On the Blue Mountain forest plan revisions:

Several of those who testified said even if access is restricted, it doesn’t mean they’ll stop from using the forests.

“There’s more of us than there are of them, and we won’t comply,” one man commented. “If it’s not broke, don’t fix it.”

Another person voiced the opinion that the Forest Service doesn’t have the authority to restrict access.

“We don’t have to listen to them,” he said.

I wonder if these folks would be talking the same way (about trespassing) if this land had been privatized by their compatriots during the sage brush rebellion.

(Why is it that environmentalists who try to enforce the law are called “extremists,” and people who threaten to break the law are called “patriots?”)

[Image courtesy of USDA]

Would you like to buy a $1,000 pellet stove at half price? Last month, the Forest Service announced that it is happy to pay the other half to promote “leveraging the market for low value wood.”

To get in on this gravy train, find 100 people who want to buy a new pellet stove (a good use of social media). Call yourselves a “biomass consumer cooperative” with a $500 membership fee — half the stove’s cost. The Forest Service will then grant your “cooperative” $50,000 to pay for the other half. What a deal! Now you and your 99 new friends can enjoy a sweet new pellet stove to warm your house at half-price! If you’d prefer cash, just turn around and sell your new stove on eBay for $800, pocketing a cool $300 profit!

An article from E&E News today, added to the NCFP library as a PDF….

Tucked deep in Congress’ bill to fund the government in 2015 was a request to the Forest Service: Get moving on a long-stalled rule that could aid the survival of America’s small timber mills.

The report language “strongly encouraged” the agency to write a directive that could ensure small mills are not bullied out of federal timber contracts by larger, better-capitalized corporations.

….

Over the past few years this blog has covered a few articles related to the Gypsum biomass plant in Colorado.

In fact, back in August 2013 this blog shared an article in which “U.S. Sen. Mark Udall said the Gypsum biomass power plant is a “win-win-win” project when he and state Sen. Gail Schwartz toured the plant’s construction site on Friday afternoon.”

So what’s happened since that August 2013 proclamation of a “win-win-win?”

Well, according to an article written by Josh Schlossberg with the Biomass Monitor:

Eagle Valley Clean Energy, an 11.5-megawatt biomass power facility in Gypsum, Colorado started operating in December 2013, only to have its conveyor belt catch fire in December 2014. Spokespersons said the facility would be back online shortly, yet as of October, it’s still offline. There have been no further media reports investigating why the facility still isn’t operating, and multiple calls and emails to the facility from The Biomass Monitor were not returned.

Another thorn in Eagle Valley’s claw is a lawsuit filed against the company in U.S. District Court in June 2015 by Wellons, Inc., an Oregon-based corporation that designed and built the biomass facility.

Wellons is suing Eagle Valley Clean Energy for $11,799,864 for breach of contract, accusing the company of “fraudulent transfers” and “civil conspiracy,” involving the transferring of $18.5 million of federal subsidies to “insider” parties in an alleged effort to hide the money. The money was issued to the facility from the federal government under Section of 1603 of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), also known as the Stimulus, involving payments to reimburse companies building renewable energy facilities.

Wellons claims that, on top of the nearly twelve million dollars Eagle Valley must pay them, they are owed past due interest of $1,185,433.56, with debt accruing at $3254.90 per day.

Another bump in the road for Eagle Valley involves the Chapter 11 bankcruptcy of the logging contractor that provides them the trees to fuel the facility, West Range Reclamation. West Range has provided nearly all of the wood to the facility since it opened, mostly from beetle-killed lodgepole pine from the White River National Forest.

Ouch, eh? So essentially every single thing celebrated before the Gypsum Biomass Plant was built turned out – in reality (and in only a short 2 year timeframe) – to be a tremendous disaster. Hopefully the media in Colorado will do a follow up investigation, because as Schlossberg pointed out above, “There have been no further media reports investigating why the facility still isn’t operating, and multiple calls and emails to the facility from The Biomass Monitor were not returned.”

Make sure to check out the rest of Schlossberg’s article to read about more recent growing pains with other wood-burning biomass plants in Florida, Wisconsin, Texas and Hawaii.

[Below is a press release from the Greater Southeast Alaska Conservation Community, Cascadia Wildlands, Center for Biological Diversity, Greenpeace, the Alaska Wildlife Alliance and Crag Law Center dated October 12, 2015. – mk]

PETERSBURG, Alaska – In a federal court filing last Friday the U.S. Forest Service announced it will withdraw its decision on the Mitkof Island Project, a large 35 million board foot timber sale. The project is in the center of the Tongass National Forest, near the communities of Petersburg and Kupreanof.

