Oregon: Cops & Loggers want to eliminate beauty strips that hide clearcuts
Roadside trees weighted by ice continue to cause disruption on U.S.
Highways 30 and 26 to and from the North Coast, blocking the highways
and bringing down power lines. Clatsop County Sheriff Tom Bergin has
kick-started a campaign to get rid of them – even though state laws
require them. The irony is that the Oregon Department of
Transportation doesn’t like them either.
“They don’t work for us very well,” said Dan Lepschat, the ODOT
forester. “Frankly, we don’t want them.” As the forester for Oregon’s
transportation system, it is Lepschat’s responsibility to keep roads
safe from falling trees. He has the authority to write “waivers” to
the Forest Practices Act, which requires landowners to maintain scenic
buffers along certain highways.
The scenic buffers are designed to
provide a minimum number of trees along highways for “enjoyment of the
motoring public while traveling through forest land,” according to
Oregon statute. The buffer is supposed to be 300 feet deep from the
edge of the pavement. Landowners (of more than five acres) along
highways designated as scenic are required to keep the trees in either
the 150 feet closest to the highway, or the deeper 150. Since it is
the deeper 150 feet that is adjacent to most logging activity,
landowners usually decide to log that section. The other 150 feet can
be logged when the previous 150 feet reach an average height of 10
feet, with a minimum number of trees per acre. Lepschat said he writes
the waivers about 95 percent of the times that he is asked to do so.
The applications he denied were for areas where windstorms didn’t pose
significant problems. He also estimated that he wrote between 20 and
25 waivers last year. And though the Oregon Department of Forestry can
refuse to grant the waivers, it hasn’t because the waivers are issued
to promote safety. “Safety’s our No. 1 thing,” Lepschat said. “Scenic
highways are a nice idea, on the north side of the highway. On the
south side – when you log – that’s a problem.” Lepschat said the
restrictions for logging along scenic highways work better in Eastern
Oregon than on the coast because the forests are different. The trees
in the east are slower-growing, harder trees.
http://www.dailyastorian.info/main.asp?SectionID=2&SubSectionID=398&ArticleID=57219&TM=73168.73
— Posted to http://forestpolicyresearch.com via gmail to posterous and
also to forestpolicyresearch@yahoogroups.com
Posted via email from Deane’s posterous