the vapors."

He cited:

* A recent ruling that requires timber companies to get Environmental Protection Agency permits for stormwater that runs off primary logging roads, even though the agency's regulations exempt them. "The result? The imminent decimation of what remains of the Northwest timber industry."

* A ruling that overturned a Forest Service management plan for 11.5 million acres in the Sierra Nevada, and set a standard that Smith said will "dramatically impede any future logging in the West."

* A ruling that reinterpreted the Central Valley Project Improvement Act, resulting in the reallocation of additional water to benefit endangered fish. "The practical impact of this decision is that there will be less, perhaps far less, water for irrigation in the San Joaquin Valley's $20 billion crop industry."

Smith argued that elected legislatures and regulatory agencies that answer to the president would never enact rules that "create such economic chaos, shutter entire industries, and cause thousands of people to lose their jobs." But the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, Smith wrote, regularly pushes an agenda lawmakers and regulators never intended.

"Our job is constitutionally confined to interpreting laws, not creating them out of whole cloth," he wrote. "Unfortunately, I believe the record is clear that our court has strayed with lamentable frequency from its constitutionally limited role when it comes to construing environmental law."

We agree.

Tom Partin: The spotted owl did help destroy the timber industry

Tom Partin: The spotted owl did help destroy the timber industry

By TOM PARTIN

READER’S VIEW FOREST POLICY Idaho Statesman

Spotted owl did collapse timber industry

I write to set the record straight. Niels Nokkentved, whose guest opinion piece appeared May 27, simply does not know what he is talking about. Following the dialectic of the environmental movement, he would have readers believe the listing of the spotted owl had nothing to do with the neglect our federal forests are now suffering or the plight of our rural communities which those forests surround.

I have lived in Oregon for all of my 62 years, mostly in small rural communities. I have witnessed firsthand the appalling damage done by misguided federal forest policy to our forests, our communities and our families. Here are some facts.

The Northwest Forest Plan, implemented in 1994, was designed to assure the recovery of the northern spotted owl. The plan allocated only 15 percent of the 24.5 million acres of federal land it covers to multiple use management and set aside 85 percent for special uses. This drastic reduction in manageable land reduced the amount of timber available annually from 4.5 billion to 1.1 billion board feet. This reduction, coupled with the fact that less than 40 percent of the projected 1.1 billion was ever made available for harvest, led to the closure of 261 mills supporting at least 50,000 jobs in western Washington, western Oregon and northern California.

Based on a conservative production estimate of at least 500 board-feet per acre per year, growth on the Northwest Forest Plan acres since 1994 has been in the neighborhood of 12.1 billion board feet per year. The annual harvest has been only about 4 percent of growth. The resulting buildup of dead and dying trees in Northwest forests has led to catastrophic fires burning millions of acres, much of it prime spotted owl habitat.

The Pacific Northwest is the premier timber growing region in the world. We have the laws and standards in place to assure good environmental management and protection of air and water quality when we harvest. Yet today, America is importing 40 percent of its softwoods from Canada. We are in a prolonged period of high unemployment in America — and especially in Oregon, Washington and northern California. Poverty in rural areas of the Northwest continues to fester. More than 25 percent of rural Oregon families are on food stamps and a record number of our children depend on free school lunches and even breakfasts to meet their basic nutritional needs.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is proposing to nearly triple the critical habitat set aside for protection of the spotted owl from 5.3 million acres to nearly 14 million acres. This despite the fact that owl numbers have continued to decline rapidly due to catastrophic wildfire and predation by the more aggressive barred owl. Curtailing harvest well below that envisioned by the Northwest Forest Plan has not helped the owl because habitat is not the limiting factor.

In closing, I suggest if Mr. Nokkentved is going to write about Oregon and Washington, he get out of Idaho and come visit some of our unhealthy forests and communities and witness the devastation firsthand. It is only a three-hour drive to visit the community of John Day, where I lived for 18 years and was the mayor for two. I watched the demise of the federal timber program and watched that community lose its timber industry, its infrastructure and its identity, while surrounded by a sea of dead and dying federal timber. It’s time to get it right.

