Daines: Chemistry of Congress may be ripe for timber reform

One thousand more jobs, that’s what Montana Sen. Steve Daines is hoping to realize for the state through timber and legal reforms in the coming year.

Daines held a roundtable discussion last week with 15 members of the logging, local government and conservation community at the F.H. Stoltze Land and Lumber offices in Columbia Falls.

The new jobs would come from increasing the state’s timber harvest by 100 million board feet, the freshman Republican senator said.

“There’s a great opportunity to pass meaningful timber reform this year,” Daines told the panel. The chemistry of Congress favors Montana with Congressman Ryan Zinke, a Republican in the Republican-controlled House and along with Daines and Democratic Sen. Jon Tester in the Senate.

The effort has to be bipartisan, Daines said.

“It will take the entire Montana delegation being on the same page,” he said.

Daines said he’d like to see legislation that increases the timber harvest through collaborative efforts with local stakeholders, like mill owners, forest users and even wilderness advocates.

Tester said he was willing to work with his Montana counterpart in the Senate.

“I appreciate Senator Daines working on this issue. As Montana continues to face milder winters, the need to responsibly manage our forests and reduce wildfire threats becomes even more urgent,” he said. “Any forest management bill must start from the ground up and have input from conservationists, the timber industry, sportsmen and women, and impacted local communities.”

The idea of conservationists and loggers working together would have been unthinkable a decade ago, but now the two seem willing to work together, as they discover that they both rely on the same landscape for their living.

“We’ve got to get away from pitting wilderness against management,” said Lincoln County Commissioner Mark Peck. “I don’t think wilderness is the enemy.”

Scott Brennan, the state director of the Wilderness Society, said they’ve learned that working with the timber industry can be mutually beneficial.

“We realized neither of us were getting what we wanted from our national forests,” he said. Tester’s Forest Jobs and Recreation Act, for example, blended mandated harvest targets with new wilderness designations.

Daines said he wants a more comprehensive piece of legislation than Tester’s bill — one that encompasses all 10 of Montana’s national forests.

Lawsuits, however, are a problem.

“The enemy is the serial litigation that’s allowed to go on,” Peck said. Lincoln County has 2.2 million acres of National Forests, yet it has no working sawmill, Peck said.

Daines said one solution is to reform the Equal Access to Justice Act, by requiring groups who want to challenge a sale to post a bond.

Mill employees said it’s a tough work environment at the moment. The warm weather has caused an early breakup, meaning the log supply will get even tighter than it is because loggers can’t get into the woods in the mud. They’ll have to take three to four months off until the ground dries.

Loren Rose, chief operating officer for Pyramid Lumber in Seeley Lake said his mill is already looking at layoffs in early March because of the tight log supply.

All the mill owners said they could use more logs. Stoltze general manager Chuck Roady said the mill is running at about 70 percent. Tom Ray, vice president at Plum Creek said they were importing logs from Canada. The Evergreen mill is running one shift and uses about 22 million board feet a year. If added two shifts, it could use an additional 40 million board feet. Roady said Stoltze’s mills could use an additional 15 million board feet and Rose said Pyramid could use 20 million more annually.

Stoltze millworker Jeff Mills said the jobs are important to the community and the uncertainty of the timber supply is difficult.

“There’s not a lot of opportunity for people who don’t have massive degrees behind there names,” he said.

Another new and potentially key player in the future timber supply is well known in the conservation community.

Last year the Nature Conservancy sold 11.8 million board feet of timber to western Montana mills. The nonprofit land conservation organization owns about 165,000 acres — primarily in the Swan River Valley, after buying the land from Plum Creek in recent years.

Last year the Conservancy paid $4.35 million to logging contractors and $432,611 to foresters, Mary Hollow, government relations director for the Conservancy said. The logging operations alone provided about 30 jobs.

The Conservancy bought the lands to preserve them from future housing development and subdivision, but it also promotes sustainable land uses, like forest management. It is now the second largest landowner in Western Montana.

But timber harvest on federal lands has lagged behind. At its peak, the statewide harvest on federal lands was about 624 million board feet. By 2013 it was down to 113 million.

“This is a problem that went further than it needed to go,” said former Secretary of State Bob Brown. He called the issue “ripe for compromise.”

Daines was also holding the roundtables in Missoula and in Bozeman.