FORESTS: Committee seeks improved management of federal lands
Phil Taylor, E&E reporter
Published: Monday, June 24, 2013
The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee tomorrow will discuss ways to improve the management of federal forests.
The oversight hearing comes as the Obama administration has proposed a significant reduction in funding for hazardous fuels removal and commercial logging in 2014, which has angered many Western lawmakers.
Both activities help reduce wildfire risks as the West continues to suffer through persistent drought and warmer temperatures. But hazardous fuels are costly to remove, and it takes time and money to plan commercial timber sales that comply with federal environmental laws.
Committee Chairman Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and ranking member Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) each represent timber-dependent states whose harvests declined precipitously beginning in the 1990s.
Wyden also represents the timber-rich O&C lands in western Oregon, a patchwork of Bureau of Land Management lands that historically provided significant revenues for the 18 counties that surround them.
Secure Rural Schools payments for the past decade compensated those counties for the decline in timber harvests when protections were granted to the northern spotted owl and other old-growth-dependent species.
But those payments expired this year, leaving some Oregon counties in a pinch to fund basic services, particularly law enforcement.
Last week, the Senate passed Wyden's S. 352, which would designate more than 30,000 acres of wilderness in old-growth forests in Oregon's Coast Range that were remote and rugged enough to have largely escaped logging (E&E Daily, June 20).
The committee last week also passed Wyden's S. 353, which would designate 60,000 acres of wilderness on the Rogue River and more than 17,000 acres of wilderness in the Cathedral Rock and Horse Heaven areas, in addition to more than 150 miles of new wild and scenic rivers (E&ENews PM, June 18).
Both measures appeased Wyden's environmental base, but logging interests in the state cried foul, saying wilderness bills should not advance without a broader agreement on how to manage O&C lands.
Expect Wyden to shift focus to his efforts to craft legislation that would designate some of the roughly 2.5 million acres of O&C lands primarily for sustained timber production and roughly the same amount for conservation (E&E Daily, May 24).
"I'm working aggressively to develop new legislation for Oregon's O&C lands and looking for opportunities to get the harvest up on both the O&C lands as well as on the forest lands," Wyden said last week. "I believe that can be done consistent with sensible approaches with respect to environmental legislation."
Lands protected in S. 353 are going to become "part of the balance that is going to be struck in the division of lands between conservation and harvest lands," he added.
