Timber roundtable discussion touches on familiar themes

A couple of years ago, Montana Sen. Steve Daines held a roundtable discussion at F.H. Stoltze Land and Lumber on timber issues. Last week, Daines held another discussion at the same venue on the same topic. This time, he brought a little more political firepower in fellow Republican Sen. Pat Roberts of Kansas, the chairman of the Senate Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry Committee.

The problems are still the same, however. There’s a lack of logs for area mills, not enough cash for counties with a high percentage of federal lands, and plenty of anger over environmental lawsuits. Lawsuits in particular are still a huge problem, mill owners say.

Dan Claridge, Vice President of Thompson River Lumber said a 16 million board feet sale his company needs is currently held up in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.

“We’ve been on one shift since 2005,” he said.

Paul McKenzie, lands and resource manager at F.H. Stoltze Land and Lumber in Columbia Falls, agreed with Claridge. He noted that timber interests have sat down with environmental groups, recreationists, and the Forest Service to create projects, only to be sued by another group unwilling to come to the table.

He said the Forest Service is “basing decisions on whether they’re going to get sued.”

Taking out wilderness, inventoried roadless areas and other special management areas, Montana still has a timber base of about 13 million acres, and yet Lincoln County, which is surrounded by federal forest lands — most of which isn’t wilderness — no longer supports a mill.

The Farm Bill of 2014 was a good piece of legislation, the roundtable concurred, but it was never implemented correctly.

Mark Peck, a Lincoln County Commissioner, claimed the Forest Service needed “a leadership overhaul.”

He said too many decisions are being made by Washington bureaucrats, not by local supervisors.

“It’s a Kremlin model that’s completely ineffective,” he said.

Several county commissioners were also in attendance. They said they rely on federal assistance like the payment-lieu-of-taxes program and the Secure Rural Schools Act just to keep the lights on.

“Mineral County is close to being broke,” Mineral County Commissioner Duane Simons told Daines and Roberts.

Daines repeated a call to reform the Equal Access to Justice Act. Under the act, groups that sue the federal government and prevail can recover their court costs.

Roberts said the Senate will take up the issues brought at the roundtable as it crafts a new farm bill.

Lawmakers would also like to see Montana taken out of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which headquarters in San Francisco and is oft perceived as being a liberal court.

The court covers the entire Northwest, including Alaska, most of California, Hawaii, Idaho, Nevada, Oregon and Washington.