BLM offers mixed review of Wyden logging bill for western Ore.

E&E News
By Phil Taylor
February 7, 2014

While the Obama administration took no official position on a bill by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) that aims to resuscitate western Oregon's timber industry, it did suggest several areas of improvement at a hearing yesterday before the Energy and Natural Resources Committee.

The Bureau of Land Management has concerns over S. 1784's prescriptions on environmental reviews and endangered species protections -- concerns shared by environmental groups -- but it lauded the bill's goal of achieving more predictable timber sales on Oregon's O&C lands.

In addition, Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.), a key player in the O&C debate, said he's willing to let go of a controversial provision in his own O&C bill that would transfer management of federal lands to a state-appointed trust. He committed to working closely with Wyden on a bicameral solution.

Wyden's bill appeared to gain a smidgen of political momentum yesterday, even as most of the key stakeholders remained entrenched in their positions.

The bill would roughly double logging levels on more than a million acres of Oregon's O&C lands, while protecting wilderness, rivers and old growth on roughly the same amount of land.

It seeks to resolve a seemingly intractable resource dilemma: Oregon counties are reeling financially from the steep decline in logging on federal lands, but protections for old-growth species make a return to historical harvests legally and socially impossible.

Wyden is seeking a middle ground by promoting "ecological forestry" projects that are also backed by scientists and the Obama administration. His bill promises to provide up to 350 million board feet of timber annually, a near doubling of current rates but less than one-third of historic highs.

"Not everybody gets what they believe they ought to get," Wyden said. "But this is going to deliver what Oregon needs. It does so because it is designed to end the tyranny of these extremes."

Thus far, most environmental groups have opposed the bill, saying it would undermine key environmental laws and upend the Northwest Forest Plan. Moreover, they fear it would relink county budgets to federal timber harvests.

Oregon's 18 O&C counties have historically drawn a significant portion of their budgets from federal timber harvests, but they've received alternative payments from Congress for more than the past decade.

Logging groups and county officials support the bill's promise of doubling timber harvests, but some argue that it fails to ensure harvests won't get snagged in court and that logging levels won't plummet after a couple of decades.

While witnesses offered few surprises yesterday, DeFazio's testimony was notable.

He recognized Wyden's position that the proposal in H.R. 1526 to strip federal management on O&C lands was untenable in the Senate.

"While I still think there are benefits to a trust concept, I acknowledge the current political reality and believe our agreed-upon principles can be legislated through a different construct -- such as the construct proposed in your O&C bill," he said.

DeFazio also proposed improvements to Wyden's bill, including broadening the timber base to include other BLM lands, ensuring that the timber harvests are geographically dispersed and strengthening certainty that harvests will actually occur.

He criticized environmental groups that he claimed were ignoring science, suing to block "modest" timber demonstration projects and funding misleading advertising campaigns.

"More conservation groups need to come to the table and engage constructively in the legislative process," he said.

The Obama administration for the first time offered a detailed critique of the bill.

Steve Ellis, BLM's newly appointed deputy director, said the agency supports the bill's conservation section, which would designate 87,000 acres of wilderness and 165 miles of wild and scenic rivers and implement the first-ever legislative protection for old-growth trees.

But he also hinted that BLM is not ardent about finding a legislative solution on O&C lands and would rather stay the course on its plan to revise its O&C resource management plans.

"We don't lack for appeals and litigation," Ellis said. But "we're moving forward in that [RMP] effort in an attempt to listen to our publics and try to come up with a suite of alternatives."

Ellis did have concerns with the bill's logging provisions, which he warned are potentially duplicative, undermine BLM's management flexibility, limit the public's engagement and could flout the Endangered Species Act.

"Many deadlines in the bill are not sufficient to allow for the necessary level of analysis, the public participation necessitated by the high level of public interest and involvement in these issues, and the complexity of the issues and information that must be analyzed," Ellis said in his written comments.

The critique cut to the heart of Wyden's bill, which seeks to streamline the National Environmental Policy Act -- which is blamed for stifling timber sales -- without upsetting environmental groups.

Wyden said his bill strikes a healthy balance by requiring BLM to craft two 10-year environmental impact statements (EIS) -- one each for the moist and dry forests -- after which individual timber sales would be authorized under a "consistency document."

"We're going to hear from the stakeholders, but we're going to do it all up front," Wyden said. "We're not going to have this policy where every tree has its own lawsuit."

