A to Z and Back Again

FYI, here’s Russ Vaagen’s blog post on the A to Z sale, which has been discussed on this blog here and here. The former said that “The “A to Z” Mill Creek Pilot Project sets up a 10-year contract on 50,000 acres in the Colville National Forest. It allows a private company to use private dollars for everything after the timber sale is laid out, including the pre-sale environmental requirements and NEPA. With private funds and local management, the Colville National Forest can be managed for healthier forests and stable, sustainable revenue.”

Anyone have a link to the court decision?

6 thoughts on “A to Z and Back Again”

  1. I wish the FS and BLM would stop painting big red stripes around all the leave trees in their thinning sales. Someone should outlaw their paint cans.

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  2. Unless it is a Stewardship Sale, the Forest Service is required to “designate” the trees – and that usually means with paint, and that paint is usually tracer paint, to help identify if trees were logged that should not have been logged. It is part of the timber accountability. But it is usually Blue or yellow paint. The red paint must indicate something else – wildlife trees perhaps? Or “Select” trees for cone collection? Along major travel routes, it is also common to have the paint markings not facing the roadway.

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    • Red paint often is associated with property lines. Monumented corners always have up to 4 Bearing Trees, to be able to re-set the monument, if disturbed. The Bearing Trees usually have a band of red paint all the way around it, with yellow signs on it.

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  3. For whatever it’s worth a comment I posted on Russ Vaagen’s blog providing many more details about the A to Z timber sale, which Russ failed to mention in his blog post, has been waiting to be approved since Friday evening. Perhaps it will never be approved.

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  4. “An idea was hatched to see if the projects could be sold earlier in the process and include the NEPA work essentially as service work.”

    The problem is that NEPA work has to be done before taking any action that would affect the environment. So the only part of the “project” that could be sold prior to the NEPA work is the job of doing the NEPA work. Any indication that the purchaser was actually buying rights to log anything (“improprieties”) would invalidate the decision. There is a legal way of contracting for NEPA work, but this statement doesn’t describe it.

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