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Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Bid To Buy Salvage Sale Invalidated Nw Ecosystem Alliance Sent Bid To Wrong Place, Official Says

Associated Press

The Okanogan National Forest on Wednesday rejected an environmental group’s bid to buy a salvage sale because the offer was sent to the wrong place, a U.S. Forest Service official said.

The Northwest Ecosystem Alliance invalidated its bid by sending the offer to the Tonasket Ranger District instead of the forest supervisor’s office, timber sale specialist Brad Flatten said.

“It’s not uncommon for that to happen. We reject the bid when it’s sent to the wrong place,” said Flatten.

The decision allowed the Ecosystem Alliance to keep its money, since its bid was the only one received on the sale.

The Bellingham-based environmental group wanted to buy the salvage sale to save the trees rather than cut them, despite a federal law that requires purchasers to conduct a harvest.

“The Forest Service is managing our forest like a soup kitchen for timber companies, so we took our place in line,” said Mitch Friedman, director of the Northwest Ecosystem Alliance.

“The $15,000 we offered was a great deal for the public, since we would not have cut the trees or asked for additional federal handouts for road construction and replanting.”

However, Flatten defended the sale plan, saying it was so carefully drawn up to protect the environment that no loggers even bid on it.

“We knew several months ago that we had a very marginal sale offering” for traditional purchasers, Flatten said. “We had already built into the sale design those measures designed to protect the ecosystem. We were not willing to back off on those.”

The Northwest Ecosystem Alliance offered $4.25 per thousand board feet of timber for the Thunder Salvage sale, south of the Pasayten Wilderness Area in the Okanogan National Forest.

The bid was one cent over the minimum of $4.24 per thousand board feet.

An estimated 3.53 million board feet could have been logged from the remote area, with most of the timber consisting of spruce, subalpine fire and lodgepole pine.

Only trees killed in the 1994 Thunder Mountain fire or very likely to die from insects that attack fire-damaged trees were to be harvested, according to the environmental review conducted by the Forest Service.

The alliance contended that cutting down the trees would jeopardize wildlife habitat and stream conditions for salmon, but the Forest Service disagreed.