Ag Secretary Says He’s Not Meddling In Forest Service But Glickman Tells House Panel He’ll Keep Pushing Clinton Policy

Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman butted heads Thursday with Western Republicans in Congress accusing the Clinton administration of playing politics with logging policies on national forests.

In what was billed as the first such appearance in a quarter century, Glickman went before the House spending panel in charge of the Forest Service budget to reject charges that high-level administrators are inappropriately meddling in the agency’s day-to-day decision making.

“The role of the secretary in these matters received a lot of congressional attention last year, a lot of executive-branch attention,” Glickman told the House Appropriations subcommittee on the Interior.

“This is not some separate organization,” he said of the Forest Service, the largest of the USDA agencies under the secretary’s authority.

“To some extent the last 40 to 50 years it has tended to operate as a separate entity,” Glickman said.

The Forest Service chief is the one in charge of the Forest Service, Glickman said, “not the secretary of agriculture.”

But while the chief makes day-to-day decisions, Glickman said he is the one responsible for administering policy at the Forest Service.

“That’s why you have elections. That’s why you have administrations,” he said, adding that he will continue to carry out policies that stress protection of wildlife habitat as well as timber production on national forests.

The agriculture secretary routinely appears before the House Agriculture Committee and House Appropriations subcommittee on agriculture.

But Rep. Ralph Regula, R-Ohio, chairman of the Interior subcommittee that sets budgets for the Interior Department and Forest Service, said it was the first time in his 23 years on the panel that an agriculture secretary had testified there.

Glickman said much of the recent disagreement over logging policy centers on the so-called “salvage timber rider” that Congress approved and President Clinton signed into law two years ago.

Industry backers said the temporary measure was necessary to cull fire-prone forests of dead and dying trees, waiving the usual wildlife protections so as to accelerate harvests. Environmentalists said it was an attempt to log live green trees under the guise of improving forest health.

“We’ve been through a very tough period of time,” Glickman told the panel.

Publicity over the salvage operations turned the public against the Forest Service, he said.

“It actually turned the words ‘forest health’ into dirty words,” Glickman said.

Rep. Charles Taylor, R-N.C., a chief author of the salvage rider, said the legislation was the only reason the Forest Service had made any significant attempt to reduce the threat of catastrophic fires.

“It was the first time this administration has stopped pandering to the politically correct set and did something about forest health,” he said.

Taylor said the administration was guilty of “falsifying statements to this committee” when officials expressed commitment to the salvage rider goals but then suspended the effort weeks short of its Dec. 31 termination date.

Glickman said he stopped a number of controversial salvage sales “to make sure they were emergency sales and not an attempt to get green sales out.

“The debate on these issues must be less polarized. Every timber sale does not have to become World War III,” he said.

“When we reach that level, I end up getting involved in individual timber sales and I don’t want to do that.”

Rep. George Nethercutt, R-Wash., also criticized the administration’s logging policies.

Rep. Norm Dicks, D-Wash., originally supported the salvage rider but said Thursday it “turned out to be a mistake.

“It caused a lot of heartburn in the Northwest. In the future, we should try to stay within existing laws when we do sales,” he said.

Nevertheless, Dicks said he remains concerned about dramatic reductions in logging on the Olympic National Forest in Washington state, where annual harvests that once reached 225 million board feet a year now hover around 10 million board feet.

“My constituents have a hard time understanding why there can’t be a little more than that,” he said.

Agriculture Undersecretary James Lyons said there would be attempts soon to increase logging there. He said the administration expects to offer 1 billion board feet of timber for sale in Western Washington and Western Oregon in the fiscal year beginning Oct. 1, as has been the plan each year since President Clinton implemented his Northwest forest plan in 1994.

“We are committed to meeting that goal this year,” Lyons said. “We will be there.”