Craig To Present Forest Overhaul Plan Bills Change Logging Regulations, Transfer Management To States

The most sweeping changes in national forest management laws in two decades will be proposed in Congress this week by U.S. Sen. Larry Craig.

The Idaho Republican says he has made 80 changes in draft legislation he made public in December 1996. What was once a 100-page bill has been split into two pieces of legislation.

One of the bills sticks with changes in logging regulations on Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management land. The other measure deals with transferring management responsibility from federal to state hands.

Environmentalists are as skeptical of the two measures as they were when the earlier version was unveiled.

Both measures are long overdue, Craig argues.

“Highly trained professionals responsible for managing our lands have become entangled in a spider’s web of overlapping and sometimes conflicting laws and regulations enacted in a piecemeal fashion over the last few decades,” Craig said during a press conference in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday. “We owe it to our forests to modernize outdated and conflicting laws that have forest management tied up in knots.”

Craig, who ranked fifth among U.S. senators in the 1991-96 election cycle in contributions from the logging lobby, has its enthusiastic support.

“It is high time (laws) reflected the advances that have been made in the past decade in the science of resource management,” said W. Henson Moore, president of the American Forest & Paper Association. “At the same time, we must streamline the planning process that has become Byzantine even by the standards of Washington bureaucracy.

“The inefficiencies documented in scores of public hearings held through the West by the senator have stymied the cost-effective production of natural resources,” Moore said.

But while Craig argues there is broad consensus for updating the logging laws, there is little warmth for his bill outside industry circles. The Clinton administration continues to argue Craig’s far-reaching bill is unnecessary.

And environmental groups find no less reason for disdain than they did last winter when the first draft surfaced. The 80 changes are nebulous, they add.

“I’d say the biggest difference is this is a 90-page timber industry wish list and the other was a 100-page timber industry wish list,” said Marty Hayden of the EarthJustice Legal Defense Fund, formerly the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund.

“The net effect will be to turn our national forests into tree farms at the expense of fish, wildlife and recreation,” Hayden said.

Craig’s staff issued a list of 10 important changes between the current bill and the draft circulated last winter. They include:

Eliminating a proposed $10,000 fine for filing timber sale appeals.

Requiring the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service certify Forest Service and BLM biologists before those agencies are allowed to review their own work for compliance with the Endangered Species Act.

Allowing organizations to bid on trees for the purpose of protecting them rather than harvesting them. That provides the best return to the taxpayer for public timber, Craig said.

Craig and the timber industry appear to part ways on this point.

The American Forest and Paper Association is asking Craig to reconsider the provision. It means people without the overhead of a timber mill, logging trucks and chain saws will push up the price of timber the federal agencies auction, Moore said.

But considering that most other environmental laws will be superceded on national forest lands, if the Craig bill passes, allowing non-loggers to bid on public timber is a minor point, Hayden said.

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