Petersburg District Ranger Jason Anderson signed the Forest Service’s decision in March. In May five environmental organizations filed the lawsuit, GSACC v. Anderson. They are the Greater Southeast Alaska Conservation Community, Cascadia Wildlands, Center for Biological Diversity, Greenpeace, and the Alaska Wildlife Alliance. The organizations are represented by Chris Winter and Oliver Stiefel of Crag Law Center (Portland) and Gabriel Scott.

“Faced with the realities brought forth in our lawsuit, the Forest Service is withdrawing its authorization of the Mitkof project rather than defend it in court. This is a victory for old growth, wildlife, and subsistence hunters, although we don’t yet know whether the agency will attempt resurrecting the project with future planning,” said Cordova-based Gabriel Scott of Cascadia Wildlands.

At issue in the lawsuit is the harm caused by logging old-growth and to the species dependent on old growth forests including Sitka black-tailed deer-an essential resource for subsistence hunters-the Alexander Archipelago wolf, and the Queen Charlotte goshawk. Petersburg resident Becky Knight of GSACC said: “Mitkof Island has been hard hit by 60 years of industrial logging. Subsistence hunters from the community rely on deer as a primary source of protein, but for years have been faced with critically low deer populations and severe harvest restrictions. This area of the Tongass needs a long period of recovery, but this sale targeted some of the few remaining stands of important winter deer habitat.”

Randi Spivak with the Center for Biological Diversity said, “During the planning process for this sale, the Forest Service tried to downplay and hide from the public the full scope of the damage this logging would cause.” Spivak added: “The agency initially told the public this was a ‘small sale’ involving only a local logging opportunities, but the project ballooned to a major timber sale designed for a large regional or out-of-state timber operator.”

“The Forest Service must take a hard look at the environmental consequences of its actions, especially with respect to species like the deer and the goshawk that depend on old-growth forests,” said Oliver Stiefel of Crag Law Center. “In a rush to approve yet another major old-growth timber sale, the Tongass National Forest brushed aside these environmental concerns and fast-tracked the project.”

In the court filing, the Forest Service asked for an extension of the briefing schedule in the case to give the agency time to formalize its withdrawal notice. The extension request is for 60 days.

Greenwire article from last week….

It seems like this should be obvious, but it apparently took a lawsuit to get the Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest to agree.

Thursday’s reversal by the Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest of its June decision to allow wheeled all-terrain vehicles (WATVs) on six Forest Service routes was met with mixed reviews by people on both sides of the motorized trail-use issue.

(The lawsuit) charged that opening the roads to WATVs not only violated the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) but was also premature, since the Okanogan-Wenatchee has yet to complete its long-overdue Travel Management Plan. The federally mandated plan is supposed to guide the use of off-road recreational vehicles on public lands.

Thursday’s Forest Service announcement said any decision to reopen those six roads to WATVs would be based on additional NEPA analysis, but didn’t reference the Travel Management process.

While the plaintiff’s primary concern may be the sequencing of travel planning and road management decisions, the NEPA concession could be at least as important.  The Forest Service has generally tried to limit its analysis of road use effects to the travel planning process.  The conclusion reached here could also be applied to roads and trails currently open to motorized vehicles that have never been through a NEPA process to consider their effects, or that have never been reviewed for effects on listed species under the Endangered Species Act.

The following article is written by Keith Hammer, Chair of the Swan View Coalition in Montana. Hammer has shared his views on this blog before – including raising red flags about some types of ‘collaboration’ in Montana. – mk

When there is wildfire smoke in the air, the timber industry and its cronies in Congress blame it on a lack of logging. As though logging prevents wildfires, which it does not. Moreover, they blame the alleged lack of logging on lawsuits brought by conservation groups simply wanting to insure the Forest Service follows the law as it logs public fish and wildlife habitat.

In February, Senator Jon Tester (D-MT), emphatically and falsely told Montana Public Radio “Unfortunately, every logging sale in Montana right now is under litigation. Every one of them.”

Listeners, including Swan View Coalition, challenged Tester’s statement. The Washington Post investigated and found there to be 97 timber sales under contract in Montana’s national forests with only 14 of those being litigated and only 4 of those stopped by a court order! The Post awarded Tester “Four Pinocchios” and noted the Forest Service responded “Things should be litigated that need to be litigated. If there is something the Forest Service has missed, it is very healthy. We absolutely should be tested on that.”

Then politicians and the Forest Service went back to lying as though this never happened. Representative Ryan Zinke (R-MT) visited Essex on the border between Glacier National Park and the Flathead National Forest and claimed the summer’s wildfire smoke “is completely avoidable.” He went on to promote his Resilient Federal Forests Act, that would speed up federal logging and require citizens to post unaffordable bonds before suing the Forest Service to make it follow environmental laws. He then proposed that future Wilderness designations allow logging to reduce fires.

