Western Lawmakers Urge Forest Service To Log Faster

Western Republicans told Forest Service Chief Jack Ward Thomas on Wednesday that his agency should be logging national forests faster to salvage dead and dying timber before it rots.

“We are barely getting started on the job which needs to be done,” said Sen. Larry Craig, R-Idaho, chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources subcommittee on forests.

“To me, these (new estimates) do not show the administration is acting with the urgency to accelerate the timber salvage program in order to utilize burned trees while they still have value,” he said.

Craig’s panel and members of the House Resources subcommittee on public lands grilled Thomas during a joint hearing on the progress of salvage logging under a bill Congress passed and President Clinton signed this summer to expedite the harvests through exemptions to environmental laws.

“I just don’t know why we can’t crank it out,” said Sen. Conrad Burns, R-Mont. “Are we a Park Service or are we timber managers?”

Thomas replied, “Maybe we’re a mixture. This is a multiple-use agency.”

Rep. Wes Cooley, R-Ore., chairman of a House task force on salvage timber, said the national forest trees represent “a public asset.”

“If we allow it to rot, we don’t get anything out of it,” Cooley said. “It appears we have an agency that absolutely is basically doing nothing. We have an agency that is looking at the birds and trees and talking about things that may or may not have value.”

Thomas said the agency is “right square on track” to meet the 4.5 billion board foot target of salvage logging by the end of December 1996.