February 18th 2000

By Mike A'Dair
Willits News
February, 18, 2000

A four-person quorum of the county's Forest Council expressed both happiness and chagrin after hearing a report by county forester Steve Smith on the contents of three option A documents.

Option A documents are one of three alternatives required by the state board of forestry, reportedly to ensure that timber producers are meeting the state's broadly defined goal of maximum sustained production timber products.

The other two alternatives are option B sustained yield plans, and option C, which allows timber products to harvest on a "timber harvest plan by timber harvest plan" basis so long as minimum standards for leaving live, standing trees on the ground after the harvest met.

The option C alternative will sunset at year's end for ownership if 50,000 acres or more; hence larger ownership are now filing their option A plans.

Smith, consulting forester for Mendocino County advised that only one SYP has been submitted and approved in the entire state; everything else is option C or option A.

Sustained yield plans provide detailed items for the preservation and/or recovery of wildlife and fish as well as information on timber inventories and strand composition.

They also allow for input from the public and governmental bodies and agencies and are costly. According to Sonoma County timber activist Helen Libeu, Louisiana-Pacific spent $6 million over three years in an effort to finish its sustained yield plan. It was never approved, and the company sold its holdings in California before any of the plans included in SYP could be implemented.

Option A plans resemble SYPs, except that they contain no wildlife and habitat restoration data and they do not allow for any input from the public or from governmental bodies. In fact, the amount of regulatory input allowed under the option A alternative is limited.

Greg Giusti, staff member of the county forest council, said at the meeting that under option A, data on timber inventory and stand compositions is considered "proprietary" and need not be submitted to public agencies, including local governments.

"The entire data for option A is completely hidden from the public," Giusti said. "The information is hidden even from the regulators. Only a few people inside CDF can see the information in these plans.

Nevertheless, Smith recently requested option A information from three local timber producing entities: Mendocino Redwood Company (MRC), the Jackson Demonstration State Forest (JDSF), and the Hawthorne Timber Group, the new corporate owners of the former Georgia-Pacific holdings.

Of the three, MRC and JDSF voluntarily submitted information to Smith; but Hawthorne refused to submit any quantitative information. Smith said that Tom Ray, resource manager for Hawthorne's Mendocino County Holdings submitted a "qualitative document" to Smith but it did not contain the kind of data that Smith wanted.

"It appears that they are intending to follow the plan laid out in the previous existing SYP [prepared and submitted by Georgia-Pacific but ever approved by the state]," Smith explained. "It has been difficult, at best, to get people (from Hawthorne) to respond."

Jackson State Forest

Smith began his report by considering Jackson Demonstration State Forest's option A plan. According to Smith, the next hundred years for the 47,000 acre forest located between Willits and Fort Bragg are a mixed bag.

The forest will increase its overall inventory and planned future harvest are always below the long-term sustained yield level. However, the amount of land that is in older redwood trees will decline by 66 percent.

"They have 27,000 acres in older redwood trees now, "Smith said. "In 2100, they will have 9000 acres in older redwood trees."

Smith expressed some confusion as to why JSDF, a publicly-owned forest which currently has the highest timber inventory in the county, should adopt a philosophy that, in his word, "demonstrates traditional industrial practices."

"The rationale in the change in balance is not well known," Smith said, referring to the shifting balance between older and younger trees. "The document lacks innovation."

His opinions were echoed by Giusti, an ecologist with the University of California Extension Service. "

There is some terminology here, and some approaches, that are not as innovative as they could be," Giusti said.

He referred to a paragraph in the option A document which stated that the clearcuts proposed for JSDF timberlands would mirror naturally occurring events that would wipe out large sections of trees on an 80-year cycle.

"This is the kind of thought that does not demonstrate leadership in how to run a demonstration forest. I'm not sure that this document would be able to get CDF certified."

Fifth District Supervisor David Colfax, who, together with Tom Lucier of the Third District, is one of the two supervisors on the Forest Council, requested that Giusti prepare a short synopsis of Smith and Giusti's analysis of the JDSF option A plan that will be submitted to the board of supervisors for its comments.

