Insiders Attack Timber Firm’s Logging Practices : Environment: Memos by a top Louisiana-Pacific executive and a respected industry consultant support outside reformers’ charges of over-cutting.

In a series of scathing memos, two internal critics of Louisiana-Pacific Corp., the giant forest-products company, accused the company of over-cutting its Northern California timber reserves--a practice the company has long denied.

Environmentalists and some Sacramento legislators claim the memos--which came to light just as legislators in Sacramento are considering new timber-harvest rules--support their longstanding call for reform of the timber industry.

The memos were written by a top Louisiana-Pacific executive and a respected industry consultant.

First obtained by the Santa Rosa Press Democrat, the memos charge that through mismanagement, Louisiana-Pacific has been shutting down mills even as it over-cuts its forests--in some cases taking trees before they have begun their most economically productive period of growth.

The executive, former Western Division resources manager Robert E. Morris, was fired a week after writing one of the memos last August. In it, he criticized management’s “failure to understand and apply basic business principles,” citing mill closings, allegedly skewed pricing practices and over-harvesting.

A spokesman for Louisiana-Pacific said Tuesday that the cutting rate had already been slowed. He declined to say why Morris was fired.

The consultant, Jerry Partain, director of the California Department of Forestry during the George Deukmejian Administration, is generally considered a conservative in industry circles. Apparently hired to placate Louisiana-Pacific foresters who were disgruntled with the firm’s practices, he instead aligned himself with the critics, his memo indicates.

“It is now clear to me,” Partain wrote to Joe Wheeler, L-P Western Division manager, on Dec. 18, 1990, “that the environmental activists, the Department of Forestry, your contract loggers and your foresters are all correct when they say your present harvest rate cannot be continued for long . . . Removing trees to (sic) a smaller and smaller diameter will create a large hole in the timber inventory that cannot be recovered for decades.”

Timber reformers saw Partain’s views as a particularly strong vindication of their own.

“It is internal confirmation of what everyone has been saying externally for years,” said Linda Hager Bailey, a Ukiah attorney and member of the Mendocino County Forest Advisory Committee. “It’s always been, ‘those environmentalists’--and now here’s Jerry Partain saying exactly the same thing.”

Even allies who have often joined with Louisiana-Pacific in opposing tighter regulation of the California timber industry are taking pains to distance themselves from the memos’ description of company cutting policies.

“We’re not there to defend their practices,” said Claudia Jennings, a Mendocino lumber broker and board member of California Women in Timber, a pro-industry group. “We’re there to defend the entire redwood region, and it shouldn’t be penalized because of what other people perceive as bad management.”

Assemblyman Byron Sher (D-Palo Alto) said the memos would be helpful in advancing compromise timber legislation now under consideration in Sacramento. Sher expects votes in the state Legislature as early as Jan. 17.

“It paints a picture of taking the timber and running,” said Sher, who is chairman of the Assembly Natural Resources Committee and an author of timber-reform proposals since 1981.