Scott Swanson
It’s a Friday and Milt Moran is grappling with one of the biggest challenges of his 45-year career at Cascade Timber Consulting.
After some 34 years, he’s having to change offices.
Moran, the most senior member of the staff at CTC, took over on March 1 as president of the firm that manages 140,000 acres of private forestland in east Linn County. He succeeds Dave Furtwangler, who is retiring after 13 years at the helm.
“I’ve collected a lot of stuff,” Moran said last week. “I had to start digging through it. I’ve got a couple of garbage cans already, and I’ve got a recycling bin full. We’re going through stuff.”
Though he said he’d be available through the end of the year on a consultation basis, if necessary, Furtwangler said he expects the transition of leadership to be “easy.”
“Milt’s really familiar with everything here,” he said. “We’re not making any big changes. We’ll keep being the same company we’ve been.”
Both have been with the company for decades. They’ve watched it grow from a five-man-plus operation in 1973 when Moran started working for the firm, then named Barringer and Associates, after graduating with a forestry degree from Central Oregon Community College.
“When I first came here, it was Gene Ellis, Jack Barringer, Larry Blem, Howard Dew and myself,” Moran recalled. “We were the professional staff and we had a grader operator and a shop guy and a tree-planting crew. That was it.”
In those days, what is now CTC contracted with Willamette Industries to harvest the local timberlands owned by the Hill family of Minnesota.
Moran, who grew up in Lacomb and “always kind of had it in my mind that this is what I wanted to do,” started with Dew in reforestation.
“We did a lot of survival checks, tree planting supervising, a lot of road layout and property line surveys, and a lot of road construction with the operators.
The company headquarters was in what is now the Chamber of Commerce office at 1575 Main St.
“It was tight,” Moran recalled. “We rented the house to the east of the office. We had myself and a bunch of guys in there for a while. It wasn’t the best conditions. We had a wood stove. We’d be working in there and you’d see your breath and stuff. That office was flat bulging at the seams.
“Jack (Barringer) finally went to the family and said, ‘We’ve got to do something. We see where we’re going to be needing to do a lot of work and we’re going to need to triple the crew here, equipment and that stuff.'”
Moran said the company staff was “pretty excited” when the Hill family approved CTC’s current location, at 3210 Main St., which gave them “a structure where we could all be under one roof.”
They moved in in 1984.
Furtwangler arrived the following year, coming from Georgia-Pacific, which was shutting down its mill and selling its forestlands in the Toledo area. He was on staff when the Willamette contract ended in 1986 and CTC took over the complete management and harvesting of the Hill Timber holdings.
“That was a long-term relationship the family had,” Furtwangler said. “When that ended, they needed to do more in-house. We started doing our own sales and they needed people to help lay out sales, timber cruise and do the different activities that way. It worked out really well for me.”
Today, the company has 34 employees, with two more arriving this summer after graduation.
CTC manages the Hill family’s holdings, “the whole gamut,” Furtwangler said, “from reforestation to fire protection.”
It also provides services to other, smaller, landowners in the area: tree-planting, fertilization, road and bridge construction, a lot of surveying, timber cruising and forestlands market analysis.
“A lot of the things we can do is because we’re doing it for Hill and we can piggyback on what we’re already doing for them,” Furtwangler said. “It’s more efficient and it provides services for people.
“Probably the biggest thing we have to offer is the marketing because we’re selling logs for the Hill family all the time and we know the best places to send timber to, who’s paying the best prices this month or this week.
“It changes, so the average small landowner can’t stay on top of that. When they let us market it for them, I’m sure we probably make more for them than anything they have to pay for our services.”
Added Moran: “I’ve talked to folks that haven’t used us and they kind of shared their numbers and I know we’d do a lot better for them than what they’d do.”
In addition to its own employees, CTC has 10 local logging operations doing harvesting. Furtwangler said a recent accounting showed that the company had close to 200 people employed year-round, either directly or for subcontractors, in its operations.
In looking back over his career, Furtwangler said a big change has been the rise of political challenges for the logging industry.
“What we call ‘our license to do business’ is a challenge,” he said.
Moran added that the issues include “the right to continue to do our job and manage timber and use the tools that we’ve had.”
“We really feel like we’ve responsibly used all those tools, which could include fire or chemicals,” he said. “We’re not going out there and spraying chemicals on the landscape every single year. We might do it twice in a rotation – 50 or 60 years – in one spot. That’s a moving target, based on the family and the decisions they make.”
He said that a recent ban on spraying forestland in Lincoln County is an example of what worries him about the political climate in Oregon.
