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Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Timber Firms May Keep Road Credits Democrats Join Opposition To Clinton Forest Plan

Associated Press

After winning support from a key Republican, opposition is mounting among influential Democrats to President Clinton’s plan to make the timber industry pay for its own logging roads on national forests.

In a letter to timber industry officials obtained Thursday by The Associated Press, Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., said he shares their concerns and would pass them on to colleagues on the appropriate committees.

“While well intentioned, the proposals to end purchaser road credits in next year’s budget adversely affect the ability of the Forest Service to manage the national forests,” Daschle wrote March 14.

Washington Rep. Norm Dicks, a senior Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, has raised similar concerns about ending the road program that environmentalists characterize as a subsidy for the timber industry.

“I worry this assault on the roads program is unwarranted and misunderstood,” Dicks told Forest Service Chief Mike Dombeck during a budget hearing last month.

Clinton’s budget proposes saving taxpayers $55 million next year by eliminating Forest Service road credits beginning Oct. 1.

Rep. John Kasich, R-Ohio, chairman of the House Budget Committee, earlier included the roads program on a list of a dozen examples of “corporate welfare” whose elimination could save taxpayers more than $100 million over five years.

Under the program, timber companies are effectively reimbursed for building the roads they need to log national forests. They receive credits for the construction costs, which they can use to bid on future timber sales.

“Many people question the logic in trading roads for national forest trees, especially given the current expansive network of roads on the national forest system and the cost of maintaining many of these roads once they are built,” Dombeck recently told the House Appropriations subcommittee on the interior.

The 378,000-mile road system in U.S. national forests is about eight times the size of the federal interstate highway system. As of last year, the Forest Service had a $440 million backlog in road-maintenance needs.

Reps. John Porter, R-Ill., and Joe Kennedy, D-Mass., intend again this year to introduce an amendment that would eliminate the logging-road assistance, Porter spokesman David Kohn said Thursday.

Their proposal initially passed the House 211-210 last June, but opponents demanded reconsideration the next day and it failed on a 211-211 tie.

Daschle was responding to a letter from Tom Truxel of the Black Hills Forest Resource Association in Rapid City, S.D., who noted that the logging roads provide access for recreation and firefighting as well.

Industry officials say eliminating the road assistance would reduce the amount of money private loggers are willing to bid to harvest national-forest timber, thus reducing state and county shares of federal timber receipts.

“You raise a number of important points in your letter that I doubt the administration fully considered when it developed this proposal,” Daschle said his letter to Truxel.

Daschle said he would pass along the concerns to the Senate Budget and Appropriations committees “in hopes that a compromise can be developed that ensures the ability of the Forest Service to continue to construct needed roads in the future.”

Environmentalists long have claimed the road program serves as a public giveaway to the timber industry.

“Not only are they allowed to destroy our public assets, they get an enormous public subsidy to do it. So we lose our property and we get stuck with a bill,” Tim Hermach, executive director of the Native Forest Council in Eugene, Ore., said Thursday.

Kasich appeared at a news conference in January with an unusual coalition of Republicans and Democrats attacking a variety of existing government programs.