Spirited contest for public lands post

OLYMPIA – One of the biggest jobs in the state happens to be largely ignored by voters.

The job: overseeing 5.6 million acres of state land, much of it under water. Regulating timber harvests on millions more acres of private forests. Overseeing a staff of 1,400 and a $190 million annual budget. And while you’re at it, raising billions of dollars for schools, colleges and other public projects.

In the coming weeks, Washingtonians will decide whether Doug Sutherland, a 71-year-old former smokejumper and Tacoma mayor, deserves a third term as the state’s commissioner of public lands.

The challenger: 62-year-old Peter Goldmark, an Okanogan County rancher, farmer and scientist.

Polling suggests the race is extremely close, with a large number of undecided voters still in play. Goldmark, a Democrat who ran for Congress two years ago, has consistently led Sutherland in fundraising, with help from Seattle-area donors and environmentalists.

Both say they’ll protect the land, keep logs flowing to mills and expand wind projects and other alternative energy on state lands.

Yet it’s been a heated race from the start, with Goldmark maintaining that Sutherland’s too close to timber and mining companies and other industry groups. He’s blasted Sutherland over forest landslides, this summer’s Spokane Valley fire and a years-long trespass on state tideland by a geoduck-farming company.

“I think, quite frankly, after eight years we’ve got a really good opportunity to assess his management style and who he’s really working for,” Goldmark said this week.

Sutherland, one of the few Republicans to hold a statewide office in Washington, is clearly chafing at the attacks, which he says are heavy on innuendo and loose with the facts.

“His whole campaign has been anti-Doug, hugely negative,” Sutherland said. “He just keeps coming up with another one of them, and none of them have any traction.”

In fact, Sutherland says, he’s a fair-minded manager who’s won valuable sustainable-forestry certification for state timberlands while providing a steady stream of timber for logging and mills and protecting habitat and old-growth forest.

“You’re hiring a chief executive officer of the 23rd-largest business in the state, if we were in the private sector,” said Sutherland, who heads the state Department of Natural Resources. “Wouldn’t you want someone with experience?”

Among the issues the two sides have battled over:

•Logging on steep slopes: In a new TV ad, Goldmark blasts Sutherland for a series of forest landslides during a major storm in southwestern Washington last December. Dozens of areas – many of them clearcut, Goldmark says – had landslides. Sutherland should have had state geologists look at those hills first, he says.

Sutherland says it’s absurd to blame him for an unusual storm. More importantly, he says, DNR field technicians did check the sites. Having a geologist there instead, he says, probably wouldn’t have changed things. No one expected a three-day storm with 20 inches of rain atop two feet of snow and 140-mile-an-hour gusts, he said.

•Timber harvest: Goldmark says he’s satisfied with a new state timber harvest plan, but faults Sutherland for an environmentalist lawsuit that led to the cutting levels being pared back. That wasted years in court and $1 million in state legal fees, he said.

Sutherland says the changes were minimal and that the original harvest levels – nearly 600 million board feet a year – were sustainable.

•Spokane Valley fire: At a recent forum, Goldmark slammed Sutherland for alleged delays in getting a water-dropping airplane to the Spokane Valley wildfires in July. A plane sat in Wenatchee during the initial phase of the fire because of state red tape, he said, “and that I will not allow.”

In response, Sutherland’s campaign produced the aircraft logs, which show that local fire crews twice said they didn’t need aircraft while sizing up the blaze. Forty minutes later when they called for a plane, the logs show, DNR approved the request in less than a minute. It ended up making two to three drops of retardant, then stopped because of high winds and low fuel.

•Land swaps: Unveiling a new TV ad last week, Goldmark said that “when wealthy developers come looking for sweetheart land deals, (Sutherland) is willing to bypass public input to assure a good deal for his friends.” To illustrate that, the campaign posed a logger, hikers and a fly fishing family at the site of one such land swap: a drug store and parking lot in Pierce County that the state acquired in exchange for 320 acres near Puyallup.

Sutherland defends the transaction, which like all DNR land swaps was approved by the bipartisan Board of Natural Resources. In exchange for logged-off land that wouldn’t have produced salable timber for 70 years, he said, the state got a property that generates nearly half a million dollars a year in rent.

Two public hearings were held on the exchange, he said, and assessors valued the drugstore parcel at more than $1 million more than the timber acreage.

•Industry ties: About half of Sutherland’s campaign contributions come from natural resource companies or their employees, a fact that Goldmark says suggests Sutherland’s much too cozy with the industries using state forests and lands. Sutherland says they appreciate consistency and predictability and know he’ll listen to them. But he also noted that DNR has issued more than 200 citations a year to industry rule-breakers.

“We’re not afraid to go out and enforce the regulations,” he said.