Settlement Will Restrict Federal Timber Harvests in Northwest
12/21/99
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Title: Settlement will restrict federal timber harvests
Source: The Oregonian
Status: Copyright 1999, contact source for permission to reprint
Date: December 21, 1999
Byline: Hal Bernton
A newly approved court settlement will keep federal timber harvests
in the Northwest at sharply reduced levels for at least the next
year, and it's uncertain whether harvest levels will rebound.
The settlement, made final Friday by U.S. District Court Judge
William Dwyer in Seattle, resolves a conservationist lawsuit that
charged the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management
with failing to survey timber harvest areas properly for rare plants
and animals.
Under the settlement, extensive wildlife surveys must be conducted,
slowing the pace of timber harvests. Federal officials say they
expect to sell no more than 250 million to 315 million board feet of
timber during the current fiscal year. That's less than half the
current annual target of 811 million board feet for the 24 million
acres of federal land covered by President Clinton's Northwest Forest
Plan.
"We see the Northwest Forest Plan -- as it applies to timber -- as
being virtually shut down," said Chris West, a spokesman for the
Northwest Forestry Association, which represents more than 50 mill
operations that in years past have bought timber from the federal
government.
A decade ago, a shutdown in the federal timber supply would have been
a sledgehammer blow to the Oregon timber industry. Federal timber had
accounted for more than 4.8 billion board feet, 57 percent of the
timber cut. But federal timber harvests have been shrinking and now
amount to less than 15 percent of the total Oregon harvest.
Still, federal-lands timber is vital to some loggers, particularly
smaller mills that lack large private land holdings. And the
Northwest Forestry Association has fought hard to maintain federal
harvests. Association members, who intervened in the lawsuit brought
by 13 conservation groups, tried to challenge the settlement approved
by Dwyer, saying their attorney was improperly shut out of key
negotiations between the federal government and conservationists.
But Dwyer rejected those arguments, saying that industry officials
were provided with a draft of the agreement and given ample time to
comment. The settlement spans old growth forests in California,
Oregon and Washington.
Conservationists argued in their suit that federal officials fell far
short of the Northwest Forest Plan's requirements to survey for as
many as 78 species of plants and animals. That plan was crafted to
free public lands from the legal gridlock of the early '90s brought
about by the battle over protection of the northern spotted owl.
Dwyer approved that plan in 1994.
But in August, Dwyer ruled that federal officials had violated the
plan by failing to conduct surveys properly, and he urged settlement
talks. In the final agreement, conservationists dropped demands to
survey for nine species. But federal officials agreed to return to
more than 100 areas targeted for logging and expand earlier survey
efforts. Conservation groups will have the right to review the new
surveys in each of these areas before logging can proceed.
The top priority will be to survey sites where the timber already has
been sold and awarded to a buyer, according to Rex Holloway, a Forest
Service spokesman. The second priority will be to survey sites where
the timber was sold, but was never awarded formally to a buyer.
Timber industry officials say there's no telling how long this
process will take.
The settlement will guide the federal government only for the next
few years. After that, they plan to work under a separate set of
survey rules released in draft form as an amendment to the Northwest
Forest Plan.
That document suggests that federal timber harvests under the plan
eventually could climb back up to nearly 700 million board annually.
That would be more than double the 287 million board feet of timber
sold in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30 and also more than double
the levels expected for the current fiscal year ending Sept. 30,
2000.
But conservation groups do not endorse the draft and could end up
challenging it in court. "We hope they withdraw this thing and use
the (amendment) process to basically give up on logging old growth,"
said Doug Heiken, a representative of the Oregon Natural Resources
Council, which joined in the suit.