Tom Partin is president of American Forest Resource Council in Portland.

Read more here: http://www.idahostatesman.com/2012/06/03/2140631/tom-partin-the-spotted-owl-did.html#storylink=cpy

Congress must protect water quality, forestry jobs in Oregon

Congress must protect water quality, forestry jobs in Oregon
 By Guest Columnist
By Bruce Hanna and Arnie Roblan

There's an environmental success story in Oregon's timber industry you may not know about -- one that's helped forest owners protect our rivers and streams from pollution for more than 35 years while supporting tens of thousands of critical jobs in Oregon. That success story is the Oregon Forest Practices Act. Since 1971, this policy has helped protect soil, air, water, fish and wildlife, as well as forest resources, while also supporting one of Oregon's top-producing industries: timber. But this balance between protecting our environment and supporting a critical natural-resource-based economy is at risk. 

In 2010, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed more than 30 years of practice and ruled that forest roads are a "point source" of water pollution. That new classification would require forest owners to undergo an unnecessary, rigorous permitting process intended for other point sources such as sewage plants and factories. 

The court's decision to reclassify forest roads represents a break from judicial precedent, which has upheld the Environmental Protection Agency's authority under the Clean Water Act to identify the industries that present the greatest pollution threats to our waterways. The EPA has determined that forest roads are not a major contributor to pollution and are better managed by best forest practices established in each state -- such as Oregon's Forest Practices Act. 

The current regulatory process is working and the timber industry needs certainty that it can continue, but if the 9th Circuit's ruling is allowed to stand, Oregon would lose more than 5,000 jobs and $150 million in wages in our already depressed rural communities. The result would be new, unnecessary rules that do nothing to strengthen Oregon's already stringent water quality protections, thousands of jobs lost and a further blow to an already struggling industry. Under this ruling, there would be no benefit to Oregon, only hardship. 

Last week the EPA tried to address the uncertainty this ruling presents with a proposal for an administrative rulemaking process. While the stated intent is laudable, administrative rulemaking is not the answer. First, rulemaking does not protect the industry from the inevitable lawsuits that litigators are waiting to file, which are costly and would put an indefinite halt to timber-related business activity in Oregon. Second, rulemaking does not address the issue of forest roads as "non-point sources" of pollution. Third, there is still the option that a new rule could require new and unnecessary industrial discharge permits, which would cost Oregon jobs and wages. 

At this point, the only true path to protect a regulatory system that works and supports a sustainable timber industry in Oregon and across the nation is an act of Congress. Congress and the Obama administration have provided leadership on this issue before, and they need to again. Last December, Congress passed legislation that temporarily prevented the 9th Circuit's ruling from taking effect, but that protection expires in September. We need Congress and the president to make that legislation permanent, providing legal certainty for an important American industry and the tens of thousands of workers it employs. Anything short of permanent legislative action would lead to ongoing and costly litigation, lengthy administrative processes and lingering uncertainty for the timber industry, our state and our nation. 

Oregonians are committed to maintaining healthy, sustainable forests. It's not only the right thing to do, but it's necessary for the long-term viability of the timber industry and rural communities. These unnecessary threats of increased costs, lost jobs and years of litigation could force forest owners to convert their land into other uses with far fewer benefits to water quality and our economy. 

The bottom line is that rules exist that have protected rivers and streams in forestland from pollution for more than 30 years. Congress needs to protect these rules, rather than allow an uncertain rulemaking process to be subject to years of court battles or to allow the 9th Circuit's misguided decision to muddy the water. 

Bruce Hanna and Arnie Roblan are the co-speakers of the Oregon House of Representatives. 

Timber Country -- seeing beyond the trees

Timber Country -- seeing beyond the trees

 By The Oregonian

Sixty-seven years ago, when Allyn Ford's father opened his first sawmill in Roseburg, he found a straightforward way to make money: A grinding, steel maw chewed through locally cut trees, spitting out millions of board feet of lumber annually.

Those days are long gone. Today, trees from nearby state and federal forests are nearly as scarce as spotted owls.

