(Note: One has to wonder how -- exactly -- the president intends to log more in the forests, when each new logging agenda will come complete with its own 'Restraining Order' from the attorneys retained by the environmental extremists?)

August 9, 2003

By Michael Milstein

The Oregonian

michaelmilstein@news.oregonian.com  or 503-294-7689

Portland, Oregon

http://www.oregonian.com/

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The Bush administration has committed to more than double the amount of logging in public forests west of the Cascades -- including old-growth trees -- to meet the original goals of the 1994 Northwest Forest Plan.

Administration officials have been vocal about their plans to resurrect cutting in the region, but they put the pledge on paper for the first time in a legal settlement filed in federal court Friday in Washington, D.C.

The settlement came two weeks before the president is scheduled to visit Portland to promote a White House initiative to cull fire-prone forests.

"We finally have a real commitment of what the agencies need to do, which is huge," said Tom Partin, president of the American Forest Resource Council, an industry group in Portland that signed the settlement.

Friday's deal stitches together a series of other recent administration steps to accelerate logging by curtailing environmental reviews and appeals of timber sales.

It means trees probably will start falling on federal lands faster than they have in nearly a decade, possibly sparking a new round of logging protests and activist lawsuits.

"The Bush administration is trying to go back in time and ignore the legal decisions and body of science that brought us to this point," said Patti Goldman, a lawyer with Earthjustice who often works on lawsuits over logging.

The document requires the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management to seek enough funding and make "their best efforts every year" to sell 1.1 billion board feet of federal timber annually starting in 2005.

That's the amount the Clinton administration estimated the agencies would sell when it released the sweeping Northwest Forest Plan nine years ago. But environmental lawsuits and other hang-ups have held the actual harvest far short. Last year, the federal agencies offered 428 million board feet, less than half the original goal.

A federal judge still must approve the settlement filed Friday. It resolves a 1995 lawsuit filed against the government by 18 Western Oregon counties that have Oregon and California grant lands.

The federal government granted the lands to the Oregon and California Railroad Co. in the 1860s before reclaiming them in 1916. Congress later passed legislation to compensate the counties because the federal lands provide the counties no property tax revenue. The grant lands dot the counties in a checkerboard pattern.

The BLM manages the lands to produce timber, although the acreage remains subject to environmental laws, including the federal Endangered Species Act.

The counties argued that 2.4 million acres of O&C lands should not have been included in the 24 million acres covered by the Northwest Forest Plan. The plan was meant to balance protection of wildlife, such as the northern spotted owl, with some logging.

The counties' lawsuit was settled and dismissed before the Bush administration amended the original settlement Friday. It reaches beyond the original lawsuit to boost logging on all forest plan lands in Oregon, Washington and Northern California.

"What we have is an attitude change among the agencies and the administration that they really have to deliver what they're supposed to deliver," said Douglas County Commissioner Doug Robertson, president of the Association of O&C Counties.

The settlement says federal foresters will offer 805 million board feet of wood from the roughly 4 million acres of land open to logging in the Northwest Forest Plan. Some of that includes massive old-growth trees.

It says they also will provide about 300 million board feet by thinning crowded trees in reserves set aside for wildlife protection.

And it says the BLM will revise its management blueprints for Western Oregon by 2008, which could end up removing O&C lands from the forest plan acreage as the counties first sought. That could undermine ecological aims of the forest plan, activists said, since some scientists felt the lands hold vital wildlife corridors.

The Bush administration has used similar legal settlements in other environmental cases to loosen restrictions on federal lands. For instance, it agreed to revise forest plant and wildlife survey rules in response to a lawsuit by industry.

But administration officials had no pressing need to settle the county case, Goldman said. "They're using a decade-old case that had virtually no merit or life left in it to give away the forest."

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