Timber Salvage Speed Criticized Falling Prices, Oversupply Of Timber Blamed For Delays In Logging

Western Republicans accused the Clinton administration Thursday of undermining a new law intended to accelerate logging in national forests facing fire threats as well as Northwest forests with spotted owls and marbled murrelets.

“This is a smoke screen,” Sen. Conrad Burns, R-Mont., said.

“We are spending a helluva lot of money and we are producing nothing.”

But Assistant Agriculture Secretary James Lyons and Forest Service Chief Jack Ward Thomas assured the critics they are committed to meeting the salvage logging targets in the new law.

“It doesn’t happen overnight,” Thomas said. “We will do more next year by about double than we are this year.”

Lyons, who oversees the Forest Service, said falling lumber prices and an oversupply of timber largely are to blame for delays in salvage logging.

He also warned the declining demand will cut into projected profits from the salvage sales, causing taxpayers to lose money in some cases, especially in the Rocky Mountains.

Sens. Frank Murkowski, R-Alaska, chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee; Larry Craig, R-Idaho, chairman of its subcommittee on forests and public lands; and Burns led the charge in sometimes heated exchanges with Lyons during a hearing before the subcommittee.

“When we have an emergency situation with rapidly decreasing values (of wood) there needs to be a sense of urgency, not the grand waltz of procedure to me the politically correct essence of what is out there,” Craig said.

Burns asked Lyons, “Do you really want to harvest dead and dying timber?”

“You’re damn right I do senator,” Lyons responded.

“Why aren’t you doing it?” Burns asked.

“We’re doing it,” Lyons answered. “There seems to be this inference we aren’t moving on this. We are.”

Murkowski warned that the GOP-led Congress will use the appropriations process to force the administration to log the trees more quickly.

“We are going to have a viable timber industry in this country as long as I am chairman of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee,” the Alaska Republican said.

“If the Forest Service policy won’t allow that, we’ll change the policy. If we have to cut the off the funds to get your attention, we’ll cut off the funds,” he said.

The administration still intends to sell 4.5 billion board feet of salvage timber over the next two years, as outlined in the new law co-authored by Sen. Slade Gorton, R-Wash., Lyons said.

But demand for the salvage timber is so poor in some parts of the West that many timber sales offered by the government are attracting only minimum bids and in some cases no bids, he said.

“The primary concern right now is there’s a lot of companies that harvested a lot of volume,” Lyons said in an interview with The Associated Press before the hearing.

“The market is down and there’s not as much demand as there was a year ago. That’s going to affect our ability to move this volume and it’s also going to affect the projections on revenue. It could put us into a below-cost sale situation on these sales.”

Below-cost sales are those in which timber purchasers pay less for the trees than it cost the government to prepare them for cutting.

They most likely will occur in the Rocky Mountain states, he said, pointing to numerous offerings in Idaho that have to be reworked because they didn’t attract any bids.

Backers of the new law - which waives existing environmental laws to help expedite the logging - said it will help reduce fire threats in overstocked forests and bring the U.S. treasury hundreds of millions of dollars in logging revenues.

The Congressional Budget Office projected the increased salvage logging would generate an additional $345 billion in timber sales.

But Lyons said those revenue projects are based on outdated estimates of stumpage prices - the amount loggers and mills pay for the trees.

“It’s a whole new ball game,” he said. “The bottom fell out on stumpage prices between last fall and January and February. It has had a significant impact on the attractiveness of these sales.”

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