The race for Washington’s next commissioner of public lands began with seven.
But after what may have been the tightest primary election in state history — and a hand recount resulting in a 49-vote margin — voters have a choice between the two prevailing candidates with competing visions for the management of about 6 million acres of public forests, waters and rangelands.
Democratic King County Councilmember Dave Upthegrove faces former U.S. Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler, a Republican who voted to impeach former President Donald Trump.
The position they are vying for oversees the state’s largest firefighting force, the harvest and sale of timber on private and state lands, and the leasing of public lands and waters for everything from growing shellfish to grazing cattle and generating wind energy.
Both agree on the need to adapt land management to a changing climate. But they disagree on how to do it.
Upthegrove has offered a plan to protect tens of thousands of acres of older forests to store carbon and provide habitat and recreational opportunities. The former state representative has described himself as leading with “strong conservation values” with endorsements from the Sierra Club and Washington State Council of Firefighters.
Herrera Beutler has painted some state and federal forests as “neglected” and “tinderboxes,” and has said the agency’s existing logging practices and experts can chart a path through a hotter, drier future. She has promised to balance obligations to trust beneficiaries, rural timber economies and conservation goals. She is endorsed by the Washington Farm Bureau, Association of Washington Business and the Association of Western Paper Workers Union Washington Area Council.
Herrera Beutler has raised around $619,000 and Upthegrove has raised $1.1 million, the largest amount of money put into a candidate for the job since 2008.
The organizations donating to Herrera Beutler’s campaign include timber companies like Weyerhaeuser, trade group American Forest Resource Council, Yakama Nation and the Washington State Tree Fruit Association.
Organizations that have donated to Upthegrove’s campaign include several tribes including Quinault Indian Nation, the Sierra Club, the utility Avista and unions like the SEIU 775, which represents caregivers.
Here’s a look at where the two stand on a few key issues.
Logging
Around the state’s inception, Washington was granted vast land to extract natural resources and generate revenue for public schools, universities and prisons, as well as hospitals, schools and fire districts.
The lands commissioner oversees efforts to steward and make money from 2.6 million acres of the state’s waters, about 1 million acres of rangelands and 2 million acres of forests — with about half set aside for habitat and the rest available for logging.
The bulk of this revenue comes from timber sales.
Climate change has thrust some of this logging into the spotlight. And the biggest difference between the two candidates is how they plan to manage DNR forests — especially older trees.
Upthegrove wants to protect these so-called legacy forests, something conservationists have been calling for since 2021. Upthegrove helped pause the sale of a legacy forest stand last year in his role on Metropolitan King County Council.
Legacy forests are generally known as the old-growth forests of tomorrow. Not yet old growth, these are second-growth forests originating before 1945, and never replanted to a dense monoculture of nursery-grown seedlings.
These forests’ big trees store more carbon than younger trees on short harvest rotations. They offer critical habitat and help maintain stream flows.
On day one, Upthegrove has said he would pause or defer commercial sales of an estimated 77,000 acres of these older forests, or what he estimates to be 3% of state forest lands. He said this doesn’t mean taking executive action to set aside lands in conservation status, but rather to not bring forward timber sales including these forests.
“My proposal isn’t to change how we’re harvesting, it’s to change where we’re harvesting,” Upthegrove said in an interview with The Times.
The proposal would be a significant diversion from the status quo practice of managing these lands for the primary purpose of revenue generation, but, he says, it wouldn’t reduce the amount of timber harvested.
Nonprofits have used DNR data to identify over 200,000 acres of forests on DNR trust lands they believe to be available for harvest in Western Washington. DNR would review the lands to determine if they would all qualify for harvest and could generate similar revenue.
The path to this new policy could be challenging and expensive.
To protect these older forests, the commissioner, according to an analysis provided by DNR staff, would need to direct the agency to conduct an environmental-impact statement and recalculate existing harvest targets.
Upthegrove said he would direct staff to define exactly what and where these older forests are.
He said he would propose using revenue from sources like the state’s carbon market to buy private timber lands that might be up for sale and possibly developed and grow the trust.
The agency has done this before, he said, pointing to a portion of the private timber lands acquired by DNR within the Mountains to Sound Greenway.
Upthegrove said the state’s Habitat Conservation Plan, issued under the federal Endangered Species Act, already envisions restoring and maintaining 10%-15% of these forests in each region for conservation. He said once these targets are met, then some of the older forests could be available for harvest.
