Craig talk to timber industry covers all

From forest management to fish-counting and federal mining law reform, Idaho Republican Sen. Larry Craig is at the heart of the latest and greatest political dustups of the West.

The four-term senator was in Coeur d’Alene on Thursday to meet with timber industry leaders at a meeting of the Intermountain Forest Association. During a lunchtime speech, he offered his take on the issues.

Timber from federal lands: Craig praised the Bush administration’s efforts to increase timber harvesting. Last year the U.S. Forest Service hoped to cut 2 billion board feet of timber.

“We got to 2.3 billion,” Craig said. “That’s a turnaround of a kind that we have not seen in a long while. It’s something to talk about. Is that where we want to be? No, we want to be higher than that, and respectfully and reasonably so if we’re really looking at forest health. … A forest left unattended and only to Mother Nature, in many instances, is a forest that’s not very well cared for, especially if it’s a forest we live with and we’re around all the time.”

Reform of the 1872 mining law: Craig, who is chairman of the Senate subcommittee on mining and public lands, said a reform package for the 1872 law could be ready early next year. Craig supports the idea of adding a royalty for minerals mined on federal land.

“The timber industry pays a stumpage fee, oil industry pays a fee. Everybody pays a fee for the resource,” he said.

The Regional Fish Passage Center: Last month, Craig pulled funding from a small agency that counts endangered fish on the Columbia and Snake rivers. Craig said the measure was meant to help “chip away at the federal budget” as well as to serve as a “statement” that too much money is being spent on saving salmon and trout.

“It’s time we get real,” he said. “We all want to save them, and we’ve already done a lot to save them, but at what cost?”

The cut outraged environmental groups, who see the action as political payback to electric utilities, who have been big financial backers of Craig. The governors of Washington and Oregon have also said eliminating the center, which has a staff of 12 and a $1.3 million budget, would make recovery efforts more difficult.

Craig said his position is firm. “There is no other set of endangered species in the United States on which we’re spending this kind of money.”

Energy production: Craig said the U.S. economy is in “extreme stress” because of high energy prices, and more needs to be done to promote domestic gas and oil drilling, including drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Politics and Iraq: Craig lashed out at the growing number of Democrats calling for a gradual troop withdrawal from Iraq. He predicted that the issue would be the main factor in the 2006 elections and that Republicans could expect “substantial losses” at the polls if they don’t have their own clear plan. Craig went on to scold Democrats for “putting this country at risk in their arguments over the Iraqi war. … To put our men and women at risk, to telegraph to a very dedicated enemy that we will cut and run if you will only ramp up the violence and kill more, is a very bad signal to send.”