Audrey Caro Gomez
While environmental groups, local government and timber companies often disagree about how to best manage Oregon’s forests, one thing they agree on is that the new Bureau of Land Management’s resource management plan for woodlands doesn’t cut it.
The BLM’s plan has been met with at least three different lawsuits within days of its signing on Aug. 5.
Linn County is a member of the 17-county Association of O&C Counties, which has filed a civil suit against Neil Kornze, director of the Bureau of Land Management and Sally Jewell, Secretary of the Interior, in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia.
The complaint alleges the federal government is violating the 1937 O&C Act which placed management jurisdiction under the Department of the Interior.
The Oregon and California Railroad Revested Lands (commonly known as O&C Lands), are approximately 2.6 million acres of land located in 18 counties of western Oregon.
The land was originally granted for construction of a railroad from Portland to San Francisco, but was returned to the U.S. government in 1916. Since then, the 18 counties where the O&C lands are located, including Linn County, have received payments from the United States government as compensation for the loss of timber and tax revenue. Over the years, as timber production decreased, so have the payments.
The federal government is failing to “comply with its mandatory legal obligations to manage approximately 2.1 million acres of forest lands in western Oregon for sustained yield timber production to produce revenue that is shared with rural communities in Oregon,” according to the complaint.
Instead, the BLM plan sets aside most of that land for wildlife conservation, in the view of the AOCC.
The environmental groups who filed a complaint against the BLM and Department of the Interior also say the federal government is violating the law.
Revisions to the BLM’s Resource Management Plan “drastically change the science-based management of BLM forest lands in southwest Oregon,” their complaint alleges.
“The RMP revisions deviate from the carefully-crafted and judiciously approved multi-agency land management plan and mandatory standards and guidelines for managing Pacific Northwest forest lands – The Northwest Forest Plan – without adequate explanation,” they say in court documents.
The American Forest Resource Council, a Portland-based forest products trade association, said many of its members “could not continue to operate at their current levels of production, and would suffer financial harm, without a reliable and adequate supply of timber sold by the BLM,” according to court documents.
The AFRC’s complaint alleges that the “RMPs do not allow the timber on 74 percent of the O&C timberlands to be sold, cut, and removed in conformity with the principle of sustained yield.”
According to the document, the “productive capacity of the O&C timberlands is approximately 1.2 billion board feet per year, the 2016 RMPs set the annual sustained yield harvest level at 205 million board feet, just 17 percent of the total.”
They are requesting an injunction requiring the BLM to offer at least 500 million board feet of timber sales from O&C timberlands annually until the “BLM adopts new RMPs that comply with the O&C Act.”
In another forest-management related case, Linn County sued the State of Oregon and the State Forestry Department in March for breach of contract. Linn County is part of the Forest Trust Land Counties, which were transferred to the state in the Forest Acquisition Act.
The county alleges that the state breached their contract with the Forest Trust Land Counties “by adopting the (greatest permanent value) rule” and by “failing to manage the Forest Trust Lands in a manner consistent with the parties’ understanding when they they contracted.”
They are asking for $1.4 billion in damages. A hearing on the case against the state is scheduled in Linn County District Court on Aug. 17.