Forest Chief Says Forest Service should not Expect Profits
12/20/97
*******************************
RELAYED TEXT STARTS HERE:
Headline: Forest Chief Says Forest Service should not Expect Profits
Source: The Associated Press
Date: 12/20/97
Author: Scott Sonner
Copyright: The Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) - The chief of the U.S. Forest Service, whose agency's sale of
trees to loggers lost money last year for the first time, says Americans
shouldn't expect the service to regularly turn a profit while protecting fish
and wildlife and satisfying public demand for the great outdoors.
``The fact is, the way we are doing business is changing and will continue to
change,'' said Mike Dombeck, interviewed as he nears the end of his first year
in office. ``Forests live a long, long time. To assume you are going to run a
profit on an annual basis for everything you do is a false assumption.''
For the first time since its founding a century ago, the Forest Service
admitted recently its commercial logging operations lost money last year - $15
million.
That does not include $240 million that went to counties where federal forests
are - the counties' federally mandated 25 percent of the money private
industry pays for government-owned timber. Environmentalists say the payments
should be counted as additional losses, money that went to individual counties
and not the Treasury.
Long critical of the ecological impact of federal logging, the Sierra Club and
others say the net loss to taxpayers is yet another reason to halt commercial
timber harvests on national forests.
Rep. James Leach, R-Iowa, chairman of the House Banking Committee, is co-
sponsoring a bill with Rep. Cynthia McKinney, D-Ga., to end commercial
logging. ``The U.S. government is the only property owner that I know of that
pays private parties to deplete its own resources,'' Leach said last month.
Understandably, loggers, sawmill workers and other timber industry partisans
draw a different conclusion from the Forest Service's red ink.
They say it proves the need to lessen environmental laws they consider overly
burdensome, which they say would lead to additional harvests and bolster
timber sale receipts.
``The system prevents land managers from doing their jobs, denies them
financial and human resources and forces them to spend time cutting through
red tape and an enormous bureaucracy instead of managing the land,'' said Bob
Powers of the Washington-based United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of
America.
Powers and Bob Watrous, president of the Association of Western Pulp and Paper
Workers Local No. 5 in Camas, Wash., told a Senate panel last week that
federal logging decisions run through too many levels of citizen appeals.
``Many of our Pacific Northwest communities have become hostage to a specific
brand of professional agitators, who function under the guise of
environmentalists but who repeatedly cause waste and disturbance without ever
coming to the table or ever offering solutions or cooperation,'' Watrous said.
Dombeck made it clear in the interview that he supports continued logging on
national forests.
``I am not at all a proponent of zero cut,'' he said. ``I think there are lots
of areas we have to go into to actively manage.''
He balks at projecting whether annual federal logging levels - averaging about
a fourth those of the 1980s - will increase or drop further.
``I'm not sure we know that,'' Dombeck said. ``If anything, we need to
increase the ... focus on what we leave on the land. We need to ... be looking
at investments in the land, making long-term investments in the land. The land
will produce good things for us over time.''
The debate over money-losing timber sales ``shouldn't even be occurring,''
Dombeck said.
``We should be talking about the health of the forest, quality of water,
vegetative composition and not necessarily focus on dollars and cents every
time we turn around,'' he said.