“We shouldn’t be afraid to pursue new ways of doing things that do better for the climate and biodiversity while still supporting funding for schools and governments,” Upthegrove said.
Herrera Beutler said previous commissioners have left the forests in a state of “disrepair.” She has pointed to the practice of setting lands aside and the idea that some forests need to go untouched.
Herrera Beutler says she’s not pledging to cut any more or any less.
She gives current Commissioner Hilary Franz credit for bucking the trend and the pressure from conservation groups to set aside harvestable forests.
Herrera Beutler said she believes the state is already following the Habitat Conservation Plan and other mandates to conserve a sufficient swath of public lands. She also noted the roughly 800,000 acres already set aside for conservation.
“I don’t want to back off on the innovations that we’ve made, but we do need to make sure that we’re not afraid to also keep working forests working,” Herrera Beutler said.
She argues the best thing that can be done for climate change is to follow the state’s existing logging practices and replant logged forests to sequester even more carbon through new trees.
“If you’re using that with product here, you’re keeping mills in business. You’re keeping millwrights and contract loggers, public paper workers working so you’re keeping that economic benefit,” she said. “We can either fight carbon emissions with our amazing resources, or we can continue … the way the federal government has done it for a generation, and we now know that it isn’t working.”
Herrera Beutler pointed to destructive California wildfires and argued that forest health work includes so-called sustainable forestry.
While younger trees might sock away carbon fastest, the carbon stored increases as forests age, studies show. For carbon storage capacity to grow on land, more old trees are needed.
It takes about 200 years for a clear cut to regain the carbon storage lost from logging old growth, according to a paper led by Mark Harmon, professor emeritus in the Department of Forest Ecosystems and Society at Oregon State University.
In any cut, carbon is lost or released into the atmosphere, at least until the replanted trees grow to store as much as the trees they replaced.
As to what new strategies and science Herrera Beutler would bring to the job, she has said she’d be open to adapting to climate change through replanting stands after harvest with a mix of species that are more drought tolerant and fire resilient.
While DNR staff say they wouldn’t bring in nonnative species, they are considering sourcing native seeds of native species from farther south — like Oregon and Northern California — to find trees that might be more adapted to the hotter, drier conditions.
Wildfire
Research has shown that human-caused climate change has contributed to drying fuels and doubled the acres burned in Western U.S. forests since the mid-1980s. This is coupled with more than a century of fire suppression and the resulting buildup of fuels across the West.
Washington saw some of the most destructive wildfires in recent years, and in 2023, more fires started in Western Washington than in Eastern Washington for the first time on record.
Meanwhile, the state ignited its first “broadcast burns,” or the clearing of an entire section of a forest floor of vegetation, in two decades in 2022. More fires have been kept below 10 acres because of new tools like AI-assisted cameras and more firefighting aircraft that help expedite the state’s response to fire starts.
Both Upthegrove and Herrera Beutler say current Commissioner Franz has made great strides on the state’s wildfire prevention and response efforts, like securing $500 million through 2029 for these wildfire preparedness and response efforts.
DNR used some of the money to help property owners reduce fuels for fires on their lands and to treat thousands of acres with prescribed burns. Both Upthegrove and Herrera Beutler have called for increases in these practices.
While thinning can reduce fuels, burning also provides ecological benefits.
Both Herrera Beutler and Upthegrove have called for the state’s forest health plan to be replicated — through work with local communities, tribal nations and amendments to better fit the wetter forests — on the west side of the state. DNR staff said this planning process is already underway.
The two differ on what forests they believe are more resilient to wildfire.
Upthegrove cites studies that suggest older forests are than younger stands. That doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be any thinning or burning on older protected forest lands, he said.
Upthegrove has called for more monitoring work to better track which forest health treatments are most effective.
Herrera Beutler has said she believes the practice of setting aside these lands has left them fire-prone.
Herrera Beutler also proposed a West Coast collaborative that would share science and learned experiences for adapting to climate change and particularly wildfire.
Both candidates have said they would want to see more partnership with tribal nations and to learn from Indigenous land management practices.
Clean energy
Unique to Upthegrove is a vision for the agency’s role in the state’s ambitious clean energy goals.
He wants to lease state lands, where there are not impacts on culturally or environmentally sensitive places, for solar and wind projects, and create a clean energy trust. The money generated would be provided back to rural communities.
Herrera Beutler has said she’s not opposed to wind or solar energy projects, but it needs to be the best use of the space.
Oct. 28 is the deadline to register or update your registration online or by mail for the Nov. 5 general election.