Nine states

The "Nine states of Oregon" project was originally published in The Oregonian in November 2003.Editors have republished the complete series in response to readers' requests.

Now, Ford's family-owned Roseburg Forest Products is betting its future on high-tech home-building materials and tight relationships with customers. Trouble is, Ford's competitors in South America, Canada and Asia are all vying for the same markets.

"We'd better be good," says Ford, an affable man with a Stanford University M.B.A. who admits to healthy revenues but elusive earnings. "We're competing with everyone in the world."

Similar stories echo through Timber Country, which stretches along the western face of the Cascades, curls west around Eugene and brushes the Coast Range. Survival of the fittest applies equally to the flora and fauna of the Elliott State Forest's mist-filled hills and the struggling mill towns of Oakridge, Mill City and Sweet Home.

Most of the trees in Timber Country belong to the federal government. During the past decade, in response to environmental regulations and lawsuits, the feds have drastically scaled back logging, dragging down harvests to record lows in 2001. Since 1989, about 160 mills statewide have closed, taking with them 35,000 jobs.

While regions such as Southern Oregon, Central Oregon and the Columbia Corridor have rallied around new industries, new residents and new identities, Timber Country has struggled, with limited success, to right itself.

The bigger towns, especially those along Interstate 5, are slowly diversifying. But they're still counting on timber companies to fortify the region. Many smaller towns, which lost their livelihoods along with the logs, are trying to turn to tourists, commuters and retirees.

The industry that once ruled Oregon's economy, politics and identity watched as Portland's 1990s boom made high-tech king. It was a financial and psychological blow that has deepened tensions in the region and made the politics of Timber Country increasingly conservative, defensive and angry.

At best, the mood in these blue-collar towns is skittish.

"Everyone's feeling insecure," says Randy Fouts, who drove a forklift for Roseburg Forest Products for 30 years before becoming a business agent for Lumber and Sawmill Workers Local 2949. "They don't know what the future holds."

Gap in wages doubles

Despite the industry's decline, Oregon remains the largest softwood producer in the country.

Wood products workers account for 15 percent of the state's manufacturing employment, compared with 20 percent in high-tech. Timber companies and their executives contribute heavily to political campaigns and maintain a powerful lobby in Salem and Washington, D.C.

The industry's resilience has forced state leaders to question economic development policies that have favored high-tech over timber. Gov. Ted Kulongoski, for instance, has signed legislation making it easier to redevelop abandoned mill sites.

And it has kept the pressure on lawmakers to balance environmental, recreational and logging interests. Last legislative session, the industry pushed a bill to increase logging on some state forests, but it died after heated debate.

Still, with most of Timber Country's forests in federal hands, state influence is limited.

"I don't think Ted can do much good," Fouts says.

Amid the clash of interests, timber companies are finding ways to survive. Roseburg Forest Products bought up private timberland, branched into a wide array of lumber products and modernized operations.

Instead of selling off its mills, as others have done, it has been investing in new ones. The latest is a highly automated $75 million building products plant. Unlike its forerunners, which turned big logs into millions of two-by-fours, the plant assembles composite materials into sturdy, easy-to-use joists, beams and columns for homes and other structures.

The operation sprawls across 70 acres. A single building encloses 11 acres and contains such proprietary equipment that managers won't talk about details.

"We've decided to go big and fast," says Ford, who continues to pump millions of dollars into capital improvements.

With annual sales of about $800 million and a work force of about 3,000, Roseburg Forest Products is one of the state's largest privately held companies. For decades, it has been Roseburg's biggest employer.

Even so, the company hasn't turned a profit in the past two years. And this summer, it announced layoffs in its plywood unit, including the closure of a plant in Green on the outskirts of Roseburg.

The layoffs will leave more than 600 people -- 20 percent of the work force -- without jobs. They shocked a community still raw from a decade-long slump.

"It wasn't a pleasant decision," Ford says. "We're part of the community, and we feel it."

Judy Sherman, 60, a short, strong-looking woman with graying hair and rugged hands, learned of the layoffs -- including hers -- while buying bread in a downtown bakery.

