Panel Severely Weakens Forest Protection Bills : Environment: Timber firms would get broad exemptions from rules designed to limit over-harvesting. Sponsors vow to kill bills unless muscle is restored.

Succumbing to pressure from timber interests, a Senate committee severely weakened a package of forestry protection measures Friday, prompting threats from the sponsors to kill their own legislation unless its muscle is restored.

Over the opposition of environmentalists and Gov. Pete Wilson’s Administration, the Senate Appropriations Committee added amendments to the package that would give logging companies broad exemptions from proposed regulations and water down restrictions placed on the harvesting of young trees.

The committee then voted to move two of the four bills in the package to the Senate floor. Two other bills in the package already are pending on the Assembly floor.

But environmentalists and sponsors of the package said that unless the amendments are removed by a two-house conference committee, the legislation designed to protect California’s privately owned forests would be dead for this year in the Legislature.

The amendments would require the courts to exempt loggers from preservation requirements if they could prove that their county has a high unemployment rate and that curtailment of timber harvesting would cause it “economic harm.”

“This situation is worse than current law,” said Gail Lucas, a Sierra Club representative who helped write the original legislation. “This is a move by shortsighted companies to enable them to continue to liquidate the forests and then move on to other states or other countries where there are still trees.”

Calling the amendments a “poison pill,” Assemblyman Dan Hauser (D-Arcata), a sponsor of one measure, said they were designed by the industry to virtually exempt every timber-producing county in the state from harvesting regulations proposed by the bills.

Hauser said that since nearly all the timber-producing lands in the states are in rural counties where unemployment has been high for “at least 50 years,” the exemptions could apply to most of the privately owned forests in the state.

“It (the amendment) makes any reform null and void in everywhere but Los Angeles and Orange counties,” he said with bitter sarcasm.

Asked what he would do if the amendments were not removed, Hauser replied quickly, “I would kill my own bill.”

The Senate is expected to pass the legislation early next week. But the Assembly, which has already approved different versions, is not expected to concur in the new exemptions. That would force the bills to be referred to a conference committee to resolve the differences.

Hauser said Wilson, a proponent of forest protection, will be a key to the measures’ fate in the Legislature. He said Republicans so far have generally opposed the bills and unless Wilson lobbies for their approval, the legislation will fail.

Environmentalists charged that all along the strategy of industry opponents had been to tack amendments onto the package, making it so objectionable that their sponsors and groups like the Sierra Club would withdraw their support.

“This was an effort by the opponents to get additional leverage and . . . to get the supporters of the original compromise to walk away from it,” said Jennifer Jennings, a negotiator for the Planning and Conservation League.

Industry officials denied the charge, saying forest protection was also their goal but it had to be accomplished in a way that would not cause economic setbacks for the logging industry.

Maureen Frisch, a spokesman for the Coastal Working Group, acknowledged that even with the new amendments, the coalition of logging companies was still opposing the measure, but she said they hoped to work out additional compromises with the sponsors over the weekend.

She said the amendments meant lawmakers were acknowledging for the first time that “jobs should be a very important component of the outcome” of the legislation.

Hauser’s bill and three others sponsored by Assemblyman Byron D. Sher (D-Palo Alto), Sen. Barry Keene (D-Benicia) and Sen. Dan McCorquodale (D-San Jose) were the outgrowth of an agreement reached earlier this year between national environmental groups and the Sierra Pacific Industries in an attempt to discourage ballot initiatives. The two sides negotiated a protection plan for privately owned forests that they unveiled in March and which became known as the Sierra Accord.

The plan, which was incorporated in the legislation, provided protections for ancient forests and wildlife, restrictions on clear-cutting, curbs against over-harvesting and regulations on logging in watersheds. It did not apply to forests owned by the state and federal governments, which are governed by other regulations. More than a third of California’s timber-producing forests are on private property.

Most of the state’s logging companies, particularly those with major holdings along the northern coast, and grass-roots environmentalists opposed the measures from the beginning. The logging companies, which formed the Coastal Working Group to fight the legislation, contended that the package of bills was too restrictive and would cause severe economic hardship to their industry.