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About The daily Astorian. (Astoria, Or.) 1961-current | View Entire Issue (June 15, 2019)
A3 THE ASTORIAN • SATURDAY, JUNE 15, 2019 Oregon struggles to track Forest Practices Act Audit riddled with biases and fl aws, some claim By TONY SCHICK Oregon Public Broadcasting In February , Oregon State Forester Peter Daugherty sat in front of lawmakers during a budget hearing and reported his agency’s sterling compli- ance rate with the laws that govern private logging. “The audit showed an overall rule level compliance rate of 98%,” Daugherty told them. Others aren’t so sure about that. “We don’t know if it’s 98, 99 or 50,” said Brenda McComb, a retired Ore- gon State University profes- sor who serves on the board overseeing Daugherty’s agency, the state Department of Forestry. McComb, fellow forestry board member Cindy Dea- con Williams and two con- sultants separately hired by environmental advocates are arguing the department’s work is riddled with biases and analytical fl aws. One reviewer deemed them “suf- fi ciently severe to preclude any defendable assessment of compliance rates.” In response, the Depart- ment of Forestry says it is confi dent in its numbers but has nonetheless commis- sioned another statistical review by Oregon State . It expects that to be completed this month. All this means the state has spent fi ve years and close to a million dollars to fi nd out how many people and com- panies follow state logging rules — and came away with an answer that’s now being called essentially worthless. “It’s just ridiculous,” Wil- liams said. She fi rst expressed her concerns about the num- bers before the department cited them in legislative tes- timony. She now says she’d like to see the monitor- ing redone and the record corrected. “You can’t legislate or guide policy in a vacuum of ignorance,” she said. “We simply don’t have the infor- mation that we need in order to know whether our poli- cies are responsible and are achieving our aims.” Is the law working? The effectiveness of Ore- gon’s Forest Practices Act is at the center of conten- tious debates about private logging. Thousands of timber har- vests take place in Oregon every year, on vast corpo- rate forests and small fami- ly-owned woodlots. The 288 rules of the Forest Practices Act govern them all. They dictate how many trees must be left standing along- side streams to keep them shady and cool for salmon. They govern forest road con- struction to lower the chances of a landslide. They direct foresters on when trees must be replanted, and more. Oregon’s comprehensive law was the fi rst of its kind Oregon Department of Forestry A contractor sorts logs in southern Oregon. when it was passed in 1971, but environmental advocates say it has since become the weakest state forestry law on the West Coast. It remains the law that state offi cials use in defend- ing against claims from the federal government that Ore- gon hasn’t adequately pro- tected coastal streams. It’s what industry lobbyists extol and environmental lobbyists rail against. Central to understanding the effectiveness of this law is the question of how well it’s being followed. So, back in 2011, the Oregon Legislature directed the Department of Forestry to conduct an annual study of Forest Practices Act compliance, using an inde- pendent contractor to collect data from a sampling of for- est owners. The agency began by reviewing how well forest- land owners and the tim- ber industry were complying with rules on harvesting trees, building and maintaining for- est roads and protecting water quality. Its work found an over- all compliance rate of 98% in 2017, the most recent year completed. The state also calculates compliance rates for specifi c rules, owner- ship classes and regions. For- est industry representatives say they are confi dent in the accuracy of those numbers, as do several members of the state’s forestry board. Joe Justice, a board mem- ber who works for Hancock Forest Management in East- ern Oregon, said state for- esters use the audits to iden- tify areas where they need to work with landowners before, during and after tree harvests. “Compliance a udits are just one way the d epartment monitors f orest p ractices,” Justice said in an email. “A great deal of valuable infor- mation is gained from these audits including information and trends that help ODF focus training and education.” Marganne Allen, the department’s f orest h ealth and m onitoring m anager, said Oregon’s reported com- pliance rates are credible. She pointed out that they also fall in line with those reported by other states, which have found that landowners and timber operators are abid- ing by forestry laws at com- pliance rates that range from 61% to 99%, according to the Society of American Foresters. “This has been a very repeatable outcome over time,” Allen said. She said the latest fi ndings also are con- sistent with previous depart- ment studies dating back to 2002. Department of Forestry offi cials say they are work- ing to improve the way they check on logging-related activities. The department plans to involve statisticians from Oregon State in review- ing future audits, the next of which will focus on how landowners plant