Archive for August, 2011

We wrote back in July about a tax exemption for woody biomass that is being threatened in Washington state. Despite an immense need for renewable energy, the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Committee (JLARC) recommended that the 2009 tax exemption be allowed to expire in 2013.

Just recently a citizen committee called the Citizen Commission for the Performance Measurement of Tax Preferences took up the issue and will hold a hearing Sept. 23 and then make a recommendation to the Legislature. The commission took testimony last week, and timber and paper companies came by to make their case, according to the Olympian.

Lobbyists from Longview Fibre, the Washington Forest Protection Association and the Northwest Pulp and Paper Association showed up to point out that legislative intent can be hard to define and that lawmakers were not actually intending to end the tax break.

“If it was intended to expire and go away completely, that is news to me,” testified John Ehrenreich, a tax-policy expert for the timber-backed forest protection group. Ehrenreich said he actually wrote the original bill before it was merged with other tax breaks into a larger renewable energy bill in 2009.

Ehrenreich acknowledged that the hog-fuel portion carried an expiration date. But he said that was because the industry was “fully intending to come back in a few years and go through a review process like we’re talking about here” with hopes of retaining it.

The Capital Press this week interviewed William Ruckelshaus, the first administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency who now lives in Seattle. He is also the chairman of the William D. Ruckelshaus Center, a collaborative problem-solving institution of the University of Washington and Washington State University.

With the mere existence of the EPA being currently threatened by House Republicans, Ruckelshaus is an important figure to weigh in on the debate over federal environmental regulation. His center at UW just helped “Washington state’s agricultural industry, environmental interests and counties hammer out a framework for cooperation on critical habitat areas that was enacted by the 2011 Legislature,” according to the Capital Press, and he believes collaboration is key.

Here is an excerpt from the full interview:

A: …If I’m a landowner and someone is running a highway through my land, I may not like it, but at least I’m being compensated for it. If I’m forced to put buffers alongside streams that run through my land in order to protect salmon, sometimes those buffers take a significant amount of my land, and I think they should be compensated for that.

If that’s a public good and it’s being asserted against a private property owner, then why shouldn’t the public pay for it the same way they do with a highway? But we don’t.

Q: That was the plan of the Forests and Fish Law here in Washington. (Enacted in 1999, the arrangement includes compensation for trees not harvested within stream buffers.) But then the state doesn’t have money to pay for it.

A: That’s the problem. We just faced the same kind of agreement, that ended up with a statute, between the farmers, environmentalists, the tribes — (which) were involved all the way to the end — and the counties. And that law, where there’s significant harm, suggests payment. I’ve been sitting in on a committee for the last several months, about how are we going to raise the money to do that?

The federal government is very interested in it, because they can’t figure out how to solve this issue.

In the first place, some guy writing the regulation down in Olympia or in Salem, and not being on the actual land itself, can’t possibly draft a regulation that makes sense on every piece of land. So the landowner has the regulator from the government coming on their land, starting to tell him how to manage it. He’s been managing for five generations and this guy’s maybe six months out of school. Well, they’re not going to be very pleased with what they’re told to do.

This effort we’ve just finished here is an effort to get everybody at the table, defining the problem and letting the individual landowner have a lot more authority about what he should do to manage the land in such a way that it doesn’t adversely impact the environment. And compensating them where there are significant costs involved.

The Pacific Northwest congressional delegation is obviously not happy with the status quo when it comes to federal forest management and environmental regulations, and that is very good to see.

Just in the past week, Rep. Greg Walden (R-Ore.) said there should be “big changes” in forest management, Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.) proposed a revamped Western Oregon forest plan, Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.) criticized the EPA’s recent behavior and Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) “perplexed” environmentalists with several proposals supported by the timber industry.

Rep. McMorris Rodgers told the Capital Press that her time on the House Energy and Commerce Committee has shown her that Congress is far too defensive when it comes to EPA regulations. Rather than reacting to the Obama administration, Congress should be setting policy itself.

“Unfortunately, I see an agenda being driven by the Environmental Protection Agency that too often means it’s a hands-off approach,” she said, citing a pending update of dust regulations.

“If you’re on the land, you’re going to be stirring up some dust and it just seems the EPA doesn’t always understand that,” she said.

Rep. Walden spoke last week at a shuttered timber mill in Grant County, Ore, and “decried the lack of active management on the forests in recent years,” according to the Blue Mountain Eagle.

“The forests don’t stay static, even when our management does,” he said, noting that the trees continue to mature, die and burn up.

Walden displayed charts showing the management of the federal lands lagging far behind that on private and state forests.

He said he and some like-minded colleagues are working to draft legislation that could reverse the trend by offering new ways to manage the federal lands, strengthen rural communities and put people back to work. The proposal, still in the formative stages, is focusing on concepts such as public lands trusts to take over forest management.

The Northwest congressional delegation’s sensitivity to timber industry concerns can be complicated for Democratic lawmakers because environmental groups often think that the Dems should walk lockstep with their interests without question. But the Northwest is much more complex than the concerns of environmental groups.