"All kinds of things ran through my mind -- what bills hadn't I paid, how long would the money last," says Sherman, who had worked for timber companies for 30 years, the last eight in one of Roseburg Forest Products' plywood mills.

Sherman, who is single and cares for two young children and a grown grandson and granddaughter, can't afford to retire. She also doesn't expect to get her old job back. "Everything is so downsized and mechanized," she says. "We knew it was just a matter of time before our jobs were gone for good."

Other jobs, such as those with Dell Computer's new call center in Roseburg, have helped offset declines in timber employment. But service-oriented jobs generally are lower-paying and can be ill-suited to mill workers' skills.

From 1990 to 2000, the gap between the county's average wage and Oregon's more than doubled to $3,688. The divide between county and national average wages: $7,604.

Sherman hopes to go back to school, using money from a federal aid program for dislocated workers, to earn a degree in early childhood education.

She says she should have changed her career years ago. Even so, she doesn't understand why federal policies have come down so hard on harvest levels.

"There's no reason or rhyme why they can't harvest and replant and harvest," she says.

Looking for income, federal help

When Paul Ehinger, 80, worked for Edward Hines Lumber in Westfir, the company ran a sawmill, a plywood mill and a logging operation, dominating the bustling town east of Eugene.

Today, the company's office is a bed-and-breakfast.

Runaway costs shut down Westfir's timber operation by the early 1980s. The town where Ehinger raised his family has dwindled to 307 people and three businesses: the bed-and-breakfast, a U.S. post office and a massage therapist.

The most vulnerable mills lay in small towns like Westfir -- next to, or within, federal forests and heavily dependent on publicly owned trees. Boring, Estacada, Lyons, Idanha, Sweet Home, Oakridge, Dillard, Drain, Creswell, all suffered mill closures. Like Westfir, many have found little to fill the void.

"The ones in the center of government forests have pretty much disappeared over the horizon," says Ehinger, now a private timber consultant in Eugene.

State employment economists say almost half of the timber workers who lost their jobs in the 1990s fell off employment rolls for good. They moved to other states or retired or became part of "a cadre of chronically underemployed rural residents," labor expert Art Ayre wrote in a June article in the Journal of Forestry.

When harvests in Oregon peaked in 1986 at 8.7 billion board feet, 56 percent of the logs came from federal lands. At the low in 2001, the share had plummeted to 5 percent.

The hardships have laced communities with bitterness and a sense of betrayal. Politics are more polarized and conservative, Ehinger and others say.

"We're Republican-based but labor-friendly. That's a tough mix," says Fouts, the union leader. "Add environmental issues, and that's really a problem."

Many blame the federal government for shoddy forest management. They blame environmentalists for extremist tactics in the courts and in the forests. They blame Portland for forgetting its roots and fostering liberal attitudes unsympathetic to Timber Country's problems.

"I'm not saying they're ignorant. They just don't understand," Fouts says.

Republican state Rep. Susan Morgan has lived for 25 years in Myrtle Creek, a onetime timber town south of Roseburg. She's looking to Congress to increase federal timber harvests -- not to the levels of the past, but substantially above those of today.

The forest fires that have raged through the West in recent years have fueled the Bush administration's efforts to thin more trees and increase harvests. After Bush visited Oregon this summer to promote his cause, Timber Country residents began talking more optimistically about federal policies easing.

"There's hope here that we can regain some of the losses," Morgan says. "There has to be some kind of rational approach to managing the federal forests."

Counties also are lobbying for the continuation of their timber subsidies, put in place in 2001 and due to expire in 2006.

Yet analyst Ehinger remains cautious. "Honestly," he says, "I don't see the environmental movement turning over and playing dead in the sand."

Timber Country tries to diversify

Like many towns, Oakridge isn't banking on timber's return.

In the mid-1990s, the city bought the abandoned Bald Knob sawmill at the edge of town, eager to tear it down and forget about the past.

But the community, which lies in the lush Willamette National Forest southeast of Eugene, hasn't been able to lure a new manufacturing tenant to the site. So the mill gathers rust, its pale green sides ripped and ragged, its rafters dripping rain.