trees after harvesting. The department also opened up its external review team, Allen said, but the environmental groups criticizing its latest audit declined to participate. Flawed, selective method A major concern they raised is who the department included and who is left out. The state made 345 inquiries with potential audit partici- pants but ultimately studied only about one-third of them. Participation was vol- untary. Some landowners refused to give state forest- ers access to their woodlots — something the law permits them to do. Don Stevens, a retired Oregon State statistician who reviewed the work at the request of the Wild Salmon Center, is the reviewer who said the audit’s fl aws under- mine the credibility of the state’s reported forestry-rule compliance rates. He said the department’s sampling pro- vides “enormous potential for non response bias.” In other words, there’s no way to know if that method left out thousands of acres of forestland rife with viola- tions. And should that be the case, the Department of For- estry’s overall picture of how well the Forest Practices Act has been followed could be wildly inaccurate. Stevens and others say the problems go beyond the col- lection of bad data. They say the department’s analysis of that data is also fl awed. Chris Mendoza, an envi- ronmental consultant who has worked on compliance monitoring for the Wash- ington Department of Natu- ral Resources, reviewed the department’s work for the Oregon Stream Protection Coalition. He equated the methods to fi nding out that 200 out of 1,000 motorists pulled over by police were exceeding the speed limit — and assuming those 200 were the only speeders out of all 100,000 cars on the highway that day. “If ODF intended to choose a method that selec- tively depicts the highest pos- sible compliance rates for forest practices rules … then ODF’s reporting ‘methods’ hits that mark,” Mendoza wrote in his assessment. Allen said her agency wanted to account for the fact that not all timber harvests are the same, and some land- owners may be encounter- ing the law more often than others. “You can have one har- vest unit that has only, say, 100 feet of road,” she said. “Another may have 500 feet of road. So it’s important to get across some metric of not all harvest units are equal, and that they’ll have a dif- ferent number of times that a given rule is applied.” She said no issues had been raised with this method in the past, but that she expected Oregon State’s expertise to inform how they approach it in the future. For some board mem- bers and advocates, the audit raised larger questions about how the agency works. Bob Van Dyk, of the Wild Salmon Center, noted that, save for members from the state Department of Environ- mental Quality, the audit’s external review committee was made up entirely of peo- ple from forest companies and industry trade groups. “This audit shows that the agency that’s charged with protecting our forest waters is too close to the timber industry that they regulate,” Van Dyk said. “And that we can’t be confi dent in the qual- ity of the laws, nor in their implementation.” WANTED Alder and Maple Saw Logs & Standing Timber Northwest Hardwoods • Longview, WA Contact: John Anderson • 360-269-2500 CULLABY LAKE June 22 nd and 23 rd , 2019 • 10am - 6pm Lake will be closed to the public. SPECTATORS WELCOME! Presented by: Columbia Outboard Racing Association Sanctioned by: American Power Boat Association Questions?: Contact cora.raceboats@gmail.com Providence is calling for a nurse manager to lead surgical services PYXIS QUARTET Performing Georg Friedrich Haas String Quartet No. 3,, In iij. Noct.” Providence Seaside is seeking a nurse manager to lead our Surgical Services Department to oversee daily activities related to pre-admit, operating room, PACU, endoscopy and sterile processing. We offer competitive salary, benefits and a $5k signing bonus. Some of the qualifications needed include: x Bachelor of Science in nursing and current RN license x Recent experience as a RN circulator x Previous management experience FRIDAY, JUNE 21st - 7:30pm Complete darkness...an inky black canvas for a truly amazing musical performance. The 3rd String Quartet by Georg Friedrich Haas has quickly taken its place as a modern masterpiece, a tour de force of spectral music that is performed in absolute darkness. Darkness, however, is not present in this piece merely as an absence of light, but becomes the key theme of the work, with the musicians neither seeing their music nor their fellow performers, and seated as far apart from one another as possible. The work is subtitled In iij. Noct., a reference to the Roman Catholic Tenebrae service for Holy Week. Donʼt miss this bold event in the Liberty Theatre! PLEASE NOTE: THE HALL WILL BE COMPLETELY DARK FOR THIS PERFORMANCE. Other open positions x Care management manager x Housekeeping attendant, full-time x Medical assistant, full-time x PACU RN, full-time x Maternity RN, full-time Learn about these and others jobs at www.Providenceiscalling.jobs. Purchase Tickets: libertyastoria.org The Liberty Theater Box Office is open Wednesday - Saturday from 2PM until 5:30PM and 2 hours prior to curtain. 1203 Commercial St, Astoria, OR, 97103 // 503-325-5922