Mendocino Redwood Company

Smith and Giusti were much happier with the MRC option A plan, which keeps harvests at or under 2 percent of inventory for the next 100 years and allows inventory to increase nearly 2.75 times, from 2.26 billion board feet in 2000 to 6.3 billion board feet in 2100.

Simultaneously, conifer harvests will climb from 42 million board feet a year during the present decade to 100 million board feet a year during the last decade of the new century.

"They make a good effort on demonstrating how forest inventory will grow over time," Smith said. "I hope that I am around in 80 years to see how this model works. This document goes a long way to addressing some of the concerns that have been raised in this county."

Smith was alluding to the proposed county rules which were hammered out by a forest advisory committee between 1989 and 1992, only to be rejected 1-8 by the California Board of Forestry in December 1994.

Giusti also referred to the committee. "Now the proof will be in the pudding, as it were, to see if all the work of the original forest advisory committee will work out."

Henry Gundling, a forest council member who also was a member of the FAC, said, "To me, this is the most refreshing corporate document I've seen since I've been in Mendocino County."

Lucier noted, "This all looks well and good, as long as you have one company sticking around to abide by it. It's a lot of great numbers and what have you, but who is going to guarantee that these numbers will stick around in perpetuity?"

Hawthorne Timber Group

As already mentioned, the Hawthorne Timber Group would not voluntarily comply with Smith's request for data. However, Smith nevertheless tried to figure out what the company is planning to do, based on wording included in the qualitative document sent to him by Ray.

Smith concluded that Hawthorne may stick with Georgia-Pacific's option A plan which calls for cutting at a rate of 4 percent of inventory, approximately twice what MRC is planning to do.

"They are planning for an annual harvest of 4 percent , based on annual growth of 4.5 percent," Smith explained. Minimum harvests will be 85 million board feet a year and average harvest will be 135 million board feet a year.

At the end of the planning horizon, timber inventory will have increased only slightly, although Smith did not provide data for that calculation.

"This is a very aggressive form of timber management," Smith said.

They are condemning this huge amount of forest to perpetual depletion," Gundling added.

Colfax asked Giusti to prepare a "friendly critique" of Hawthorne's undisclosed plans, and to forward his comments to the board of supervisors.

"If it could be sent on with, more than concern--we are talking about decertification here--I'd like it to be forceful but not hostile," Colfax told Giusti.

The forest council discussed other items including how both CDF and the forestry board are suffering from a lack of direction and that lack of direction is coming from Gov. Gray Davis.

Members of the public expressed disgust and outrage at the process, and their sense of betrayal was, to an extent, shared by members of the forest council and by staff.

"This county has been defrauded," said Albion timber activists Linda Perkins. "Five years ago, the board of forestry turned down out county rules and told us that we would be getting expedited SYPs"

"We still don't have them. Now the major timber companies have withdrawn their SYPs, including Jackson State. So not even on public lands are we getting SYPs," Perkins said.

"We look at this document, and, frankly, we just want to laugh," said Mary Pjerrou, president of the Mendocino County-based group, the Redwood Coast Watershed Alliance, referring to the MRC option A plan.

"We are really disgusted with the promises that have been made, and the promises that have not been kept. Where is sustainability?" We cannot settle for nice talk. That's what has been happening with MRC since they came here."

Pjerrou pointed out that one of the major components in the proposed county rules that are not included in the MRC option plan, is the lack of area control.

Area control is a concept proposed by the late Eric Swanson, a member of the forest advisory committee. Its purpose is to ensure that harvest allowed under FAC's 2 percent rule do not all occur in one or two heavily stocked areas, depleting them and causing significant environmental damage over the short term.

"This option A document has no area control,"Pjerrou told the forest council.

Forest council staff also expressed displeasure at the implications of Hawthorne's refusal to submit hard data.

"One of the promises the state told us when they denied our county rules was that the sustained yield plans would take care of all our concerns and that the counties would be part of the reviewing process. We would be part of the timber companies' due diligence. Now we find that the county can be effectively shout out," Smith said.

This has been a very insulting process. It's gone from having the state having to deal with our county rules, then we went to the SYPs, the SYPs went away, and now we have nothing."--TWN