White House to Offer Plan to Limit Logging : Environment: Compromise package to end war over spotted owl is expected today. It may anger both sides.

The Clinton Administration, in a bid to end a seven-year war of wills over logging in the ancient habitat of the spotted owl, today is expected to set a firm annual limit on timber harvesting, begin initiatives to protect the streams and rivers of the Pacific Northwest and propose a plan to ease the economic blow to loggers, Administration sources said Wednesday.

In a package likely to anger both loggers and environmentalists--along with some influential members of Congress--the officials said the President would limit logging on federal lands west of the Cascade Mountains to 1.2 billion board feet per year for the next 10 years--a figure that represents a decline of roughly 75% from the lumber industry’s peak harvests in the late 1980s.

In doing so, the President rejected pleas from the timber industry to allow higher timber harvests early in that 10-year period--a move that could have stimulated the logging industry after a lengthy period of court-ordered restraints.

But Clinton also turned away demands by environmentalists to set aside permanent reserves of old-growth forest in the 8.6-million-acre tract of federal lands along the coasts of Washington, Oregon and Northern California. The Clinton plan would thus permit clear-cutting in some places and so-called thinning and salvage in other parts of the forest, including in some of the virgin ancient forests.

It would, however, require loggers to observe strict limits on the cutting of trees within 100 yards of rivers and streams throughout the vast public forests of the Northwest. Such restrictions are designed to reduce erosion of river banks, prevent temperature changes in the waters and minimize the buildup of silt in the streams and rivers where threatened fish and wildlife spawn.

At stake in the dispute are not only loggers’ livelihoods but the survival of more than 400 species of plants and animals that live in and under the Northwest’s stately stands of Douglas firs, Sequoias and Sitka spruce and in the fast-running streams and rivers of the great Cascade range.

The Northwest forest debate has focused attention primarily on measures to protect the spotted owl, which has been classified as an endangered species. But Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt recently scoffed at the “misperception that this is about one critter in trouble.”

The Northwest’s dwindling owl population, said Babbitt, has provided early warning that a much broader breakdown in the ecological balance of the region is possible if measures are not taken quickly.

More than any single issue, the battle between environmentalists and loggers in the Northwest has crystallized the dilemma that the Clinton Administration faces in trying to make good on its promises both to protect the environment and to stanch the loss of jobs from the U.S. economy.

The Administration has predicted that throughout the affected three-state area, its plan may cost close to 6,000 jobs beyond the thousands already lost. In an economic package designed to cushion the blow and ease acceptance of the timber plan, Administration officials said Clinton will seek congressional approval for $287 million in new 1994 spending on top of roughly $920 million in planned spending for programs to stimulate new jobs and business opportunities throughout the affected area.

But whether such an effort would be successful was not immediately clear. Congress, in a cost-cutting, deficit-reducing mood, already has refused to fund many of the Administration’s most ambitious programs.

Over five years, Clinton’s plan would bring $1.3 billion of new funds into the area. The funds would be used to ease the effects on communities and individuals, stimulate the development of new wood-products industries and begin projects to restore woodlands damaged by the clear-cutting of timber.

Clinton’s carefully crafted package leaves both parties in the dispute with some victories and some defeats--and enough of each, Administration officials hope, to prompt each side to call a cease-fire in a political and legal battle that has raged since 1987.

The Administration became formally involved in April, when the President established teams of scientists and officials to come up with a range of options for ending the intractable dispute.

Today, Clinton is expected to challenge both environmentalists and the timber industry to implement his plan and not fight it. After weeks of lobbying on Capitol Hill and among labor and environmental activists, Administration officials said they believe the feuding parties will accept the compromise and call off further court challenges to the plan.

“We’ve gone enough distance in the negotiations that neither side should go wild,” one knowledgeable Administration official said. “There’s been progress made in the past couple of weeks. Nobody is happy, or will be happy, with the outcome. But there ain’t nobody getting more than this.”

A knowledgeable official said that, while the Administration backed off its initial plan to resume timber cutting at a relatively high volume and reduce the harvest in stages, it would consider adopting such staggered limits. But the official said the Administration would entertain such alterations only if the harvests averaged no more than 1.2 million board feet a year and only if both environmentalists and timber interests agree.

The Administration similarly would accept the designation of certain tracts of land as permanent reserves--again, if both sides to the dispute could agree on which areas to set aside. In defending his decision not to set aside permanent reserves, Clinton is expected to cite the findings of his scientific experts, who determined that they are “not biologically necessary” to sustain the endangered species involved.

Administration officials said that Clinton has the authority to order most of the changes, with congressional approval required only for the economic plan associated with the logging restrictions. But they added that the President’s appeal for cooperation implicitly invites Congress to pass legislation declaring that the Administration had made sufficient efforts to protect an endangered species.

Such so-called “sufficiency” language would block further suits by environmentalists, which have tied the timber issue up in the courts on and off for years.

But congressional sources said it is unlikely that a still-divided Congress would adopt such a resolution. If it does not, many believe that at least some environmental groups based in the Northwest, which have been less conciliatory to the Clinton Administration, might file further suits, thus bogging the issue down in additional controversy.

Perhaps the greatest threat to the President’s plan, however, lies in the reaction of such powerful congressional foes as House Speaker Thomas S. Foley (D-Wash.), who reportedly is enraged by the Administration’s plan.

In an hourlong meeting Monday afternoon with Babbitt, Foley furiously denounced the plan and threatened to seek a full-scale revision of the Endangered Species Act. Babbitt emerged looking pale and shaken, according to one source. Environmentalists said that they fear the Speaker might try to go over Babbitt’s head and lobby the President himself.

Still, it was not immediately clear whether the timber industry’s backers would find enough support in Congress to sustain a counterattack.

Environmentalists’ greatest concern is that the plan does not set up the “permanent and inviolate” forest reserves for which they had long battled. Giving the timber industry clearance to cut trees anywhere means that, despite the government’s careful biological analysis of the forests’ needs, “they really have shaved the margin of safety on this option very close to the bone,” said Fran Hunt, of the National Wildlife Federation.

But environmentalists also found things to like in the plan. They were pleased by the Administration’s decision not to try to insulate the plan from litigation and its withdrawal of an initial plan to allow higher initial cutting so that more loggers could return to work in the next several years. The plan also marked a partial retreat from a proposal, called Option 9, that brought denunciations from environmental groups two weeks ago.

Industry and labor spokesmen found less to praise.

“We don’t like the plan,” said Barry Polsky, spokesman for the American Forest and Paper Assn. “We don’t think it provides near the balance the President talked about in Portland on April 2.”

He predicted that the plan would throw out of work as many as 85,000 people in the industry, which now employs about 125,000 in the spotted owl habitat.

Still, he said, labor and management officials--who joined forces on the issue several years ago--have not decided how to fight the plan. For the moment, he said, “we plan to work with the Administration as much as we can.”