Street Roots • Feb. 19-25, 2016
News/Poetry
TIMBER, from page 5
that protect them from deportation for
renewable periods of three years, while
Congress comes to an agreement on
immigration reform.
While not all reforestation workers are
undocumented, this program would have
addressed one of the reasons some workers
are fearful of coming forward about wage
theft, reporting injuries, exploitation and
abuse.
The application process would have
begun Feb. 18, but a district court judge in
Texas issued an injunction that temporarily
blocked the implementation process, and
the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals later
upheld that injunction. Now the matter is in
the U.S. Supreme Court, with a final
decision expected in June.
With the recent death of Justice Antonin
Scalia, a vacancy on the Supreme Court
means Obama needs the vote of a least one
conservative justice. Otherwise, a 4-4 tie
would preserve the lower court’s decision.
“If people had their immigration status,
they would have more liberty,” Miller said.
She said many undocumented immigrants
fear that if they lose their job, they might
not find another one.
“The reality for many workers is that a
bad job is better than no job at all,” she said.
A different way
of doing business
In 1995, Bey and fellow reforestation
laborer Justin Cullembine, co-founcjed a
nonprofit called the Lomakatsi Restoration
Project, based in Ashland.
“The reason we formed the nonprofit,”
Bey said, “was because we were trying to
create a new model.”
Twenty-one years later, Lomakatsi is
taking the lead on many large-scale
restoration projects in Southern Oregon,
working with native tribes, municipalities
and contractors to complete ecological
projects while benefiting its workers and
area communities.
Bey said many of his employees worked
CO URTES Y O F LO M A K A T S I RESTORATIO N PROJECT
A Lom akatsi employee clears brush at Table Rock as p a rt o f an oak restoration and climate
adaptation project in 2015. Table Rock, north o f Medford in Southern Oregon, was a
sanctuary fo r the Takelma Indians.
for reforestation contractors before coming
to work for him.
“It’s night and day - working for us
compared to the other contractors,” he said.
Bey said he’s able to avoid pressures
associated with low-bid service contracts by
focusing on what are known as stewardship
projects, which combine timber sales with
restoration service contracts.
When the U.S. Forest Service offers a
stewardship contract, it reinvests any profit
it earns from selling timber into the
restorative work that gets done. Normally
that money would go to the U.S.
Department of the Treasury in Washington,
D.C.
These projects are also required to have a
restorative emphasis.
“You can’t clear-cut on a stewardship
contract,” Bey said. “It’s ecosystem
restoration.”
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This creates a scenario in which a
company may have the ability to win the
contract without feeling pressure to bid
lower than it can reasonably afford, but
whether this benefit trickles down to the
worker has not been studied, Moseley said.
Wheeler said his company, Grayback, also
prefers stewardship contracts, although he
still bids on stand-alone restoration
contracts, too.
“Not all service contracts are bad,” Bey
said. “There’re some good-paying ones.
There’s some good crews that do good work
and pay people well. It’s not that it doesn’t
happen, but from my experience, typically,
it’s more of that low bid system.”
As a nonprofit, Lomakatsi typically
operates under agreements with the
government rather than bidding on
contracts, and often approaches agencies
with a proposal.
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Like stewardship contracts, these
agreements involve both logging and
reforestation services, with money earned
off timber going back into the project.
But as a partner to the agreement,
Lomakatsi must bring 20 percent nonfederal
matching funds to the table, which it does in
the form of grants and other sources, Bey
said.
“It sets up a whole program, not just of
restoration, but we can integrate workforce
training, youth training and education, work
with schools, and we can run all these tribal
forest restoration programs with the tribes
we work with - because there’s a need to
build capacity and skills,” he said.
“It gives us the opportunity to take
people who run chainsaws and help them
learn technical skills so they’re not stuck in
the labor side their whole life - they can
advance. Or in the case of young people,
partnering with schools and universities to
integrate forestry sciences into the
programs. It’s more of a nonprofit-type end
result objective in an agreement, where a
contract is just work.”
Additionally, when Lomakatsi takes the
lead on controversial projects,
environmental groups typically don’t sue
because they trust his organization will
respect the land, he said.
Klamath-Siskiyou Wildlands Center has a
history of challenging timber sales in
southern Oregon, and its conservation
director, George Sexton, agreed with Bey’ s
claim.
“They walk the talk,” he said.
Lomakatsi is the only nonprofit
reforestation operation in the Pacific
Northwest.
“It took two decades to get there,” Bey
said, “but now the agencies are finally
paying attention. It was a very bottom-up
grass roots effort to move things along.”
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