Interior Secretary visits Oregon to talk timber

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar met with the timber industry and conservation groups Monday to find a way out of decades of bitter conflict over logging in the checkerboard of federal forests in Western Oregon that has long been an economic lifeline for rural counties.

All sides in the battle dating back to the late 1980s accepted Salazar's invitation to meet again in mid-November in Washington, D.C., with the goal of approving two pilot logging projects that produce timber for jobs while protecting habitat for fish and wildlife. They also hope to develop a 20-year plan for managing the so-called O&C Lands stretching from Portland to Ashland that are overseen by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management.

"I see the pain," Salazar said at the end of a meeting at the Douglas County Fairgrounds, which was the site of pro-logging rallies at the height of the 1990s battle over logging in old growth forests inhabited by threatened northern spotted owls and salmon. "I see the emotion. It's been for decades. I would hope that through these contacts we've initiated, maybe we can find a new way forward."

Salazar came to Oregon timber country at the invitation of Oregon Democrats Rep. Peter DeFazio and Sen. Jeff Merkley, who pressed this blueprint as an alternative to the Bush administration's plan to boost logging in Western Oregon, known as the Western Oregon Plan Revision. Salazar scrapped it a year and a half ago as legally indefensible under the Endangered Species Act.

Salazar said the heads of BLM, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and his endangered species adviser would meet with representatives of conservation groups, the timber industry and rural Western Oregon counties.

"I think we are taking action here, and not the continuing analysis paralysis that we've had for 20 some-odd years," DeFazio said afterward. "When was the last time the secretary of Interior came here and made a commitment to the people of southwest Oregon that he was going to move things forward? Not in my lifetime."

Representatives of the timber industry and conservation groups said they saw possibilities in the recommendations for long-term forest management put together by two forest scientists with long experience in the conflict: Oregon State University forestry professor Norm Johnson and University of Washington forestry professor Jerry Franklin.

They were two of the architects of the Northwest Forest Plan, adopted in 1994 to settle lawsuits that had shut down old growth logging on federal forests in Washington, Oregon and Northern California.

"I think it is about the only step forward," said Tom Partin, president of the American Forest Resource Council, a timber industry group. "We have to go forward with an approach that is either similar or very close to the Johnson-Franklin approach to get in and treat these lands."

The Johnson-Franklin plan would focus logging on thinning forests to reduce the risk of wildfire and insect infestations, while protecting salmon streams from the erosion that comes with logging steep slopes and building roads.

Andy Kerr, an environmental consultant, said conservation groups endorsed the Johnson-Franklin plan as a start but want to see the O&C lands transferred to the U.S. Forest Service, which has been more successful than BLM at producing timber without generating lawsuits from conservation groups.

The O&C lands are a checkerboard of one-mile squares of federal land interspersed with private lands stretching from Portland to Ashland in Western Oregon. They once were given to the Oregon & California Railroad, but taken back after it went bankrupt. They have traditionally been logged more intensively than national forest lands, and rural counties have depended on logging revenues from them more heavily than they have revenues from national forests.

Since the Western Oregon Plan Revision was scrapped, the housing industry crash has killed lumber markets, and BLM has been unable to offer significant timber sales in southwestern Oregon that could survive court challenges.

Meanwhile, rural counties have struggled to find alternatives to the generous timber revenues they once received from the O&C lands. Congress has repeatedly approved funding safety nets, but at significantly lower levels. The latest is to expire in 2012.

"Our counties, which used to be healthy and vibrant communities, are on the edge of failure," said Lane County Commissioner Faye Stewart.