Logging Profit Not a Given, Official Says

The chief of the U.S. Forest Service, whose agency’s sale of trees to loggers lost money last year for the first time, says Americans shouldn’t expect the service to regularly turn a profit while protecting fish and wildlife and satisfying public demand for the great outdoors.

“The fact is, the way we are doing business is changing and will continue to change,” said Mike Dombeck, interviewed as he nears the end of his first year in office. “Forests live a long, long time. To assume you are going to run a profit on an annual basis for everything you do is a false assumption.”

For the first time since its founding a century ago, the Forest Service admitted recently that its commercial logging operations lost money last year--$15 million.

That does not include $240 million that went to counties where federal forests are--the counties’ federally mandated 25% of the money private industry pays for government-owned timber. Environmentalists say the payments should be counted as additional losses, money that went to individual counties and not the Treasury.

Long critical of the ecological impact of federal logging, the Sierra Club and others say the net loss to taxpayers is yet another reason to halt commercial timber harvests on national forests.

Rep. James Leach (R-Iowa), chairman of the House Banking Committee, is co-sponsoring a bill with Rep. Cynthia McKinney (D-Ga.), to end commercial logging. “The U.S. government is the only property owner that I know of that pays private parties to deplete its own resources,” Leach said last month.

Understandably, loggers, sawmill workers and other timber-industry partisans draw a different conclusion from the Forest Service’s red ink.

They say it proves the need to lessen environmental laws they consider overly burdensome, which they say would lead to additional harvests and bolster timber-sale receipts.

“The system prevents land managers from doing their jobs, denies them financial and human resources, and forces them to spend time cutting through red tape and an enormous bureaucracy instead of managing the land,” said Bob Powers of the Washington-based United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America.

Powers and Bob Watrous, president of the Assn. of Western Pulp and Paper Workers Local No. 5 in Camas, Wash., told a Senate panel recently that federal logging decisions run through too many levels of citizen appeals.

“Many of our Pacific Northwest communities have become hostage to a specific brand of professional agitators, who function under the guise of environmentalists but who repeatedly cause waste and disturbance without ever coming to the table or ever offering solutions or cooperation,” Watrous said.

Dombeck made it clear that he supports continued logging on national forests.

“I am not at all a proponent of zero cut,” he said. “I think there are lots of areas we have to go into to actively manage.”

He balks at projecting whether annual federal logging levels--averaging about a fourth those of the 1980s--will increase or drop further.

“I’m not sure we know that,” Dombeck said. “If anything, we need to increase the . . . focus on what we leave on the land. We need to . . . be looking at investments in the land, making long-term investments in the land. The land will produce good things for us over time.”

The debate over money-losing timber sales “shouldn’t even be occurring,” Dombeck said.

“We should be talking about the health of the forest, quality of water, vegetative composition, and not necessarily focus on dollars and cents every time we turn around,” he said.