Wishing this news was fake

The big news last week was when Weyerhaeuser announced it was liquidating its 630,000 acres of lands for $230 an acre to Southern Pines Plantation, a real estate firm out of Macon, Georgia.

Weyerhaeuser, in typical corporate fashion, didn’t actually name Southern Pines as the buyer, but reporters, doing what reporters do, managed to root it out.

Now some of you don’t think much of reporters, I suspect.

But if Derrick Perkins of the Western News in Libby hadn’t been covering his beat, which includes the county commission, we’d still be in the dark on who the buyer was.

It’s a fine example of why you should support your local newspaper. I’d make a strong argument that local newspapers and journalists are really what is propping up the budgets of Facebook and Twitter, but that’s an argument for another day.

This column isn’t about that. It’s about what might be one of the sweetest land deals in Montana history. Imagine, if you will, I was the son of a land baron and I came home one night from fixing fences and announced to my father that I’d met a nice man from Georgia and just sold the ranch for a fraction of what it’s worth.

My father would, son or no son, have me strangled, tarred and feathered.

But that appears to be what Weyerhaeuser CEO Devin Stockfish has done. He’s sold the ranch for a song — and stockholders should be livid.

Now I must admit full disclosure here. I own three shares of Weyerhaeuser stock. They’re worth about $90, last I checked and part of my very small individual retirement account. I bought them a few months back because I figured what the heck, why not invest in a local company?

Yikes.

Now there’s some speculation that within the deal Weyerhaeuser has some sort of fiber agreement, which is to say they can continue to cut timber off the land for “x” number of years.

That may be the case, but even so, this deal is way below book value, even for huge land sales.

Case in point: When Plum Creek sold its Swan Valley Timberlands in the Montana Legacy Project in 2008 and 2009, it made just under $1,600 an acre for 320,000 acres of land.

And that was during the Great Recession, not during the real estate boom we’re seeing today.

About 155,000 acres of that land eventually went into Forest Service ownership and another 114,589 acres went to the state of Montana.

The Bureau of Land Management purchased a little more than 3,000 acres and the Nature Conservancy, which helped broker the deal, still owns and managed about 34,899 acres — at least it did in 2016.

In other words, nearly all of it ended up the public domain.

The Swan sale, for what it’s worth, also came with a fiber agreement, though it was later struck down, at least on federal and state lands, after environmental groups objected.

I never could get an answer on how much timber was actually harvested in the Swan fiber agreement, though one source acknowledged it would be decades before there would be merchantable timber again.

I have hiked on some of those former Plum Creek lands in Swan and the adage, “cut the best, leave the rest” certainly came to mind as I crossed the nuked landscape.

It wouldn’t surprise me a bit if that happens on the remaining acreage from Kalispell to Libby.

And that’s really sad, because there’s responsible companies in the region that could have done much better, if they had only been given a chance.

Truth is stranger than fiction, my friends.

Chris Peterson is the editor of the Hungry Horse News.