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