Forest Comparison Between Feds, States Called Inequitable National Forests Forced To Meet Broad Needs, White House Says

A new government audit indicating state logging operations in the Northwest may be more efficient than their federal counterparts is breathing new life into Republican proposals to transfer control of some national forests to states.

But Clinton administration officials say the comparison is flawed because the main objective of state forests is making money, while national forests have to meet broad wildlife and recreation demands as well as produce timber.

“The mandates are different. You are comparing apples and oranges,” said Jim Petterson, a spokesman for the Agriculture Department, which oversees the Forest Service.

“The Forest Service is under the multiple-use mandates - everything from trail maintenance to ecosystem concerns. The states are not,” he said.

Rep. Don Young, R-Alaska, released the General Accounting Office audit on Tuesday. It said state forests in Washington and Oregon produced about the same amount of timber as federally owned forests in those states during the last three years with only one-fifth the staff.

“Although the federal agencies manage four times as much timberland acreage as the two states, for the past several years the states have sold about the same amount of timber as the federal agencies,” said the GAO, the investigative arm of Congress.

Young, chairman of the House Resources Committee, said he would use the data to further review proposals to transfer control of some national forests and other federal lands to the states.

“State managers are closer to the people,” Young said. “And they produce more timber with less controversy.”

The GAO said that’s partly because most of the highly valued old-growth is found on the national forests, forcing more contentious management decisions to be made there than on the state lands, which contain primarily cutover second growth.

It’s also because federal environmental laws order the Forest Service to manage national forests for multiple uses, including wildlife and recreation. Laws governing the state lands emphasize timber production and maximizing revenues over the long term, the audit said.

In addition, the federal logging is subject to more citizen challenges and appeal avenues than is the state logging, GAO said.

“Because most of the remaining old-growth forests in the Pacific Northwest are on federal lands and because these lands provide habitat for threatened and endangered species, the federal agencies must take additional steps to protect these remaining old-growth forest areas,” the report said.

Logging on federal lands in the region came largely to a standstill during the early 1990s after federal judges ruled excessive logging violated laws protecting the northern spotted owl.

BLM spokeswoman Lauri Hennessey said the report covers that time period when the agency was ramping up its timber operation in the wake of the court orders prohibiting logging.

“We were in court three years and not putting any timber out. We got out of court and now we are doing timber again. They based this report on a time when we were not doing timber,” she said from Portland.

BLM logging in Oregon averaged about 1 billion board feet a year during the 1980s before the spotted owl was declared a threatened species in 1990.

Timber sales on BLM lands in Oregon bottomed out at 14 million board feet in 1994, rose to 124 million board feet in 1995, is projected to total 190 million board feet this year and 211 million board feel next year, she said.

“We found out the hard way that level of a decade ago was not going to pass court muster. The level we have now, is,” Hennessey said.

The GAO said the Forest Service and BLM each had 20 legal challenges pending at the end of 1995 while the Oregon Department of Forestry had two and the Washington Department of Natural Resources only one.

From Oct. 1, 1992, through Sept. 30, 1995, timber sales on Northwest federal lands totaled 1.8 billion board feet compared with 1.5 billion board feet on state lands in Washington and 270 million board feet on state lands in Oregon.

At the end of that period, the Forest Service had 2,330 timber management staff in Oregon and Washington, BLM had 222, Washington state 322 and Oregon 219, GAO said.

Jim Meissner, GAO’s associate director of timber based in Seattle, said today the numbers for both the federal and state staff levels were broader than just timber sale workers.

“They include environmental assessments, normal engineering for roads, biologists,” and so forth, Meissner said.

“Are they exactly comparable? The answer is no. Do they reflect the number of people involved in timber management? The answer is yes. These are four fundamentally different programs,” he said.

GAO recognized the staff numbers would be controversial and provided the Forest Service with a preview of the comparison as it appeared in the report, Meissner said. The Forest Service did not object, he said.

Of the timber lands in the two states, the Forest Service and BLM own 12.5 million acres, or about 37.7 percent, while the states own 3.1 million acres, or 9.4 percent. Private lands make up the other 52.9 percent, or about 17.5 million acres.

“Clearly, the state systems in Washington and Oregon are producing better, more responsible decisions,” Young said.