Such proposals fly in the face of federal studies like the Interior Columbia River Basin Ecosystem Management Project, which found roads and logging render ecosystems less resilient to natural disturbances like fire. Countless other studies find large trees, including fire-killed trees, are essential for fish and wildlife habitat.

Forest Service research shows that forest thinning within the last couple hundred feet of our homes and structures helps save them, not distant logging where fire helps renew natural ecosystems. This summer’s fire that burned the remote and abandoned Bunker Creek bridge shown here was started by lightening in an area burned in 2000.

We’ve supported thinning around the village of Swan Lake, the Spotted Bear Ranger Station, guest ranches, and trail-heads, but such thinning needs to be repeated often to remain effective. Neither the American taxpayer nor our natural ecosystems can afford to apply such front-country logging to the distant backcountry.

As I write this article, Montana’s entire Congressional delegation has done an about-face and is urging the Forest Service to slow down and give loggers more time to log federal timber sale contracts in the face of a glutted timber market.

It’s also time to consider how backcountry logging, most often done at a taxpayer loss, is taking money and market demand away from the thinning that should instead be done adjacent to human homes and other structures.

In a decision dismissing three lawsuits intended to compel more federal land logging in western Oregon, DC federal district court judge Richard Leon found that the timber industry failed to show that less logging means more wildfires (see page 7’s footnote). Judge Leon had ruled earlier in favor of the industry plaintiffs in one of four forum-shopping lawsuits filed by attorney Mark Rutzick. But, judges don’t like being reversed. When the DC circuit court did so in the earlier case, ruling that the timber industry failed to establish standing, Leon took that message to heart and said “ditto” for the other three lawsuits.

Judge Leon’s ruling likely ends a two-decades long legal skirmish by the timber industry to compel federal agencies to increase logging levels from Northwest Forest Plan lands. The campaign has been led by the Portland-based American Forest Resource Council. For 20 years AFRC chose primarily the courts as its strategy to increase logging. Today’s decision suggests that AFRC may change its focus from the courts to Congress, which would play to the strength of its newly-hired executive director, Travis Joseph, former natural resources staff to Oregon Rep. Peter DeFazio. Joseph, who is not an attorney, was DeFazio’s point person during House negotiations over proposed O&C forest legislation that continues to languish in Congress.

The following article is written by Keith Hammer, Chair of the Swan View Coalition in Montana. Hammer has shared his views on this blog before – including raising red flags about some types of ‘collaboration’ in Montana.

——————

Imagine a world where you donate some time working on a Forest Service project and the Forest Service pays you up to four times what that in-kind donation is worth to continue working on it. This is the world Congress created in the Omnibus Public Land Management Act of 2009 as the Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration Program (CFLRP).

The Southwest Crown Collaborative (SWCC) in the Swan-Clearwater-Blackfoot area is one of the collaborative efforts being funded by CFLRP via the Forest Service. Because the Act requires that the collaborative process be “transparent and nonexclusive,” we asked and the SWCC agreed to list on its web site its formal partners, their contributions to projects, and federal contributions to those partners and projects.

In a nutshell, Congress through CFLRP will fund half of the costs of the projects if the Forest Service and its partners fund the other half. Partners need only provide one-fifth of the total project costs, often as in-kind, non-cash donations of work. This minimum one-fifth contribution then entitles the partner to receive federal funds to do work that otherwise would be done by federal employees or under competitive contracts with private businesses.

In a hypothetical example provided by the Forest Service and lodged on the SWCC web site, a partner can consider $2,000 of its work expenses as a non-cash contribution to a project. The Forest Service would pay the partner $5,000 cash, which may include CFLRP funds, “to pay for the partner’s salary, fuel for vehicles, and supplies toward the project.” In a real-life SWCC example, one non-profit has received $2.5 million in federal funds for its non-cash, in-kind contributions of $903 thousand.

While these funds on the one hand enable partners to do some monitoring and watershed restoration work by repairing or decommissioning roads, it also appears to silence public criticisms by partners of the more controversial timber sales being conducted under the guise of “forest restoration.” Moreover, some SWCC partners have collectively promoted “restoration” logging and asked Congress to work with collaborators and not with “organizations and individuals who oppose collaborative approaches to forest management.” (Here)

It is this type of bully behavior by partners that casts a long shadow over the integrity of CFLRP, which at the 5-year/halfway mark is far ahead of its logging quotas and far behind in decommissioning roads and controlling the invasive weeds they bring to the forest. Citizens and scientists that disagree for good reason with the notion that logging is “restoration” (see page 4) deserve equal standing with collaborators being paid millions of tax dollars by the Forest Service.

To see how over $7 million of your tax dollars have thus far been paid to partners in the SWCC, visit:
http://www.swcrown.org/partnership-agreements