“There’s always somebody telling us we’re not doing it right and we feel like we’re doing a really good job. We really appreciate that we have great neighbors here in this area to work with and we plan to continue to be a good neighbor and make contact with people regularly, and let them know what we’re doing and being open and a good communicator.
“We’re going to let people utilize the property when we think it’s appropriate and it’s not going to cause us a fire or tear up our roads. We appreciate people being respectful. We’ll continue to allow that as long as we have a good relationship with the public.”
Furtwangler said the Hill family has acquired “a fair amount of land” through various means during his time with CTC, most of which was in poor condition.
“We’ve gotten all of that converted to good, solid stands of trees now,” he said. “We’ve got remnants here and there that are not perfectly stocked like we’d like, but we’ve worked through all those acres that were low productivity, understocked.”
Gesturing toward a drone sitting nearby on a table, Furtwangler said another big change has been technology.
“When I started, originally, I think we had two computers,” he said. “Now everybody’s got a computer on their desk and a phone in their pocket.
“What we used to do in cruising, it took almost as much time to work up a cruise in the office as you spend in the field taking the data. Now, you do it with a data collector. You take it out, bring it in, plug it in and print out your report.”
Moran added: “You’d do it all by hand, write it on paper and come back to the office with a calculator and a volume table and sit there and work all that out. It took forever. Now, you just come in, plug it in and you’ve got your report – and you’ve got a lot more value than you used to, just cruising.”
Moran has managed the logging and sale of logs for the company for the past two decades, but his “big thing” has been fire prevention, which he’s been involved in since the beginning of his career, he said.
He’s been a leading figure in local and state-wide fire prevention organizations, such as the Linn Forest Protection Association and Oregon Department of Forestry committees.
He’s been involved in efforts to update county records of where forestlands are located, so they can be correctly assessed for fire prevention costs.
“There’s a few areas in Linn County that need to be looked at because it’s a huge user of firefighting costs because of the frequency of fires in some of those areas, but they’re not paying for protection. Small landowners, maybe through the sale of properties or development over the years, got dropped by accident from those assessments.”
Also of concern, he said, are areas in the “wildland interface, where we’ve got wildland mixed with homes.
“We worry about big fires coming from the national forest. We worry about that kind of thing.”
Other issues, he and Furtwangler said, that have arisen are forest health impacts from climate change,
Furtwangler said one of the achievements he’s “proudest of” is the staff he’s built at CTC.
“We don’t have a lot of turnover,” he said. “I’ve tried to focus on quality of the folks here. I’ve refined that as I could over the years. We have a great group of employees who go above and beyond for us. That’s a huge part of our success, I think.”
Moran clearly agreed.
“Dave’s handing off a great crew of people and I’m real proud to be able to manage after Dave here, to be the leader,” he said. “There are some very smart people here, a lot smarter than I am. I think that’s a good thing, having people smarter than you working for you.”
The two also expressed appreciation for the Hill family’s active interest in both its holdings and the community, they said.
Furtwangler noted that younger family members are getting involved, attending beneficiary meetings and visiting the forests around Sweet Home.
“What’s refreshing for us is to see the next generation of the family coming along, being interested in what we’re doing. It does my heart good to see that.”
He said CTC’s involvement in the community is directed by the Hill family.
“They want us to represent them, to serve in the community.”
Furtwangler said that as he exits the company, he plans to continue serving on the county Planning Commission, with the Brownsville Chamber of Commerce and the county United Way.
He and his wife Shari, a retired school principal, plan to travel, most immediately to Arizona, where they plan to take in spring training and Opening Day with the Diamondbacks.
Moran is also very involved in the community, with various fire protection and forestry organizations, on both the boards for Samaritan Health and Samaritan Lebanon Community Hospital, as chair of Linn County Parks Commission, and at St. Helen’s Catholic Church.
“I’m trying not to add to it,” he said. “My schedule is pretty busy as it is.”
What he’s really looking forward to, he said, is his new duties at CTC.
“I’m excited. One thing I really like about working on this tree farm is that I get to treat it like it’s my own. It’s a great place to work. It’s a great family to work for. I’m excited about the challenge.”
He said he will be handing off some of his responsibilities to other staffers.
“I’m really looking forward to some of these new folks we’ve got on, to bring them in on some of the things I was doing – give them more responsibility. It’s about folks growing as we move forward.”
Then there’s that office cleaning project to finish up.
“I think it’s going to be a while before I can sit back with a big cigar and my feet on my desk.”