http://bozemandailychronicle.com/articles/2009/12/18/news/

Tester forest bill heard on Capitol Hill

By DANIEL PERSON Chronicle Staff Writer

A plan to require 7,000 acres to be logged annually in the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest for the next 10 years met some skepticism on Capitol Hill Thursday.

The requirement is a major component of Sen. Jon Tester’s sweeping forest bill, which had its first congressional hearing Thursday afternoon.

 
ERIK PETERSEN/CHRONICLE RY Timber employee Donald Sheen unloads a timber shipment in Livingston on Thursday afternoon.

Sen. Tester’s proposed wildland legislation drew fire on Capitol Hill during the bill’s first hearing on Thursday. Tester and supporters of his bill say the requirement would provide struggling lumber mills with logs and reduce the number of beetle-killed trees in the forest, which includes the Madison Mountain Range southwest of Bozeman.

However, members of the Obama administration and environmentalists told a Senate Energy and Natural Resources subcommittee that the provision could set a dangerous precedent for forest management and prove difficult to implement.

Harris Sherman, an undersecretary at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, said 1,000 acres is logged, on average, in the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest. Increasing that to 7,000 acres every year is “not reasonable or achievable,” he said.

Also, the cost of advertising and implementing timber sales would be costly for the U.S. Forest Service, Sherman said.

“I do not have a precise figure,” he said. “It would certainly run into the millions of dollars on an annual basis.”

Meanwhile, Matthew Koehler, of the Missoula-based WildWest Institute, told the subcommittee that the mandated logging provisions “are unprecedented and represent an unscientific override of current forest planning.”

But Tester and a coalition of loggers and conservationists who support the legislation defended the mandates.

Tester said pine-beetles had turned the Beaverhead-Deerlodge forest into a “sea of red,” and said more forest needs to be opened up to logging if Montana’s lumber mills are expected to stay open.

“We cannot afford to lose these people who know how to manage our forests,” he said of the mills.

In a phone interview after the hearing, Tester said his bill would contain the cost of timber sales, in part because it would be harder to sue the Forest Service over logging proposals.

“If we get this bill passed, it’s going to reduce litigation in a big, big way,” he said.

Along with the logging requirements, the bill would create 677,000 acres of wilderness, most of it in Southwest Montana, garnering the support of many major environmental groups.

If passed, it would be the first new wilderness designation in Montana in 25 years.

Daniel Person can be reached at dperson@dailychronicle.com or 582-2665.