Forest Service Rejects Environmental Group’s Bid Timber Sale To Go To No. 2 Bidder After Group Says It Didn’t Plan To Log Land

Leaders of the Northwest Ecosystem Alliance knew they couldn’t stop the Thunder Mountain salvage timber sale in court, so they tried a new tactic.

At an auction Dec. 20, the 17,000-member group outbid two logging companies with an offer of $28,875 - $29,122, including fees - for about 3.5 million board feet of fire-damaged timber in the Okanogan National Forest.

Rather than the clear-cutting specified in the contract, the alliance would leave the land in its natural state.

No go, forest supervisor Sam Gehr said Thursday.

“They were not intending to fulfill the obligations of the contract,” Gehr said. “We have some resource objectives out here that we’re going to meet, in this case by manipulating some vegetation.”

Within days, forest officials will begin negotiating with the No. 2 bidder, AA Logging of Oroville, which offered $28,796.50, he said.

Making a round of visits to newsrooms in the city, about 140 miles from his office in the sparsely populated north-central part of the state, Gehr noted that the alliance neither could nor would cut the trees.

“In my view, we haven’t accepted a lower bid,” Gehr asserted. “We’ve accepted the highest bid from a qualified bidder.”

A statement issued by the alliance acknowledged that the group never intended to remove the trees as required in the sample contract on which its bid was based.

“In granting the contract to a lower bidder, the Forest Service will not only receive less money, it will also subject public forests to unnecessary environmental damage while incurring additional costs to taxpayers,” the statement said. “Nowhere does the Forest Service offer an explanation of how logging the area will benefit the environment, taxpayers or the American public.”

Gehr denied that the sale would cause any harm to lynx habitat, threaten salmon spawning or bring other environmental damage.

The trees must be removed by helicopter, road building would be limited to about 1,000 feet which would then be obliterated after the sale, and reforestation from natural seeding should proceed quickly, he asserted.

A $300,000 environmental study of the area concluded that logging would have little impact on the area.

The chief benefit of logging is jobs for as many as 70 people, Gehr said.

The sale includes mostly dead fir, spruce and lodgepole pine at about 6,000 feet elevation near the Methow Valley. Covering 275 acres, it is the first salvage sale in the 10,500 acres blackened by the Thunder Mountain fire, one of four major burns in the region in 1994.

Only about a third of the timber can be sawed into lumber, and the rest is good only for being ground into chips for pulp to make paper and other products, Gehr said.

This sort of salvage timber sale was exempted from environmental review last year by Congress. President Clinton’s appeals for repeal of the “salvage rider” were rebuffed earlier this month in the Senate.

The alliance bid attracted attention as a new twist on deals by groups like the Nature Conservancy, which for decades have bought privately owned land around rivers and lakes to preserve sensitive areas from development.