House Panel Approves Timber Salvage Proposal Measure Also Streamlines Process For Appealing The Sales

More than six billion board feet of dead and dying timber would be logged in federal forests nationwide under an amendment approved Thursday by the House Appropriations Committee.

The amendment left it up to the Forest Service to decide where the so-called salvage timber would be sold, but Northwest lawmakers were confident it would add “significantly” to the supply of logs for the region’s sawmills and chips for pulp and paper.

“It should get some timber flowing,” said Rep. Norm Dicks, D-Wash., a member of the committee. “It’s also good for forest health.”

Rep. George Nethercutt, another member of the appropriations committee, called the amendment a “common-sense approach that will be good for the Northwest and the nation.”

The amendment, attached to a supplemental appropriations bill, would require the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management to sell 3 billion board feet of salvage timber in the current fiscal year, and an additional 3 billion board feet in the next fiscal year.

Salvage timber is considered dead, dying or diseased trees often damaged in forest fires.

No sales would be allowed in wilderness areas or in areas were logging is prohibited by statute.

Before any of the sales could proceed, the federal agencies would have to complete an environmental assessment and a biological opinion, which would have to take into account any impact on threatened or endangered species.

The amendment also includes a streamlined process to appeal the timber sales.

Dicks said the Forest Service has a backlog of salvage sales nationwide of between 18 billion board feet and 21 billion board feet, but that it had been stymied by excessive regulations.

“I don’t like to do this on appropriations, but we have no choice,” Dicks said.

“The idea of letting these trees rot because of excessive government regulations is why people were angry in 1994.”

The legislator has been pushing for expanded salvage sales for three years.

But this time Republicans, led by North Carolina Rep. Charles Taylor, took the lead.

“It was their initiative,” said Dicks, though he helped guide it through the committee.

Environmentalists said the amendment appeared to cut off judicial review and suspend the nation’s environmental laws.

“It’s more extreme than anything proposed under Reagan or Bush,” said Kevin Kirchner, a lawyer for the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund.

“It opens up the Treasury to the timber companies because it says the Forest Service has to sell the timber even if they have to give it away.”

Timber workers praised the move.

“At a time of increasing unemployment and mill closures due to harvest restrictions, particularly on federal lands in the Pacific Northwest and Northern California, salvage can provide an important source of timber supply to keep mills up and running and workers employed,” Jay Perrizo, executive secretary of the Western Council of Industrial Workers in Portland, said in a statement.