Oregon: WOPR backlash even coming from conservative counties
Curry County Commissioner Marlyn Schafer says she’s not happy with the
plan released by BLM on Wednesday. “It’s basically not the plan we all
agreed on,” Schafer said Friday, her last work day before her eight
years on the board ends at 8 a.m. Monday when new commissioners are
sworn in. “It changed the amount of revenue for O&C counties. “Now the
governor and federal representatives do not want the BLM plan
approved. They want an entire assessment of the entire plan before
cutting starts. BLM says as they do the cutting (in each area), we
will have the environmental plan before we do the cutting.”
The BLM
said it has completed its revision of the land use plans that will
guide the management of 2.6 million acres in western Oregon in the
BLM’s Salem, Eugene, Roseburg, Medford, and Coos Bay Districts, and
the Klamath Falls Resource Area of the Lakeview District. It said the
Resource Management Plans comply with all applicable Federal laws
including the O&C Lands Act, Endangered Species Act, Clean Water Act,
and the Federal Land Policy and Management Act. “Substantially all of
the existing older and more structurally complex forests outside the
Late-Successional Management Areas would not be available for harvest
until the year 2023. This means that the issue of harvesting old
growth forest on BLM lands is ‘off the table’ for the next 15 years,”
BLM Oregon State Director Ed Shepard said. “Additionally, there are
approximately 1.1 million acres of mature and structurally complex
forest today on BLM Lands. Under the plan, 100 years from now it is
anticipated that there will be 1.7 million acres of mature and
structurally complex forest – a 50 percent increase from the current
level,” he said. The BLM provided a protest period that ended on Dec.
8. In all, the BLM received 264 formal protests. Shepard said after
all the protests were analyzed and resolved, the BLM made minor
changes as a result of the protest process. Besides increasing timber
available to Oregon mills, the new logging plan is intended to restore
federal timber payments to Oregon counties which have suffered since
logging was cut back in the 1990s. BLM officials said it would likely
be 2011, when federal safety net funding for timber counties runs out,
before the logging plan is in full swing. Legal challenges are likely,
and the plan cannot go forward without a critical habitat plan for the
northern spotted owl. The O&C Association sent a message to the 18
counties saying the action culminates five years of work by BLM and
many other federal resource agencies, 10 state agencies, tribal
representatives, and the O&C counties.
http://www.currypilot.com/news/story.cfm?story_no=18833
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