Clinton Forest Plan Jeopardized By Rider, Some Officials Claim Increased Burden Wildlife Seen For Private Landowners

Logging under a controversial salvage-timber law places President Clinton’s Northwest forest plan in legal jeopardy and increased the burden on private landowners to protect fish and wildlife, state and federal officials say.

Clinton’s plan, known as “Option 9,” has been the forgotten part of the puzzle as Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., and Rep. Elizabeth Furse, D-Ore., gather support in Congress for repeal of the so-called salvage logging rider the president signed into law last summer.

When he unveiled his forest plan nearly three years ago, Clinton said it would yield an average of 1 billion board feet of timber a year on national forests in Oregon and Washington while ensuring compliance with U.S. environmental laws.

U.S. District Judge William Dwyer of Seattle agreed the plan met the legal standard required to end his injunction banning logging in the region. But Dwyer went out of his way to warn that any scaling down of the forest reserves outlined in the plan could land the Forest Service back in court.

Critics of the salvage rider are focusing on a provision that requires logging of “Section 318 sales” - which include significant old-growth stands - approved before Northwest logging was affected by concerns about survival of the threatened northern spotted owl. Logging of those sales was suspended under court rulings by Dwyer and other federal judges.

That provision may give environmentalists ammunition to go back to Dwyer and argue that Clinton’s forest plan no longer offers adequate wildlife protection, they say.

Murray brought the concern up this past week when she proposed repeal of the salvage law authored by Sen. Slade Gorton, R-Wash., and others.

The measure “could relegate the Northwest forest plan to the trash heap,” she said.

The state of Washington and most of the largest timber companies in the region are developing comprehensive habitat-conservation plans to help soften the need for federally mandated protection, Murray said.

“Every single one of these groups assume full implementation of ‘Option 9’ as the basis of fish and wildlife protection in their own plans,” she said.

“If ‘Option 9’ goes belly up, all of these habitat plans are worthless.”

Jennifer Belcher, Washington state’s commissioner of public lands, warned Clinton two months ago that his “landmark plan is seriously threatened by the salvage timber rider.”

More than 100 private landowners in the state have completed or are completing habitat conservation plans, she said, and her Department of Natural Resources hopes to complete its plan for 1.6 million acres of state lands this summer.

“The rider effectively shifts the burden of protecting listed species (and as yet unlisted species such as salmon) onto non-federal lands and forces your administration to revise its promise to provide the bulk of protection on federal public lands,” Belcher said in her January letter.

It has created a double standard, the Democrat said - exempting federal agencies from the Endangered Species Act and other laws “while continuing to hold non-federal landowners to the highest conservation standards.

“State lands will be even more heavily burdened than before,” Belcher wrote.

Gorton doesn’t buy that.

He says Clinton’s forest plan has been a failure and the salvage rider is a small step toward providing timber for wood-starved mills.

When Clinton signed the bill, “sale owners began to see some light at the end of a very long tunnel, but then the administration changed its mind,” Gorton said in a Senate floor speech Thursday.