Eugene weekly., April 12, 2012, Page 15, Image 15

TREES VS. COUNTIES?
While rural communities might be
wary of toxic pesticide sprays, they are
also dealing with the loss of jobs, not to
mention the same county budget cuts
affecting city dwellers. Oregon counties
have not had certainty in their funding
for years. DeFazio says his plan will do
just that — give counties an assurance of
funding, as well as providing rural jobs.
But, “How far do you go to prop up
counties?” Kerr asks. He says the bill
“dramatically increases logging levels,
dramatically imperils more species,
dramatically degrades water quality.”
Kerr adds, “There are better ways.”
Lane County Commissioner Rob
Handy agrees that there are better ways
to get money out of Oregon’s forests
than privatizing public lands, and he says
ramping up logging on O&C lands won’t
create rural jobs here in Lane County.
Handy says Lane County is losing $20
million a year through forest tax exemptions
on private forestlands, such as a harvest tax
relief for owners of more
than 5,000 acres. Such
tax breaks don’t help little
mom and pop operations,
he says, only the industrial
timberlands.
Spencer Lennard of
Big Wildlife down in
economically
hard-hit
Josephine County says it
wouldn’t hurt to increase
the taxes on smaller
plots of private forests
either. He says he owns
39 acres of land that is
zoned forest commercial.
“We pay $3 a year on 39
acres,” he says.
Lennard says, “Just
tax us, please.”
Oregon Wild, the
Geos
Institute
and
other groups against
the DeFazio plan agree
with Lennard. They say
counties can get funded
without hurting Oregon’s
forests and clean water.
They propose a “shared
responsibility”
plan
of tax reform at the county level, along
with reforming the excise tax that allows
logging corporations to export raw logs
to China while paying low taxes, as well
as transferring management of the BLM
lands to the Forest Service.
Property taxes in Oregon are incredibly
low, Kerr says.
DeFazio points out that Oregon’s
Measure 5, passed in 1990, limited
property tax rates, and he pooh-poohs the
shared responsibility plan, which he says
is fl awed. “Some people seem to lack
education in government,” he says.
DeFazio says his plan, or rather the
DeFazio-Walden-Schrader plan, is a
defensible starting point for resolving the
timber wars and the county funding crisis,
especially given the current climate in
Congress. He says a lawsuit in Washington,
D.C. is one of the motivations to get this
legislation under way.
The enviros might look askance at the
notion that the DeFazio plan could end the
timber wars, but OSU forestry professor
Norm Johnson, one of the authors of the
Northwest Forest Plan, which determines
how most logging is done on federal forests,
agrees. He is one of the few people taking a
middle-ground approach to the forest fi ght.
Johnson says the plan “triggers a
discussion of the long-term future of
these lands that we haven’t seen in over a
decade.” It has text and maps and it “gives
us something real to chew on.”
From his science-oriented perspective,
the plan has pluses and minuses. The
negatives include the potential for
clearcutting, that it allows the potential for
broad use of herbicides and the possibility
of cutting older trees in
younger stands.
But, on the other
hand, he says, it has some
“tremendous conservation
accomplishments” in that
it offers protection for
trees more than 120 years
old, it has a sustained
yield requirement that
means “you can’t just go
in and cut it all down,”
and half of the timber
trust is on a 120-year
rotation.
Johnson says that he
and Jerry Franklin, along
with their students, are
working to strengthen
the plan. For example,
in
conjunction
with
aquatic specialists they
are exploring changes
to the riparian buffers so
that they’d take up less
area than the streamside
protections of the NWFP,
yet offer more protection
for water than the Oregon
Forest Practices Act
offers.
It’s exciting that DeFazio’s bill is the
fi rst time early seral forests have been
mentioned in federal legislation, Johnson
says. Early seral forests are a stage after
a disturbance like fi re, before conifers
dominate. While old-growth forests and
spotted owls may be the superstars of
forest debates, Johnson says that early
seral forests are the most biologically
diverse and also the most rare.
Johnson says he hopes that as the
discussion of the DeFazio plan continues,
it will be enriched by information from the
pilot projects he and Franklin are working
on; these projects look at different ways of
managing the moist forests found around
the Willamette Valley and the dry forests of
southern Oregon and the east side, in order
to generate timber and protect ecosystems.
Developing a forest plan is a long,
diffi cult process, Johnson says, but now
that the DeFazio plan has been put out
there, everyone can “sit down and have a
good argument.”
AT THE CENTER
OF THE ISSUE
IS WHAT TO DO
WITH MORE
THAN 2.5
MILLION ACRES
OF PUBLIC
FORESTS IN
OREGON.
SOMETHING TO CHEW ON
The biblical tale of splitting the baby
that Pedery alludes to is not so much about
mothers and babies as it is about proposing
a radical solution that discerns what the true
situation is — in order to make the right
decision. So what does the threat of splitting
the O&C lands baby do?
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EUGENE WEEKLY APRIL 12, 2012
15