Groups weigh in

But Sean Stevens, executive director of Oregon Wild, which strongly opposes Wyden's bill, said the NEPA provisions would eliminate BLM's ability take public input and adapt to changing environmental conditions and new science.

"We don't know everything about forests now. We certainly didn't 25 years ago," he said. "We're going to learn more in two years, five years ... and we're going to need the opportunity to be able to be flexible as we look at these individual sales."

Mike Matz, director of U.S. public lands for the Pew Charitable Trusts, said he, too, has concerns over how the bill treats NEPA and the Endangered Species Act, but he argued that the bill is closer to striking a balance between economic development and conservation.

"You can get to that sweet spot," Matz said. "With a few minor improvements, you're pretty much there."

While increased timber harvests will not be a "panacea" for counties' fiscal woes, added revenues will help stave off some of the most draconian cuts some counties have had to make to law enforcement and libraries, Matz said.

He proposed that Wyden's bill designate more wilderness protections in the Kalmiopsis backcountry, the North Umpqua River and Mount Hebo, among other areas that he argued would not diminish the available timber supply.

Wyden's bill also received a relatively conciliatory review from Douglas County Commissioner Doug Robertson -- though he and his group the Association of O&C Counties continue to question the bill's ability to deliver on its promises.

While Robertson praised the bill's attempt to streamline NEPA, "we fear, however, that improvements in this area might be more than offset by loopholes and new substantive requirements in other sections of the bill," Robertson said.

In addition, even if the bill generates the timber it promises, the O&C lands grow more than 1 billion board feet annually and were statutorily reserved for timber production, he said. The counties are unwilling to accept less than 500 million board feet annually, he said.

"I think we can reach a resolution," Robertson said.

Dale Riddle, senior vice president for legal affairs at Seneca Sawmill in Eugene, Ore., said "timing and streamlining is a different issue than whether or not there's legal certainty."

"You're just going to get to the lawsuit a little quicker," he said. "But you're not going to get necessarily a different result with the lawsuit, and that's the concern."

But Andrew Miller, CEO of Stimson Lumber and a top GOP donor, said Wyden's bill recognizes political realities.

"We know the bookends of these issues, and your bill is the appropriate place to begin the process and finally do what we need to do for Oregonians," said Miller, whose company's land would not be affected by Wyden's bill.

Yesterday's hearing was Wyden's last as chairman of the ENR Committee before moving to lead the Finance Committee, but passage of an O&C bill is time-sensitive for the Oregon delegation.

As Finance chairman, Wyden will be in a prime position to extend and reform the Secure Rural Schools program, the primary safety net that keeps O&C counties on fiscal life support.

Forest Service opposes Barrasso logging bill

Forest Service Chief Tom Tidwell yesterday said his agency opposes a separate bill by Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) to streamline logging on national forests West-wide.

Barrasso's S. 1966 would require the Forest Service to treat at least 7.5 million acres within the next 15 years using expedited NEPA and ESA reviews.

Barrasso said the bill would require the Forest Service to conduct timber treatments on 3.8 percent of its lands and only in areas it has already deemed suitable for logging. The lands represent a fraction of the forests designated as wilderness or roadless, he said.

The measure would manage lands from the "cooperative middle, not the radical extremes," Barrasso said.

But Tidwell said limiting logging reviews to environmental assessments could inhibit the agency's ability to plan landscape-scale restoration and could lose the trust of the public.

"If they believe their opportunity to be involved is cut out or reduced, there's just going to be more controversy and delays," Tidwell said.

But the bill's proposal to require arbitration in lieu of lawsuits to resolve project disputes is "interesting," Tidwell said.

"We're willing to explore this idea of some type of nonbinding, reviewable arbitration on a trial basis," he said.

Tidwell also hinted at the challenges of passing a national forestry bill.

Barrasso and other Republicans and logging groups have called for a national bill, saying the agency's timber program is in shambles.

Barrasso said the Obama administration is playing a political double standard by supporting place-based Democratic forestry bills that set management quotas in Montana and Oregon, but not his bill.

"Ideally, it'd be great to have a national bill that would embrace all these key elements," Tidwell said. "But that being said, if you look at the diversity of our forests across this country, there's probably going to be a need for some site-specific or forest-specific bills, while at the same time hopefully being some opportunities for some national direction to be able to improve our efficiencies."

Wyden and Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) said they have concerns with the Barrasso bill, which Wyden argued resembles a House measure that the White House threatened to veto.