Belcher Rips Gop For ‘Special Interest’ Legislation

The Republican-led Legislature seems bent on giving away forest and tidelands through “special interest legislation at its worst,” Lands Commissioner Jennifer Belcher said Wednesday.

“The strong message this year seems to be ‘take state assets and give them away, either to private interests or to local governments,”’ Belcher, a Democrat serving her second term as lands chief, said in an interview.

Lawmakers reacted strongly to Belcher’s assertions. They said they see the legislation as responding to legitimate public interests, not special interests.

They contend the lands commissioner has forgotten that they, not she, are the ultimate trustees of the public lands, and that as trustees, they must respond to public needs.

“We (lawmakers) are the ones who have to answer to the public, and sooner or later we have to get back to the form of government we have,” said House Natural Resources Chairman Jim Buck, R-Port Angeles. “Jennifer Belcher was elected to manage our resources. We in the Legislature were elected to make policy about how those resources should be managed.”

The dispute focuses on more than a dozen bills. Among them is a proposal to turn over 500,000 acres of state timberlands to counties, a bill to bar the lands commissioner from entering into long-term timber management agreements with Uncle Sam, and a bill to permit the state to swap tidelands with a private company.

Other measures include bills to loosen land-use planning law and to reduce the regulatory power of the state Forest Practices Board and give it to local governments.

Belcher said she was hard-pressed to say which proposal was the worst.

But she said one of her least favorites is Senate Bill 5325, which would allow transfer of the state’s second-largest forest trust, about 500,000 acres of producing timberlands, to counties.

She said the transfer would result in “fractured management” of timber resources at the very time that forestry scientists are recognizing that a common management approach is a far more effective way to protect the forest ecosystem.

Belcher also said such a transfer would cost the state millions of dollars in timber revenue and greatly reduce her department’s ability to fight forest fires.

Buck said some counties are rightfully unhappy with Belcher’s management of timberlands the counties once controlled, and they want the land back.

He said there was no reason to believe that counties would be less able to manage those lands than Belcher’s department.

Belcher disagreed, saying local government officials are more subject to the pressure of special interests to exploit the resources.

Scott Merriman, a spokesman for the Washington Environmental Council, said: “Some counties can’t even get it together with growth management regulations. How are they going to manage forests?”