Logger Expected To Plead Guilty Faces Criminal Charges For Trashing Stream

In what officials say is the first case of its kind in Idaho, a Hayden Lake logger is expected to plead guilty to criminal charges of destroying a stream during logging.

Jim Kozak, 39, faces nine misdemeanor counts of violating the state’s Forest Practices Act. Each count carries up to six months in jail and a $300 fine.

Deputy Kootenai County Prosecutor Joel Hazel said the prosecutor’s office expects Kozak to plead guilty to some of the counts. A trial was slated for earlier this week, but was canceled because of the pending plea agreement, Hazel said.

Efforts to reach Kozak for comment Wednesday were unsuccessful. He is not the Jim Alan Kozak, also 39, who lives in Spokane and works as a Kootenai County paramedic.

The case is the first time a logger has faced criminal charges under the state’s 20-year-old Forest Practices Act, Hazel said.

Kozak logged in 1994 near Black Lake, on the east side of Kootenai County. The site was visited by a forester for the Idaho Department of Lands, which regulates logging on private land.

Kozak, according to court documents, skidded logs and piled debris in a stream, and failed to prevent erosion from his logging roads.

“He basically took a small stream and just trashed it,” said Jim Colla, a state forester.

From February to September, state foresters visited the site eight times, according to court documents. Each time, they told him to fix the problems.

“He didn’t say no, he just strung them on,” said Hazel, the deputy prosecutor. “He’d do just enough to keep going. He’d just drag his feet, drag his feet.”

Finally, the state did the work and sent Kozak the bill: $255. Kozak didn’t pay.

This February, the state filed charges.

“We’re interested in sending a message to him and others that we take these things seriously,” said Hazel.

State foresters found 736 violations of the state forest law during inspections last year. Of those, 53 resulted in written warnings, and 39 resulted in orders to stop working and fix the problems.

“When we ask somebody to do something, they usually do it,” said Colla. “Only when they don’t, do we turn the screws a little tighter.”

If loggers don’t comply, Colla said, the state normally does the work and charges the logger.

In extreme cases, the logger can be prevented from doing any other jobs in Idaho.

“That gets most people’s attention,” he said. “Eventually, they decide to play it straight, or go out of business, or they move to Washington.”

The department’s been reluctant to pursue criminal charges before, he said, because they’d been told forestry violations were a low priority for county prosecutors.

“They’ve got drug dealers and murderers to deal with,” Colla said.

In previous years, he said, the state was also more likely to shrug off bad logging.

“People might not have messed with this 20 years ago,” he said. “But times have changed, and we’re interpreting the Forest Practices Act as it was written.”

In Kozak’s case, the department filed charges because there were no other options left, Colla said.

“Here’s a guy who’s thumbing his nose at us, and we’ve got a job to do,” he said.

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