June 24 - Tues. - 6:30-8 p.m. - Olympic Natl. Forest Headquarters, 1835 Black Lake Blvd., Olympia
June 25 - Wed. - 1:30-4:30 p.m. - Quilcene Ranger Station, Quilcene
June 25 - Wed. - 6:30-9:30 p.m. - Cooperative Extension Office - Shold Business Park
June 26 - Thurs. - 3-5 p.m. - Soleduck Ranger Station, Forks
June 26 - Thurs. - 6:30-8 p.m. - Soleduck Ranger Station, Forks
June 27 - Fri. - 6:30-8 p.m. - Quinault Ranger Station, Quinault
See following AMA article and/or call 385-6271 for more information
The Interior Appropriations bill, to which Porter/Kennedy is an amendment, is not expected to reach the House floor until after July 8. A letter sponsored by Reps. Kennedy and Porter calling for an end to funding new logging roads was signed on by 114 Members of Congress (but not by Mr. Dicks). That number is over half that needed to win, but clearly more support is needed.
Supposedly Rep. Dicks has not yet decided his position on the Porter/Kennedy amendment. He has expressed concerns about road maintenance and recreational access. Let's help him make up his mind!
Surely, over 2,300 miles of Forest Service roads on the Olympic Peninsula is more than enough access for any reason. The Forest experienced millions of dollars of damage to some of those road miles this past winter and spring.
Critical funds to maintain roads that need to stay open, and close roads that need to be eliminated should be appropriated as separate budget items, and not tied to building more roads. It's much more cost-effective to be able to maintain the roads pro-perly, than to have to spend many more emergency dollars cleaning up the slides from road failures.
If you haven't contacted Rep. Dicks, please do so now. If you already have, you might want to again, just to encourage his vote for the Porter/Kennedy amendment. Also ask him to find those maintenance dollars! Letters to your local paper would help publicize the issue as well. Pass the word along, and thanks for your help!
Congress is on recess from June 27-July 4. Call his Tacoma office to leave messages for him, or to find out if he'll be at a public event in your neighborhood where you can ask him about roads personally.
In D.C.: The Honorable Norm Dicks, 2467 Rayburn House Office Bldg., Washington, DC 20515; 202/225-5916; 800/962-3524 (Capitol Switchboard); fax 202/226-1176.
In Tacoma: 1717 Pacific Ave. #2244, Tacoma, WA 98402; 800/947-6676.
The Forest Service has scheduled workshops for the pub-lic to explain and discuss the Olympic Adaptive Management Area concept. They are developing an AMA Guide which will identify opportunities and priorities for experimentation and learning activities in the AMA.
During initial meetings with interested parties, the Forest Service has noted that timber management was the issue most frequently raised. While it is possible to improve habitat for some wildlife species by thinning, and thereby producing some wood products for the local economy, there must be guidance about where, how, and how much should occur. As experiments are conducted to test how good a solution thinning is, there must be rigorous scientific standards applied to activities and monitoring.
Management of the AMA is supposed to respond to local needs and concerns, and these workshops are a good opportunity to convey your interest. If you can't attend one of them, you can communicate your questions and concerns to: Ward Hoffman, Olympic National Forest AMA Coordinator, 1835 Black Lake Blvd. SW, Olympia, WA 98512-5623, 360/956-2300, fax 360/956-2330.
Paul Roberts describes the dramatic rise of salvage sales in his June 1997 Harper's Magazine article, "The Federal Chain-Saw Massacre--Clinton's Forest Service and clear-cut corruption." Following are excerpts:
Describing the Pendleton Canyon sale (not salvage) on the Wenatchee National Forest: ... "Pendleton is expected to generate 6 million board feet of timber--enough to fill 1,200 logging trucks or build 600 homes--worth $3 million on the volatile lumber market. In exchange for this public asset, the logging company will pay the Forest Service anywhere from $900,000 to $1.5 million or more, depending on the market and the number of bidders. Not that the public will see much of that money. Selling federal timber is expensive. Carving out new logging roads to Pendleton will cost the Forest Service $30,000 per mile, and the agency pays for a myriad of other planning and administrative expenses--everything from pre-sale surveying to post-sale replanting ... In the end, the sum returned to the U.S. Treasury will be considerably less than what the logging company pays. In fact, between 1992 and 1994, according to a new Government Accounting Office study, the Wenatchee's timber pro! gram lost nearly $19 million ...
... The notion that the Forest Service must chop down a substantial chunk of America's public woodlands to pro-tect the remainder--that we must, in effect, log our forests to save them--is not a view to which everyone subscribes. Scientists and activists who watch the na-tional forests regard the "forest health crisis" as willful malpractice. Yes, western forests are burning up at an accelerating rate: last summer alone saw 6 million acres--an area the size of Vermont--turn to ashes. Yet the con-flagrations stem as much from a decade-long drought out West and a century of misguided forest management as from bugs ...
