Board OKs timber plan
The Washington state Board of Natural Resources unanimously approved a 10-year plan Tuesday that will allow more timber to be logged from state forests in Western Washington.
More than three years in the making, the plan sets the regional timber-cut level at an average of 597 million board feet a year.
The six-member board, which sets policy for the state Department of Natural Resources, chose that option over one that started out at 636 million board feet per year, a plan tentatively approved in March.
Public Lands Commissioner Doug Sutherland, who runs DNR and serves as the board’s chairman, recommended the lower level, saying it was a more attainable goal, given the extra staff and training that would be needed to log more land.
“We just can’t ramp up that fast,” Sutherland said after the meeting at DNR’s headquarters in Olympia.
Mike Cooper, a Democrat hoping to unseat Sutherland, a Republican, denounced the plan, saying it “logs our forests at an unsustainable rate, with a spike in logging in the short term and then decreased revenues in the future.”
In public comments before the vote, critics said the plan includes too much clearcutting and would harm fish and wildlife habitat.
DNR spokesman Todd Myers, who is also running Sutherland’s re-election campaign, defended the plan, saying much of the state’s forest is overstocked with trees and needs to be thinned to improve the ecosystem and reduce the risk of wildfires.
About 470 million board feet of timber are slated to be harvested from state lands this year, generating an estimated $115 million for schools, county services, hospitals, libraries and other needs.
Under the new plan, the state’s logging revenue would increase to about $150 million per year.
It takes about 15,000 board feet of lumber to build a 2,000-square-foot home, according to the National Association of Home Builders.
DNR manages 2.1 million acres of forest trust land statewide, including about 1.4 million acres in Western Washington.
A separate harvest target will have to be drawn up for Eastern Washington, a process Myers said is expected to wrap up by the end of next year.
The state typically logs about 80 million board feet of timber annually east of the Cascades.
The state sells logging rights on its forest trust land, with the money paying for school construction and local county government needs like libraries, hospitals and fire districts.
Becky Kelly, campaign director for the Washington Environmental Council, said she was disappointed the board’s vote didn’t reflect what she characterized as “overwhelming public opposition to increasing the harvest so harshly.”
“Most of the logging will be clearcuts,” said Kelly, who also works as policy director for Cooper’s campaign. “We do not restore the health of our forests by cutting most of them down.”
Sutherland bristled at the notion that the board ignored the plan’s harshest critics.
“The board followed a very learned approach” by relying on input from forestry experts, Sutherland said. “Yes, we heard their issues, but the fact that we didn’t accept them doesn’t mean we ignored them.”
DNR officials estimate that clearcuts — or “regeneration harvests” as the state calls them — will make up about 62 percent of annual timber harvests in the next decade.
Craig Partridge, DNR’s policy director, noted that such harvests require loggers to leave at least eight trees standing on each acre, which is why the department doesn’t call them clearcuts.
“We’re very sincere when we say that the images of ridgeline-to-ridgeline clearcutting of the past that people conjure up is not what we’re talking about in regeneration harvests,” Partridge said. “There’s no resemblance.”
The plan also will allow some logging near streams, which have been mostly off-limits because of the potential to harm fish habitat. The goal, Partridge said, is to thin out areas crowded with too many trees to support a healthy ecosystem.