Eugene weekly., April 07, 2016, Page 14, Image 14

‘OUTSIDE OUR JURISDICTION’
Lee van der Voo contributed to this report.
‘I didn’t know
until closing that
I was selling to
the McDougals.
I panicked.’
— SUSIE HANNER
PHOTO BY TODD COOPER
Five years ago, in the midst of a divorce, Susie Hanner
reluctantly prepared to sell her Creswell home and the idyllic 69-
acre forest surrounding it. With assurances that the new owners
would thin but not clearcut the plot’s mosaic of firs, oaks and
pines, Hanner agreed to sell the property to Fern Hollow Farms
Inc., a company run by Greg Demers.
But when Hanner arrived to sign the paperwork, the contract
listed a different buyer: McDougal Bros. Investments.
“I didn’t know until closing that I was selling to the McDougals,”
Hanner said. “I panicked.”
Hanner says she had second thoughts about the sale, but having
already put the house on the market once with no bites, she decided
to move forward. “I wasn’t really excited about it,” she said. “But
my realtor reminded me they were not going to clearcut” — an
account supported by emails Hanner provided to InvestigateWest.
But that verbal agreement turned out to be a false promise.
Today, aerial images show that only a few small patches of trees
remain on the property. The rest of the forest is gone.
Hanner still hasn’t forgiven the McDougals. When she saw one
of the brothers at a public meeting about Parvin Butte, Hanner
unloaded, she said. “I told him, ‘I would love to do to your genitalia
what you did to my trees.’ I got a bit of very minute pleasure from
seeing his reaction.”
According to Lane, ODF can’t get involved with land-sale
disputes like Hanner’s, even those involving a breach of contract.
“That would be outside our jurisdiction,” Lane said. “The only
thing we’re responsible for is violations of the Forest Practices
Act. What happens when they buy land becomes a contractual
issue between the landowner and the operator.”
Landowners can take contract disputes to court, but that can be
daunting — and difficult — for small forest landowners like Erb.
Erb told InvestigateWest that the logging contractors, in
addition to their documented forestry violations, also took more
trees than outlined in his contract. To try to prove his case, Erb
hired an independent timber consultant to complete a survey
of the forestland — an assessment that found the loggers had
exceeded their allotted cut by an estimated 200,000 board feet.
This documentation might have helped Erb make his case in court,
but it never came to that. Erb, who is 77, says he couldn’t afford
to file a lawsuit.
Neither Demers nor the McDougals responded to repeated
requests for comment. But state court records show that Demers
has faced similar allegations before. In civil lawsuits filed more
than 20 years ago, three separate landowners accused Demers of
failing to follow through on his contract obligations. In one of
the lawsuits, eventually settled out of court, the plaintiff alleged
that Demers failed to pay for $45,000 worth of timber. According
to the lawsuit, Demers had suggested to the landowner that his
company, Timber Sales & Reforestation, was financially strong
and in the process of building new offices. In reality, the complaint
says, Demers’ company was insolvent.
Although ODF can’t intervene in such disputes, Lane said
that resources do exist to help forest landowners navigate timber
sales and contracts. The Oregon Association of Loggers website,
for example, includes an eight-step guide to harvesting timber;
Oregon State University runs a forestry extension program that
helps support forest landowners; and the Oregon Forest Resources
Institute (OFRI) invites questions through its “Ask a Forester”
page, which covers forestry laws but not contract issues.
However, not all landowners know about those resources,
and some don’t get results even when they use them. Stipp, for
example, said he used OFRI’s “Ask a Forester” feature to submit
a question about state forestry laws. The response? “I never heard
back,” he said. ■
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