Bush Advisers Deadlocked on Owl Issue, Sources Say : Environment: Staff specialists urge a big reduction in logging to save the endangered bird. Cabinet group is stymied by potential job losses.

A staff-level group of technical specialists has recommended a substantial cutback in the Pacific Northwest timber harvest to save the endangered spotted owl, but a task force of Bush Administration Cabinet members remains deadlocked on how to proceed on the politically volatile issue, sources said Thursday.

The specialists have suggested that the task force adopt guidelines proposed by a Forest Service researcher that call for reducing the timber harvest on Forest Service lands in the Pacific Northwest to 2.6 billion board feet a year, down from more than 4 billion during the 1980s.

That would be a bare minimum for saving the owl, because it would still allow for the loss of up to 40% of the estimated 3,000 pairs of spotted owls that remain, the scientists on the panel contended.

But the timber industry contends that such a drop in the harvest could result in the loss of 100,000 jobs or more in the Northwest. The staff group contends the losses would be much less, perhaps 20,000. But even at 20,000, the Cabinet group so far has been unable to agree on the trade-off, Administration sources said.

The group, composed of the secretaries of Agriculture and the Interior and the heads of the Office of Management and Budget, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Council on Economic Advisers, met a week ago, and again Wednesday night, without achieving a consensus. It has already missed a Sept. 1 deadline for presenting recommendations to President Bush.

Interior Secretary Manuel Lujan Jr., for one, is resisting the scientists’ recommendations, a spokesman said Thursday.

The Cabinet task force was appointed in June after the decision by Interior’s U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to list the spotted owl as a threatened species, a step that requires the federal government to develop a protection plan.

Bruce Hamilton, field office director on national parks and forests for the Sierra Club in San Francisco, said the staff-level recommendations “don’t go as far as we want, but they go a lot farther than we expected them to.”

Hamilton cautioned that whatever recommendations are adopted must be reviewed by White House Chief of Staff John H. Sununu, who in the past has sympathized with loggers and has been critical of unrestricted protection of owls.

Kevin Brett, spokesman for the American Forest Resource Alliance, said his understanding was that the staff group recommended that a 2.6-billion-board-foot harvest be imposed for one year, 1991, while a permanent solution was being sought.

That would actually allow the harvest of 3 billion board feet next year, by adding to the 1991 total 400 million board feet of timber that had been sold in fiscal year 1990 but not yet cut.

But even at 3 billion board feet next year, Brett said, the staff recommendation “fails the test of balance.”

“It is now up to others to balance the needs of the owls and the needs of timber families,” he said.

The timber industry has called on the Administration to convene a special committee that could override the Endangered Species Act in cases of severe economic and social distress. Such a committee, known informally as the “God squad,” is allowed by the act, but congressional sources said such a committee is unlikely to be convened in this case.

Abramson reported from Washington and Stein from San Francisco.