Sen. Wyden is worrying environmentalists with some of his recent proposals, but that’s sometimes par for the course in a state as varied as Oregon, according to Greenwire.

Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.), who represents a western Oregon district that combines the liberal bastion of Eugene with more conservative towns and timber communities, said that part of Wyden’s challenge is that he represents a very diverse state where it is very difficult to please everybody all of the time.

“We have people who love to stake out the extremes and just fight as opposed to work in resolution,” DeFazio said. “I have at times been called a ‘timber beast’ by environmentalists throwing sawdust on me, and I’ve been called an ‘environmental radical’ when I go to the southern part of my district. So I wouldn’t find it anything new that Senator Wyden has gotten in some trouble for probably proposing something pragmatic.”

In the middle of a very tough week for the U.S. economy, it’s nice to read about a success story, especially one in the timber industry. Teevin Bros., a timber shipping company in Rainier, Wash., is doing gangbusters business, according to the Longview Daily News.

One of the biggest reasons for success is owner Shawn Teevin, according to his employees.

This year, the Rainier-based business added 30 acres and 30 additional workers to its log yard operation. It now employs 100 workers. The company is shipping 250 to 300 log truck loads of timber a day to California, Hawaii, Japan and China and is on a pace to export 280 million board feet by the end of this year.

Teevin’s employees credit him for turning what was once a small business into a regional juggernaut.

“Shawn is not afraid to grow his business,” said Cheryl Konop, operational resources manager at the site. “He just doesn’t sit back and say ‘no’ because there’s some risk. He’s willing to take the risks, but he always makes sure his ducks are in a row.”

Another nice piece of news is environmental advisers for President Obama just visited Eastern Oregon to learn more about how government agencies, environmental groups and timber companies are working together there, according to the East Oregonian.

Over the last five years, collaborative groups in Grant and Harney counties have worked with Malheur National Forest officials to craft a series of forest projects to thin overstocked stands, restore wildlife habitat produce timber for the mills. Complementing this work, an alliance of local, state and federal partners worked to site the new biomass fuel plant in John Day, a project completed with some $5 million in stimulus funding…

…Teresa Raaf, (Malheur National Forest) supervisor, said the tour provides an opportunity to showcase the “forward thinking” demonstrated by the two collaborative groups that work with the forest.

“That forward thinking is an first class example of what communities can accomplish by working together to solve complex resource and economic issues,” she said. “It also has the potential to bring about policy changes that could assist the Forest in expediting other forest restoration activities.”

Great to see collaboration, rather than conflict, get some attention from federal officials.

Two opinion pieces this week from Oregon writers, one in the Wall Street Journal and one in the Oregonian, provide a valuable perspective on the importance of the timber industry to Northwest communities.

James L. Huffman, dean emeritus of Lewis & Clark Law School in Portland, writes in the Journal that the spotted owl recovery plan released in June by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service won’t work.  Instead, it’s just another chapter in 20 years of bad decisions over the owl.

In the early 1990s, when the spotted-owl controversy reached its peak, people desperate to save their jobs and communities joked about having spotted-owl barbecues. Today it seems that the joke is on those who believed science always has a solution.

And even assuming the spotted owl can be saved, is there no cost too high? How many millions of acres of forest must be abandoned? How many rival birds must be killed? Would anybody really notice if barred owls displaced and interbred with every last spotted owl in the Northwest?

For most Northwesterners it was never really about the owls anyway. It was about preservation, in some pristine state, of some of the planet’s most productive forests versus the management of those forests to serve the interests of mankind. But even preservation proves to be an elusive goal as forests age and debris accumulates to feed the next forest fire.

Rather than more of the same — or spending millions to shoot the more aggressive barred owl – the federal government should rethink the way it looks at forestland and endangered species, Huffman writes.

The spotted-owl saga provides convincing evidence that it’s time to re-examine our objectives and methods in species protection, followed by appropriate amendments to the Endangered Species Act.

Robert S. Smith, the president of Peregrine Private Capital Group in Portland, says in an Oregonian op-ed that “environmental hubris” should not stand in the way of Oregon taking advantage of its status as “one of the best places on Earth to grow trees.” From an economic perspective, the value of the timber harvest is too great to leave behind in a state with 9 percent unemployment.

This is Oregon. What do we do better than anyone else? We grow trees. So let’s put the “folks” back to work and make some real money harvesting trees and processing lumber.

Time is of the essence. Douglas fir logs rose 19 percent in price in the fourth quarter of 2010 alone. This will only be exacerbated by this year’s tsunami in Japan. Once ports, roads and power are working there again, demand for lumber and plywood will explode. Supplying Japan’s rebuilding needs will be a global undertaking. This could employ much of rural Oregon for years to come.

The supreme irony here is that in the wake of the Great Recession and disillusionment about jobs and the future, Oregon is actually in a position to have one of the nation’s best economies rather than one of the worst.

What we need to do is to shake off the chains of an old, failed ideology and forge a new business paradigm based on Oregon’s rich natural resource endowment and burgeoning global demand. We have what the world wants.

The comments section of both the Journal op-ed and Oregonian op-ed are also quite vigorous — on both sides of the debate.