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About East Oregonian : E.O. (Pendleton, OR) 1888-current | View Entire Issue (June 15, 2019)
A10 STATE East Oregonian Saturday, June 15, 2019 Who’s following the Forest Practices Act? Oregon can’t say for sure By TONY SCHICK Oregon Public Broadcasting SALEM — On Feb. 26, 2019, Oregon State Forester Peter Daugherty sat in front of lawmakers during a bud- get hearing and reported his agency’s sterling compliance 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 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 Uni- versity. 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 ODF cited them in legislative testimony. She now says she’d like to see the monitoring 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 For- Oregon Department of Forestry Photo A contractor sorts logs on Oregon Board of Forestry land in Southern Oregon. est Practices Act govern them all. They dictate how many trees must be left standing alongside streams to keep them shady and cool for salmon. They gov- ern forest road construc- tion to lower the chances of a landslide. They direct for- esters on when trees must be replanted, and more. Oregon’s comprehensive law was the fi rst of its kind 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 Legisla- ture directed ODF to conduct an annual study of Forest Practices Act compliance, using an independent con- tractor to collect data from a sampling of forest owners. The agency began by reviewing how well forest- land owners and the tim- ber industry were comply- ing with rules on harvesting trees, building and maintain- ing forest roads and protect- ing water quality. In line with other states 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 represen- tatives say they are conf ident McComb in the accu- racy of those numbers, as do several members of the state’s for- estry board. Joe Justice, a board mem- ber who works for Hancock Forest Management in East- ern Oregon, said ODF for- esters use the audits to iden- tify areas where they need to work with landowners before, during and after tree harvests. “Compliance Audits are just one way the Depart- ment monitors Forest Prac- tices,” Justice said in an email. “A great deal of valu- able information is gained from these audits including information and trends that help ODF focus training and education.” Marganne Allen, ODF Forest Health & Monitor- ing Manager, said Oregon’s reported compliance 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 oper- ators are abiding by forestry laws at compliance 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 consistent with previous ODF studies dating back to 2002. Department of Forestry offi cials say they are work- ing to improve the way they check on logging-re- lated activities. The depart- Williams Justice ment plans to involve stat- isticians from OSU in reviewing 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 environ- mental groups criticizing its latest audit declined to participate. A fl awed, 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 foresters access to their woodlots — something the law permits them to do. Don Stevens, a retired OSU 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 forest- ry-rule compliance rates. He said ODF’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 for- est land rife with violations. And should that be the case, the Department of Forestry’s overall picture of how well Oregon’s 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 Nat- ural Resources, reviewed ODF’s work for the Oregon Stream Protection Coalition. He equated ODF’s methods to fi nding out that 200 out of 1,000 motorists pulled over by police were exceeding the speed limit — and assum- ing 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 possible compliance rates for forest practices rules … then ODF’s reporting ‘methods’ hits that mark,” Mendoza wrote in his assessment. The ODF’s Allen said her agency wanted to account for the fact that not all timber harvests are the same, and some landowners may be encountering the law more often than others. Larger questions about the agency “You can have one har- vest unit that has only, say, 100 feet of road. 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 different 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 OSU’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 Department of Environmen- tal Quality, the audit’s exter- nal review committee was made up entirely of people 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 tim- ber industry that they reg- ulate,” Van Dyk said. “And that we can’t be confi dent in the quality of the laws, nor in their implementation.” Williams, who was a fi sh- eries biologist for 30 years before serving on the Board of Forestry, said the audit appears to be part of a pat- tern that causes her to be skeptical of scientifi c infor- mation coming out of the for- estry department. At a Board of Forestry meeting in early June, Wil- liams voiced concerns that a board-ordered review of the science on the effects of for- est practices on stream tem- peratures in Oregon’s Siski- you forests omitted studies that were both relevant and indicated a need for changes in management to reach water quality objectives. She said the agency’s work has the appearance of a bias toward upholding the status quo. “It certainly feels that way,” Williams said in a phone interview. “I don’t know if it is an intentional bias or not, you know, I don’t know what’s causing it, but the result is that we are being given sort of a rose-colored glasses picture of the world.” P E N D L E T O N th of Umatilla Landing Days july HOSTED BY THE PENDLETON VFW “LET’ ER BUCK” POST 922 IT STARTS HERE. HONORING OUR PAST, BUILDING OUR FUTURE. JUNE 21-22 EVENT SCHEDULE AT THE UMATILLA MARINA FOOD & CRAFT VENDORS • BEER GARDEN PARADE • DANCING HORSES • DANCERS KIDS ACTIVITIES & WATER PARK! FRIDAY EVENING Grupo Viajero & KROME Beer Garden Host: The Pheasant Bar & Grill SATURDAY Grupo Viajero Trespasser - 5pm HEADLINER: Leah Justine - 8pm Beer Garden Host: The Rustic Truck Bar & Grill 10 AM Thursday, July 4, 2019 THEME: “Only in America” Horse Staging Area: Western Auto/Baxter Parking Lot Line-Up Area: SW Dorion Street From City of Pendleton building on SW Dorion to Main Street to SW Court to the Convention Center Any Individual, Organization or Business - ALL ARE WELCOME All Entries will receive a participation ribbon. Trophies will be awarded in the following 14 Categories: MOTORIZED - Best ClubMOTORIZED - Judges’ Choice BUSINESS/COMMERCIAL • FIRST RESPONDERS & ARMED FORCES PEOPLE WITH PETS • BAND / DRUM & BUGLE • YOUTH DANCE & DRILL GROUPS • FLOATS • CIVIC GROUPS & SERVICE CLUBS YOUTH GROUPS • EQUESTRIAN (2 riders or less) EQUESTRIAN GROUPS • EQUESTRIAN GROUPS - Royalty HORSE & BUGGY/WAGON In Addition, the VFW will award the “Patriot Trophy” to the entrant with the most overall votes (Winner of Patriot Trophy not eligible for additional trophies) TRACCI DIAL PARADE HOST 10:00am Saturday May be picked up at the Pendleton Chamber of Commerce, Dean’s Athletic, DG Gifts, Elite Guns & Tactical and the Pendleton Downtown Association Caballos Bailadores Rancho el Escondite Horse Dancers & Ballet Folklorico Estrella de Mexico Dancers will be in the parade on Saturday and performing in the park right after. You may also mail requests to VFW Post 922 • PO Box 787 • Pendleton, OR 97801 or email requests to: fbradbury@yahoo.com Questions? Call Fred Bradbury at 541-377-7474 MASTER PRINTERS N W Printing • Copy Center • Graphic Design