... Meanwhile, the owners of the national forests--the public--remain as confused and uninvolved as ever: vaguely opposed to logging yet consuming more wood products than any other people on earth and, for the most part, completely clueless as to why or how the government is selling their trees ...
... Like most burned areas of federal forest, Warner Creek [in Oregon] is to be sold as salvage, even though doing so will actually retard the recovering forest. Logging equipment tears up the already unstable hillside. Removing the blackened trees deprives the landscape of potential nutrients and wildlife habitat. The same is true in bug-infested forests, where soil disturbance from machinery and road building is harder on the forest than are the most voracious insects.
Salvage can, in theory, help prevent forest fires by removing "fuel load." Unfortunately, the Forest Service also wants its salvage sales to make money, and these goals are at odds. In the ideal thinning operation, loggers would take only smaller trees, plus brush, logging debris, and other "fuels." But in real life, logging companies don't want small trees; at the timber mill, an eight-inch-wide log brings less than a quarter the price of a sixteen-incher. Brush and debris bring nothing. So agency officials often try to sweeten salvage sales by adding healthy "green" trees from neighboring sites, or by not requiring the loggers to remove fuels, or by cutting the sale price, and often all three. As a result, many "treated" forests remain almost as flammable as before ...
... Unfortunately, such complex ironies don't fit on a bumper sticker. What resonates among voters is that fire is bad, dead trees are ugly, and salvage must be a good idea, not least because salvage logging has some exceedingly persistent backers. Industry likes salvage because many burned trees, when stripped of their charred bark, are quite serviceable as lumber--and available to loggers at bargain prices ... But salvage's most eager proponent is, once again, the Forest Service. Salvage sales, being an "emergency" measure, may exceed the normal forty-acre limit on clear-cut size and are also allowed in environmentally or geologically unstable forests, where loggers are ordinarily prohibited ... the Forest Service can keep all receipts from salvage sales in a kind of revolving slush fund earmarked for future salvage operations ...
... between 1988 and 1989 salvage receipts quadrupled, from $32 million to $144 million. Slowly but surely, the federal timber program metamorphosed. In 1976, salvage sales had accounted for 762 million board feet and 7 percent of the total federal timber program. But by 1990, the Forest Service was moving 2.8 billion board feet of salvage, or 26 percent of the program. And by 1993, after two years of owl-related shutdowns, salvage accounted for 42 percent of the agency's harvest and was bringing in $190 million in receipts--every penny of which the agency was allowed to keep ...
... In the late 1970s, the Natural Resources Defense Council began scrutinizing one of the agency's proudest claims: namely, that federal timber sales turn a profit. After comparing sales receipts to the actual costs of administering those sales, the NRDC found that the "profitable" federal timber program was bleeding money. The NRDC, and later both the GAO and the Congressional Research Service, concluded that the Forest Service routinely hid or minimized expenses through questionable accounting methods. Road-building costs, for example, which can run up to hundreds of thousands of dollars per mile in steep, mountainous areas, were often amortized over 100 years--1,800 years, in several cases ...
... On the whole, the U.S. timber program has been in the black three times in its history: 1955, 1956, and 1969. From 1980 through 1991, the program lost nearly $6 billion; and between 1992 and 1994, when the agency claims to have made $1.1 billion, GAO calculations show instead a loss of nearly $1 billion ...
... In 1995, proceeds from a "typical" $1 million timber sale broke down as follows: $71,000 deducted from the price as a road-building credit to the timber company; $500,000 to the agency's various discretionary trusts; and $375,000 to the counties in which the forest lies, leaving $54,000 for the Treasury. Once all administrative costs are deducted from net receipts, the sale lost $633,000. This doesn't include "indirect" costs, such as when reforestation fails and must be repeated, or when salmon runs, battered by erosion, must be restored ...
... a Congressional Research Service report showed that the Forest Service overestimated the selling price of salvage timber by nearly 100 percent; the two-year [Salvage] rider is estimated to have cost taxpayers up to $233 million ...
... Last June, for example, after Al Gore admitted that signing the salvage law was the administration's "biggest mistake," Clinton quietly declined to support a bill that would have repealed the "mistake"--a bill that subsequently lost by two votes ...
... [Clinton] still likes salvage. Some 1.4 billion board feet of wood--one third of the total Forest Service volume expected for 1997--will come from salvage log-ging operations ...
... By 2005, the Forest Service, if it gets what it wants, will be "treating" 3 million acres of that landscape--about 5 percent of the agency's forest holdings--every year. At that rate, it will take only a decade to clear-cut, thin, or otherwise alter nearly half of the national forests ...
... In the end, the Clinton Administration did "reinvent" the federal timber program--or, rather, stood aside while the program reinvented itself, morphing from a logging bureaucracy into a "treatment" bureaucracy ...
Percentage of Americans who believe they are more likely to see Elvis Presley than campaign-finance reform: 48
QUAFCO News June 1997
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