Conservation advocates are prepared to sue over more than half of the timber sales Washington’s Board of Natural Resources approved on Tuesday, the latest flare-up in the fight over whether older trees on state-owned forestland should be spared from logging.
The board approved a package of nine sales that would involve cutting roughly 1,200 acres of trees across western Washington, with minimum revenue expected to be around $13.8 million. Staff at the Department of Natural Resources put together plans for the sales and money generated would go largely to schools, counties, and public universities.
Tacoma-based Legacy Forest Defense Coalition opposed five of the nine sales. The group’s founder, Stephen Kropp, said in an interview on Tuesday that it would likely file lawsuits in state court to stop some or all of the five approvals. “We’re probably going to appeal every single one,” he said.
Legacy Forest Defense Coalition and others have been pressing with litigation and through administrative processes to prevent logging on state land of older forests that are short of qualifying as protected old-growth. These forests, they say, are some of the last patches of their kind in western Washington, containing trees that are around a century old in some cases.
But school district and local government officials in parts of the state are growing increasingly agitated over their budgets taking a hit as timber sales are waylaid by these sorts of challenges. Local leaders also warn that halting sales threatens to undercut timber-related jobs and the state’s remaining lumber mills.
These issues have become central in this year’s state lands commissioner race. Two-term Commissioner of Public Lands Hilary Franz, a Democrat, is not running for reelection.
Democratic candidate Dave Upthegrove has promised to preserve nearly 80,000 acres of older forests and to find replacement lands that can be logged to make up for the loss in timber. His Republican opponent, Jaime Herrera Beutler, has vowed not to buckle to political pressure from environmentalists and argues Upthegrove’s plan will raise fire risks and hurt state revenue.
The commissioner is one of six members of the Board of Natural Resources.
‘Caught in the middle’
Russ Pfeiffer-Hoyt, board president at the Mount Baker School District, said the district is the largest local beneficiary of state forest revenue in Whatcom County. He said that, at the minimum bid price, the Little Lilly timber sale, which the state Board of Natural Resources approved on Tuesday, would provide about $282,000 for the district.
Pfeiffer-Hoyt said the revenue was especially important as Mount Baker School District is grappling with a budget deficit. He said pauses in state timber sales are a major reason for the district’s fiscal shortfall. Timber sale revenue, he said, had fallen from an average of $1.2 million annually to around $107,000 last year. The district, he said, cut 23 teachers and support staff.
“We strongly support the approval,” he said.
Lisa Olsen, a Pacific County commissioner, said those who no longer want forests logged “need to come up with another way to fund the taxing districts that support all the essential services that everyone expects and depends on – and leave DNR alone in this regard.”
The Intent timber sale in Pacific County, also approved Tuesday, is expected to bring in close to $1.1 million at least.
Representatives from the American Forest Resource Council, Sierra Pacific Industries and the Washington Contract Loggers Association were among others who applauded the latest sales.
Little Lilly and Intent are two of the five sales the Legacy Forest Defense Coalition opposed. Kropp noted that the Little Lily tract butts up against a section of old-growth forest and said it is adjacent to nesting sites for the marbled murrelet, a threatened bird species. The Intent site, Kropp said, is one of the largest remaining forests of its kind in the Willapa River watershed.
He said revenue concerns that school districts and other local officials are raising are justified, but he blamed decisions made by the Department of Natural Resources for the situation. The local governments are “really caught in the middle of all of this, through no fault of their own,” he said.
A key sticking point critics raise is whether the Department of Natural Resources is doing enough to meet a goal of ensuring about 10-15% of certain land it manages grows into older, “structurally complex” forests by sometime around 2076 to 2106.
Michael Kelly, Department of Natural Resources communications director, said in an email on Tuesday that the agency is meeting that goal “under policy and the law.”
People like Kropp see it differently. “They’ve managed to convince themselves that they’re doing the right thing by essentially clearcutting what amount to the last remaining native forests in many of the lowland watersheds in western Washington,” he said.
‘Seeking a big change’
During Tuesday’s meeting, Superintendent of Public Instruction Chris Reykdal, another Board of Natural Resources member, put forward a motion to remove one of the sales – Next Contestant – from the package so it could be voted on independently. This maneuver failed.
Next Contestant, located in Mason County, is another of the five sales that the Legacy Forest Defense Coalition opposed.
After the meeting, Reykdal explained by phone that he had walked the tract with tribal elders who outlined to him why they viewed it as sacred and important. Reykdal emphasized that even if his motion succeeded, the sale would have passed the board but with further discussion.
He was also the only board member to not vote in favor of the sales, opting instead to abstain. Reykdal said he disagrees with how money from state school trust land timber sales goes into a pool of funding that’s divvied up by the Legislature, rather than to schools near the logged land.
Instead, Reykdal said he wants lawmakers to commit other state funding to a school construction assistance account where the state trust land timber dollars are now going. And he wants to redirect the logging revenue to schools in areas where trees are cut.
“I’m seeking a big change there,” he said.
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