"The pigeons rent it," says Jay Bennett, a former city administrator.

Government money helped Oakridge buy the 220-acre site, which the town plans to turn into a campuslike industrial park. Some of the work is done, and a few small businesses have moved in.

Bryan Huber, chief executive of Creative Composites, came to Oakridge to build high-end snowboards, but he ended up manufacturing aircraft parts for the U.S. Air Force, a more lucrative niche. With annual sales approaching $1 million and employment growing, he plans to expand the business into an available building at the industrial park.

Huber is a sailor, as well as a snowboarder and businessman. He says Oakridge, resting in a tight valley pocket within the forest, is the perfect spot to play and make money. Highway 58 brings travelers to nearby rivers, lakes and the Willamette Pass ski area.

Randy Dreiling, chamber of commerce president and owner of Oregon-adventures.com, is convinced the town can become a destination for mountain bikers, rivaling hot spots like Bend in Deschutes County.

Dreiling tried to get traction for his business back in the early 1990s. But the mill had recently closed, and laid-off timber workers were in no mood for the peddlings of forest-loving mountain bikers.

" 'Tree-hugger' was the politest thing they called us," Dreiling recalls.

Now, many of the timber families are gone. And the townspeople who remain seem more receptive to new ventures, Dreiling says. Early this year, he moved to Oakridge from Eugene, set up a Web site and began organizing mountain-bike tours.

With 500 miles of trails winding through the surrounding forests, "the atmosphere up here is great for biking," he says. "It's just a matter of time."

-- Gail Kinsey Hill

Logging roads, not logging roadblock

Logging roads, not logging roadblock

Published: Saturday, May 26, 2012, 2:01 PM

 By The Oregonian Editorial Board 

Nobody doubts that a gravel road cut through a forest can, under hard rain, lose some dirt that washes into a nearby stream. Neither does anybody doubt that the same road, gullied by a torrent of stormwater, could send loads of silt downhill and choke waterways that are spawning grounds for protected fish. 

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, charged with enforcing the Clean Water Act, has known and acted on this for decades. And that's why the agency was right last week to oppose a federal court ruling that would undercut the agency's ability to coordinate with Oregon and other states wanting to manage forest roads to their own standards. 

In 2010, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the EPA require federal Clean Water Act permits for logging roads -- a step that would classify logging operations in the same category as sewage treatment plants and further complicate logging approvals. While EPA considers forestry to be among the top 12 "probable sources" of waterway impairment, a logging operation is no sewage treatment plant. And Thursday, the U.S. solicitor general issued an opinion to the U.S. Supreme Court arguing that the 9th Circuit erred by not allowing EPA to interpret its own regulations and role in clean water enforcement. 

At issue is logging. Oregon can no longer afford to manage logging by lawsuits. Oregon can no longer withstand the chokehold that lawsuits have put on the prudent harvests of trees in our forests. 

A lawsuit forced the stormwater question before the 9th Circuit. And it will be another lawsuit another day that keeps logging sales from going forward, citing another federal requirement designed for another purpose. 

Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli Jr. avoided recommending that the Supreme Court review the 9th Circuit's flawed decision. That's a disappointment. But the high court may yet do so, deciding once and for all whether forest roads are, as the 9th Circuit found, "point sources" of water pollution requiring industrial discharge permits. A Supreme Court review would create the kind of certainty needed by foresters and agencies managing logging sales. 

Significantly, however, Verrilli recommended that the issue return to Congress. Last December, with Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden's advocacy, Congress had the good sense to pass a moratorium preventing the 9th Circuit Court decision from taking effect until Sept. 30. In doing so, Congress backed EPA's historic position that road building for forestry constitutes a "non-point source" of pollution, which Oregon and other states can handle through wise forestry practices. 

That position is especially defensible now. Part of EPA's proposal last week was to review best management practices by states and tribes nationally to decide who's doing theirs best. 

Oregon should be a contender in that review. And Oregon should, with Congress' help and perhaps the Supreme Court's, be able to step up the pace of logging without fear of being shut down by the next lawsuit.