Editorial: Act would let cleanup continue in forests

The tug-of-war over forestland management goes on.

Last week, the Washington Forest Practices Board gave owners of timberland in the state another five years to comply with their own plans for eliminating sediment-laden runoff from access roads. The deadline had been 2016. Now landowners can apply to the state for an extension out to 2021.

Road Maintenance and Abandonment Plans apply only to landowners harvesting more than 1 million board feet of timber annually. (That includes Inland Empire Paper Co., a subsidiary of Cowles Co., which owns The Spokesman-Review. Inland Empire owns about 115,000 acres in Washington and Idaho.)

Of the 57,000 miles of logging roads in Washington covered by RMAP, 18,500 miles have so far been modified in ways that prevent soil from washing into nearby streams.

The state of Washington, with more than 2,200 culverts on its own land to bring up to snuff, has taken corrective action on 1,700. The cost in 2010 was $9.7 million, out of timber sale proceeds of $181 million.

The board voted to extend the RMAP compliance deadline because most remediation work is done in conjunction with tree harvesting, which has been slowed to a minimum by the plunge in housing construction.

But a recent court ruling in an Oregon case may replace that carrot with a stick.

Forest runoff has been regulated as a nonpoint source of pollution under the 1972 Clean Water Act. The states drafted their own rules for assuring compliance.

In the Oregon case, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled – twice – that the forest runoff should be regulated as if it were industrial runoff. If that opinion is upheld – the state plans to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court – landowners would need to get a separate federal permit for every culvert and bridge under their roads. There would also be significant new monitoring requirements.

An appeal of any one permit could bring logging to a halt.

U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., says that, if not changed, the ruling “will bury private, state and tribal forestlands in a wave of litigation.”

The Northwest Environmental Defense Center says the court is merely following through on the Environmental Protection Agency’s 1990 inclusion of logging on a list of industries that need point-source permits.

Wyden and Idaho Sens. Jim Risch and Mike Crapo have introduced a Silviculture Regulatory Consistency Act they say will restore the interpretation of forest runoff remediation that prevailed before the 9th Circuit ruling. The legislation has an uncommonly bipartisan pedigree, with not only Democrat Wyden and Republicans Risch and Crapo as Senate sponsors, but a long list of other senators and representatives from both parties in support.

If it remains a stand-alone piece of legislation, its passage will allow the continued progress on cleaning up forest streams and rivers that has occurred over the past 30 years.

But if it becomes wrapped up in the woefully anti-environmental agenda of House Republicans, the term “regulatory consistency” will become a mockery.