BY RACHEL CHEESEMAN
SALEM - When the State Land Board met Tuesday, one of the major topics of discussion was the management of state forest lands in Northwest and Southwest Oregon, including the Tillamook and Clatsop State Forests.
The Board of Forestry adopted a new management strategy for the lands April 22, 2010. It was recommended to the State Land Board, which consists of Governor Ted Kulongoski, Secretary of State Kate Brown and Treasurer Ted Wheeler, that the Land Board concur with this management strategy for the 28,000 acres of Common School Forest Land in western Oregon, excluding the Elliot State Forest.
The new management plan was already adopted by the Board of Forestry and applied to its lands after concerns that the expectations of the old plan, both for timber harvest and for diversifying the forest growth in areas that are currently young, uniform forest, were unrealistic.
The Land Board approved the new management plan contingent upon the completion of a scientific review and the presentation of its results to the Board of Forestry and the State Land Board, with any necessary alterations to the management plan in light of the review being made before the vote.
This requirement was included in an amendment to the staff recommendation for the adoption of the new management plan. Bob Van Dyke of the Wild Salmon Center, who was in opposition, said that he was “heartened to see the Land Board stand up for science.”
According to staff presenters Louise Solliday of the Department of State Lands and chief of the State Forest division of the Department of Forestry, Nancy Hirsch, adopting this plan would increase the timber harvest in these forests from the average yield for the past 10 years of about 185 million board feet to an estimated 195 million board feet, an increase of about 5.2 percent.
With the fluctuating prices in timber, Solliday said she couldn’t estimate how this would translate into dollars, but the additional revenues would go directly to the Common School Fund, which serves as an additional source of funding for K-12 public schools in Oregon.
According to Dan Postrel, a public information officer for the Department of Forestry, harvests could increase about seven percent in state forests.
“It’s not a huge revenue increase,” he said, “but it is significant if you’re Tillamook County, for instance.”
The management strategy also includes a new plan for managing species of concern, rather than the habitat conservation strategy of the older plan.
Solliday said that practices for aquatic species would remain the same, while including a certain amount of acreage as “set-asides” for avian species like the Northern Spotted Owl and murrelets.
“The Department of Forestry is going to manage these under a species of concern strategy, which is about recovering species rather than just avoiding take,” she said. “We’re still on the landscape managing to protect the habitat of those species.”
Van Dyke testified opposing the new plan saying it was drafted without scientific review and ignored certain environmental and wildlife factors.
The amount of clear-cutting in the forests, he said, would increase from 10 to potentially 25 percent, under the new plan, potentially causing many harmful side effects to the areas, including an increased risk of landslides. He added that sedimentary runoff could pollute streams, thereby preventing the successful spawning of endangered salmon in the area.
“I’m not opposed to a robust timber harvest,” he said. “But I am opposed to the amount of clear-cutting in this plan.”
According to Van Dyke, not a single conservation group agreed with the adoption of the new plan.
Sean Stevens of Oregon Wild said he was unaware of any conservation groups that supported the plan, finding it unlikely that they would.
“The plans are a step backwards,” Stevens said “We had designed something that started to forge some balance, and this is going back to a pretty imbalanced approach.”
“This is all a trade-off and a balancing of different values,” Postrel said, referring to the social, economic and environmental values of state forests. “It’s challenging sometimes.”
