Judge amends order to allow fish projects and log removal to go forward
Copyright 2000 Associated Press
December 22, 2000
A federal judge has modified an order that stopped some 180 Northwest timber sales, saying projects that improve salmon habitat can go forward.
U.S. District Judge Barbara Rothstein in Seattle was scheduled to further modify the order Friday to allow logs already cut and laying on the ground on some of the sales to be hauled away.
Acting on a request by environmentalists and commercial fishermen, the judge on Thursday amended a Dec. 7 injunction affecting timber sales on national forests and U.S. Bureau of Land Management lands in Washington, Oregon and Northern California to allow habitat improvement projects to go forward.
"The judge has now separated the good from the bad and allowed the good projects to move forward," said Doug Heiken of the Oregon Natural Resources Council.
U.S. Forest Service spokeswoman Kathy Bowman said attorneys were still examining the order, but it affected about 75 projects, ranging from stream improvements to prescribed burns.
Rothstein had halted the sales on federal lands after finding that the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) failed to follow environmental regulations when it released some 20 biological opinions saying the logging would not harm salmon habitat.
The lawsuit was filed by the EarthJustice Legal Defense Fund on behalf of several environmental groups as well as the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen's Associations, which represents commercial fishermen. The plaintiffs argued that the sales threatened salmon habitat.
Logging on the Isabella and Poor Bishop sales in the Bureau of Land Management's Medford District had stopped since Rothstein's ruling, with BLM officials citing concerns that any activity could violate the order.
Steve Swanson, president of Superior Lumber Co. in Glendale, purchaser of the two sales, estimated there are about 2 million board feet of timber on the ground in the two sales.
"This is real good news for the rest of our operation in Glendale," Swanson said. "Those logs will be consumed in the spring. They will be necessary and useful to us."
If the logs were left on the ground to rot, he added, "It would be a terrible waste of a valuable resource."
The modification only allows helicopter harvesting of the downed timber and doesn't permit a return to full-scale logging of the two sales, which originally contained about 15 million board feet, officials said.
The Isabella and Poor Bishop timber sales are among five active timber sales that have been suspended in the Medford District as a result of the original ruling.
A similar ruling by Rothstein in the fall of 1999 also concluded that the NMFS was breaking the law by approving 27 timber sales in the Umpqua Basin.
NMFS has appealed the 1999 ruling to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco.