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Tuesday, March 19, 2024
March 19, 2024

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In Our View: Forest Plan Not So Simple

Well-managed timber harvests would greatly aid Skamania, other counties

The Columbian
Published:

As if we needed a reminder of the nation’s convoluted land-use policies, a recent examination of the Northwest Forest Plan has been in the news. Not that anything could be simple about trying to balance environmental concerns with economic interests. Not that any plan could be easy when vast swaths of Washington and neighboring states are publicly owned. But the labyrinth of confusion and consternation created by federal policy continues to confound.

“The Northwest Forest Plan was a very delicate balance of diverse interests,” Matt Little, executive director of the Gifford Pinchot Task Force, a Vancouver-based advocacy group, said as officials considered a series of draft reports about the plan. The Northwest Forest Plan was enacted in 1994 under President Clinton and, to quote an article from Columbian reporter Eric Florip: “The results are mixed. The spotted owl — one of the icons of the so-called ‘timber wars’ of the early 1990s — continues to decline in both population and available habitat. The marbled murrelet has also seen its numbers decline in Washington, but remains stable in Oregon and California, according to the reports. Many watersheds, meanwhile, have seen improved conditions, officials say. Timber harvests have fluctuated since their initial dive, but remain far below what’s allowed under the Northwest Forest Plan.”

Through all the mixed results, Skamania County — Clark County’s neighbor to the east — has served as the plan’s canary in the coal mine. With the Northwest Forest Plan significantly reducing logging, a county that is 80 percent owned by the federal government — primarily the Gifford Pinchot National Forest — has been bereft of economic activity and jobs. While the 1970s saw a peak of 399 million board feet of timber being harvested in a single year in Skamania County, by 2000 that total had dropped to 26 million board feet — a decline of 93 percent.

To make up for that in Skamania County and other timber-dependent counties, the federal government instituted the Secure Rural Schools program that essentially compensates counties for limits on timber harvests. The amount of funding has varied over the years, and Congress wavered on approving payments for 2015 before finally renewing the program.

Before we go any further, it is instructive to answer the question of why so much of Skamania County is owned by the federal government. It is a fair question, but the 1889 Enabling Act that allowed Washington to join the United States included this provision: “The people inhabiting said proposed States do agree and declare that they forever disclaim all right and title to the unappropriated public lands lying within the boundaries thereof …” In other words, that land is owned by all the people of the United States, which probably doesn’t help the people of Skamania County but does clarify the situation.

Meanwhile, Skamania County and others are beholden to absurdist bureaucracy. The Northwest Forest Plan has eschewed sound forest management in favor of the spotted owl at the expense of residents. And the Secure Rural Schools program — along with the federal Payment in Lieu of Taxes program — has created a dependency upon the federal government for rural counties. Both situations are anathema to a free-market system and should be adjusted.

Well-managed timber harvests would allow Skamania County to support itself, adhere to reasonable environmental protections, and eliminate the need for federal welfare on the behalf of timber counties. But that might all be too simple.

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