Alaska News

Forest Service pulls Tongass sale, but reasons are in dispute

JUNEAU -- The Tongass National Forest has withdrawn a proposed timber sale near Petersburg that could have provided 30 million board feet of timber to the Southeast logging industry.

Local environmental groups that had opposed the sale are praising the decision, and are claiming a victory.

But the U.S. Forest Service said it canceled the sale due to "industry concerns," and plans to bring a revised sale back later.

The cancelation of the sale will mean more deer available for local hunters on Mitkof Island, where the sale was to have been held, said Becky Knight of Petersburg, with the Greater Southeast Alaska Conservation Community.

"Deer habitat has been greatly reduced, so deer populations are way down so we can't meet our subsistence needs," she said, prior to sitting down to dinner of minestrone soup with venison meatballs.

But deer hunting didn't appear to be what blocked the sale.

"At this point we are considering our various options going forward, including a new proposed action, which would require additional analysis and a new decision document," said Kent Cummins, Ketchikan-based Tongass spokesperson.

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The Tongass has been under pressure to end old-growth logging and transition to second-growth harvests on previously logged lands, but at the same time is trying to keep what remains of a Southeast logging industry going.

The Alaska Forest Association confirmed it had concerns with the sale and brought those to the Forest Service.

"We told them that none of the Alaska operators could bid on the sale the way it was," said Owen Graham, the group's director.

The problem, he said, was there wasn't enough economically viable timber that could be logged there because it was designed as a helicopter-logging sale. That means only the most valuable logs can be taken out.

The Forest Service's timber cruise, the process of estimating from a sample of the area how many board feet can be harvested, overestimated what was available, he said.

"We had concerns about the cruise on the sale, and the way it was appraised, but we've got an agreement with the Forest Service, at least I think we do anyway, on how to redo the cruise and the sale," Graham said.

Petersburg's Knight said she thinks the sale was withdrawn because her group joined with other regional environmental groups, Cascadia Wildlands, Greenpeace, Center for Biological Diversity and Alaska Wildlife Alliance to challenge the sale in federal court.

She said the case was expected to go to trial soon.

"We believe their attorneys advised them that the case was not winnable, and that's why they waited until the last minute and then withdrew it," she said.

Among the claims the environmentalists had hoped to see decided was whether the Forest Service should have done a full Environmental Impact Statement for the sale, rather than the lesser Environmental Assessment.

Cummins declined further comment, citing the ongoing litigation.

Graham said he thinks there my be something to the claim that the lawsuit played a part in withdrawing the sale, but that's OK because it will enable the Forest Service to address any flaws when it does a new sale.

In an email to the Petersburg district ranger, Tongass supervisor Earl Stewart said he believed there was a way to improve the sale so as to "facilitate the transition to an industry primarily based on young growth, as well as support the transition of the existing local industry."

Graham said helicopter logging had been proposed for the sale as a way to minimize environmental impacts and objections to the sale, but that meant less timber could be economically harvested.

At least half of the wood from the sale has to be processed domestically, he said, and much was likely to have gone to Viking Lumber on Prince of Wales Island, the region's largest remaining mill.

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