Salvage Timber Law Delaying Logging Forest Service Chief Says Politics Has Kept Harvests Short Of Their Goals

Controversy over the salvage timber rider is stalling normal logging operations and could cause the Clinton administration to once again fall short of harvest goals in Northwest forests, officials said Tuesday.

“This issue is so politicized everyone is losing focus here,” Forest Service Chief Jack Ward Thomas told a congressional panel.

“All this arguing is beginning to hurt us,” Thomas said of the measure that mostly Republican supporters touted as a way to simultaneously provide timber for domestic mills and reduce wildfire danger on national forests.

His concerns were supported by James Lyons, Agriculture Department undersecretary in charge of the Forest Service.

“One down side of the salvage rider is it diverted resources and expertise and put us more in the business of responding to interrogatories and timber industry accusations than preparing timber sales,” Lyons said.

“That doesn’t help anybody.”

Time spent on lawsuits and court orders related to the salvage-logging measure could stall for another year the administration goal of offering 1 billion board feet of timber annually from Northwest forests, Lyons said.

The salvage measure, passed by Congress and signed into law by President Clinton as part of a catch-all spending bill last summer, was touted as a way to speed removal of diseased, dead and dying timber on national forests and thus reduce fuel for catastrophic wildfires. It suspended some environmental safeguards and barred citizen appeals challenging emergency salvage-logging plans.

But Thomas dismissed the measure as a cure-all.

Increased risk of catastrophic fires on national forests, especially in the West, is a result of decades of logging and fire-suppression policies that left large sections of diseased, insect-infected and dying timber that provide tinder for wildfires, he told the House Resources subcommittee on national parks and forests.

“We have a forest-health problem,” he said.

“It took us a long time to get there,” Thomas said, and the salvage rider is not the answer.

“This is a small portion of the problem,” he said.

“We still have a very large problem that we have to collectively address in some intelligent fashion,” Thomas said of the long-standing policies now recognized as ill-advised.

But Forest Service personnel are being sidetracked from normal duties to address concerns about the salvage law.

They also are scrambling to arrange swaps for the so-called Section 318 sales released under the law. The measure directed the Forest Service to release for harvest thousands of acres of Northwest old-growth forest that had been sold to private bidders over the past five years, but never logged due to environmental concerns.

While Clinton signed the salvage law, he has supported subsequent efforts by Democrats to repeal the salvage and Section 318 provisions.

The salvage-logging issue came up Tuesday during a hearing on Clinton’s Northwest forest plan, presented three years ago as a way to end a series of court orders blocking most logging on federal lands due to environmental concerns.

Administration officials were responding to concerns that harvest goals set by the plan could be jeopardized if salvage logging continues to distract Forest Service staff.

Clinton’s plan set up large wildlife reserves and no-logging buffer strips along salmon-bearing streams, and called for annual logging of about 1 billion board feet on federal lands in the region - about one-fifth the annual average in the 1980s, when logging reached its peak.

Timber industry leaders have complained loudly that the Forest Service has failed to meet the 1-billion-board-foot goal - offering about 500 million board feet last year and a projected 610 million board feet this year.

In fiscal 1997, beginning Oct. 1, a full 1 billion board feet should be offered for sale - about 850 million by the Forest Service and 200 million by the Bureau of Land Management, Lyons told the subcommittee.

But he warned that lawsuits and land swaps could thwart the goal again next year.

“If we have to direct resources to find substantial timber for substitute sales, how can we be preparing new sales?” Lyons said in an interview during a break at the hearing.