Salvage Logging to Begin Forest, Enviros Agree on Pared-Down Plan
Environmentalists, loggers and the Forest Service reached a settlement after 2 a.m. Thursday to remove about 60 million board feet of timber from the 307,000 acres of the Bitterroot National Forest that burned in the fires of 2000.
Approximately 14,700 acres of burned land will be logged.
Restoration projects, watershed and fisheries improvements, manual fuels reduction, reforestation and prescribed burning on the forest will move forward. The settlement will provide about 1,400 local jobs, officials estimated Thursday.
The agreement came after members from all sides spent two long days in court-ordered mediation at the federal courthouse in Missoula. U.S. District Judge Donald Molloy ordered the talks for Tuesday and Wednesday after the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco denied a Forest Service request to allow five logging projects to begin. The appellate court sent the decision back to Molloy Jan. 31 and asked that he speed up the ruling so that if approved, winter logging could proceed before the spring thaw begins.
The original record of decision on the Bitterroot burned-area recovery plan that was signed in December called for logging on 44,000 acres, about 30,000 more than agreed on in Thursday's settlement. The record of decision closely resembled Alternative F which would have allowed as much as 176 million board feet to be salvaged from the forest.
The five emergency sales, Blodgett, Roan Burke, Elk Point, Robbins and Bear, will go forward immediately. In all, 19 whole or partial logging sales were approved. Another 19 sales were removed from the burned-area recovery project. Bitterroot Forest Supervisor Rodd Richardson said the Forest Service will focus all its energy during the next two years on the approved sales.
U.S. District Judge Michael Hogan of Oregon served as mediator during the two days of talks. He announced the settlement at about noon via closed circuit television from San Francisco where he traveled for an unrelated meeting. The settlement was recorded at 2:30 a.m. Thursday, Hogan said, with about 40 people present. Mediations went until about 2:30 a.m. on Wednesday also.
"We reached a global settlement," Hogan said.
A global settlement is when all parties involved agree that all issues have been resolved. As a part of the settlement, both parties that appealed the plan signed by Agriculture Department Undersecretary Mark Rey and supported by the Forest Service will dismiss their lawsuits.
Two coalitions of environmental groups filed lawsuits, one protesting the Forest Service's plan to log some burned areas and one saying the Forest Service acted outside its authority in bypassing the appeals process when it implemented the plan in December. The Forest Service has also dropped their appeal for emergency logging to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
The 19 sales that were removed from the Burned Area Plan will be subject to citizen appeals if they are reproposed.
There will be no public input on the 19 approved sales, officials said. But they repeatedly stressed the volumes of public input that were included in the process as a whole.
"Throughout this process there has been an awful lot of public involvement, discussions and meetings and all the information went into the proposal," said Forest Service Chief Dale Bosworth. Other parties will still be able to legally challenge the settlement and the 19 approved sales but officials seemed confident that the agreement will stand.
"The settlement agreement can't bind non-parties to the agreement so potentially there could be somebody who could challenge it later," said Alan Campbell, an attorney for the U.S. Agriculture Department in Missoula. "There are some legal defenses that we could raise to that."
The 19 approved sales, Hogan said, "will provide projects for the environmentalists, jobs for local citizens . . . protect humans and homes and provide wood fibers for manufacturing."
Participants in the mediation are still under a gag order not to discuss the events that took place Tuesday and Wednesday and early Thursday.
"I can't talk about the journey," Richardson said, "but I can talk about the destination."
Work on the two sales that were approved before the fires of 2000, the Bear sale and the Roan Burke sale, will be the first to move forward. The five emergency sales will account for 15.4 million board feet of timber and logging will occur on 5,400 acres.
"The contracts will be awarded immediately and we will be going ahead on the ground immediately" pending the sales meet the required conditions, Richardson said.
Logging will continue for at least three to four weeks or as long as the winter conditions last.
"Mother Nature is in charge here," Richardson said. "If we get our normal winter weather we have a window of time of about 30 days, and we can do a lot of work."
He could not predict when restoration work or savage logging on the 19 approved sales will be completed.
"I don't know that there is a definitive end date," he said. "Our intent is to be well down the road with it by the fall of 2004."
Richardson also said he could not estimate the dollar amount of the 60 million board feet that will be salvaged. More analyzing of the settlement is needed to determine exact figures, he said.
At the end of the mediation the Forest Service, the loggers and the environmentalists, three sides that rarely see eye-to-eye, all praised one another and Judge Hogan's work as a mediator. Richardson called Hogan a "real master at helping all of us no matter what our views were."
"The people are best served by compromise instead of ongoing litigation," said U.S. Attorney Bill Mercer who participated in the mediation.
Mercer called the settlement a "localized solution to a local problem" and said because it so specifically addressed the Bitterroot National Forest, it will not be a precedent-setting agreement.
Mercer said the advantage to this type of agreement is that all parties are able to move away from all the legal maneuvers and focus on what is best for the forest and the residents living in and around it.
Richardson and others said every group involved in the mediation had to give and take a little to reach the settlement.
"Nobody got everything they wanted but everybody got something they wanted," Richardson said. For him the reward was the ability move on with restoration work immediately.
"A good amount of activity will occur in 2002 and 2003," he said. Jennifer Ferenstien, president Sierra Club, said the protection of wildlife habitat was what her group achieved in the settlement.
"We think it is a good start," she said Thursday afternoon. "We think that a lot of important areas are protected for elk and trout. We still have concerns about letting logging go forward in those fragile areas but we will keep monitoring."
"Ultimately everyone walked out of the room with something they could live with," said Mary Anne Peine, executive director of The Ecology Center, one of the environmental groups involved in the lawsuit. "It was hard for us to give up so much timber on the ground but at the same time we wanted to get people to work in the woods this winter. And we also gained protection for 27,000 acres of roadless and native trout strongholds and we also preserved the right of citizens to appeal land management decisions."
"I'm quite pleased," said Bob Walker, president of Timber Workers United. "We are able to put people back to work.
"In the big picture we would have liked to have treated more acreage but we were past that point," he said. "We are happy to be able to move forward with 60 plus million board feet.
"Under these conditions it could have been held up in court for years," said Walker, who owns a logging company and has an unfinished job which was started before the fires ignited.
Walker said the mediation process helped the relations between the timber industry and the environmentalists. He called the process a "stepping stone."
The 19 sales that were removed from the recovery plan can still be negotiated for at a later date. Among the timber in those sales is a lot of logs that will make for quality log home wood. That wood, Walker said, will hold out longer than some other types. "In the areas that we are able to go into . . . we have a good product to remove. But, he said, "there is a lot of ground out there that we are not able to treat and we still believe that the best thing to do is to treat it."
"In view of what happened here," Richardson said, "I hope this is another step in the healing process."
