Scott Swanson
The South Santiam All-Lands Collaborative is about to become more structured as the final steps for establishing it as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization are completed.
SSALC Coordinator Sharon Kanaroff told members of the current organizing board that a few more board seats still need to be filled for the new nonprofit, but that the process is essentially complete.
SSALC is an organized collaborative effort between government agencies, non-governmental organizations and private companies and individuals to plan and implement projects that will provide employment, watershed restoration, and recreation opportunities near Sweet Home.
Participants include the Sweet Home Ranger District, Cascade Timber Consulting, Linn County, the City of Sweet Home, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and half a dozen others.
SSALC has assumed leadership of the process of establishing a South Santiam Community Forest that was begun by the Governor’s Solution Team during a 16-month period beginning in 2012. Members have met regularly to work on various projects that fall within the goals set down by the team before it disbanded in late 2013 with an agreement to “find better ways to ensure public access to natural resources, provide opportunities for nature-based and cultural tourism, improve public health, support jobs, and promote natural resource health both along the river and in the entire South Santiam watershed.”
One of the goals is to create a riverside trail connecting Sweet Home and the western end of the Santiam Wagon Road, east of Cascadia. That would connect Sweet Home with, essentially, Clear Lake and points beyond, through existing trails systems, for hikers, bikers and equestrians.
Kanaroff said last week that a memorandum of agreement has been signed with the Corps of Engineers for work around Foster Lake and the National Parks Service is working on specific plans for the trail in that area.
“We haven’t made as much progress this year as we’ve hoped, but getting that memorandum of agreement with the Corps is really a positive state because it validates the plan we are creating and also lets us work on the spur up towards Menear’s Bend,” she said.
Work on the trail may actually begin after the first of the year, she said.
At a meeting on Friday, Dec. 18, USFS representatives told the board that the agency is working on plans to thin and harvest certain areas of an approximately seven-mile stretch of forest along the South Santiam River.
Ken Loree, who supervises timber sales in the Sweet Home Ranger District, said the proposal includes a variety of projects aimed at increasing forest health where overgrowth subjects trees to fire and disease, and clearing some hardwood stands where conifers did not re-establish themselves after logging in the 1950s.
He and Nikki Swanson, a USFS fisheries biologist, said the projects would also aim to create habitat and grazing for big game in the area, improve conditions for fish, create fire breaks to protect neighboring private forests owned by Giustina and Roseboro, and the land managed by Cascade Timber Consulting.
“It’s a timber project but it does a lot of other things as well,” Swanson said.
They emphasized that work would be performed by local contractors and with buy-in from the community.
“It’s a great way to do work,” she said. “Local people doing the work and a local collaborative group behind it.”
Preparation for the project involving the public would include field trips and public meetings, including review of the work done in the Cool Soda area east of Trout Creek in recent years.
The Trout Creek proposal includes some potentially controversial elements because some of it would take place in adaptive management areas that protect spotted owl habitat in old growth forests.
“This is a controversial, frankly, expensive project,” said District Ranger Cindy Glick, adding that Forest Service personnel are hoping for help with it from Oregon State University, which can contribute crucial research to support the proposed activities.
“This one has to go hand-in-hand with OSU.”
Currently, the Sweet Home Ranger District produces approximately 8 million board feet per year of the 70 million board feet typically harvested in the Willamette National Forest, she said. Forest officials would like to increase that total to 80 million board feet to provide “shelf stock” and funding necessary to pursue projects such as Trout Creek.
“That (additional) 10 percent would be shelf stock,” Loree said.
Swanson said a slow pace on the Trout Creek proposal would be advantageous because it would give forest officials time to work through issues.
“It would give us time to build shelf stock while we do the footwork on Trout Creek to reduce controversy,” she said. “The concept on very controversial projects is how to bring people together to try to solve these problems in the manner that you want and reduce litigation in the long run.”