Congressional stalemate puts logging on pause – Stockton Record
March 10, 2011 12:00 AM
SONORA – The National Christmas Tree will be harvested from the Stanislaus National Forest this year, but don’t expect local loggers to be overjoyed.
The national fame from cutting that not-yet-chosen tree does little to compensate for the fact that neither the harvest of saw logs nor contracts to thin small trees and undergrowth are likely to put many people back to work this year.
More than 40 loggers, truckers, mill operators and others connected to the local forest industry got the bad news Wednesday during the annual timber operators meeting with forest officials at Stanislaus National Forest headquarters in Sonora.
The congressional stalemate over spending is part of the problem, Stanislaus Forest supervisor Susan Skalski said.
“Probably the best single word I can use right now to describe our budget is ‘uncertainty,’ ” Skalski said, noting that six months into the federal government’s fiscal year, she still doesn’t know how much she will be allocated to thin overgrown and fire-prone forests.
“It is not at the same level we were at last year at this time,” Skalski said of contracts the forest is awarding for thinning.
It should be a much better time for forestry workers and logging businesses. Not only is Sierra Pacific Industries expected within a few months to reopen its newly retooled mill in Standard near Sonora, but forest officials want to aggressively thin tree stands that are now in danger of burning in catastrophic wildfires.
Skalski and other officials presented a list of more than 5,000 acres of logging or thinning contracts they’d like to award this year. With the budget Skalski estimates she has, she can plan to do only about 2,000 acres.
Rick Martin of Tom Martin Logging in Sonora was one of those at the meeting. “We’re just surviving,” Martin said of the family business his father started in the early 1960s.
“We’ve done a little bit of biomass (thinning), and that’s it in two years,” Martin said. “There’s so many areas that need (thinning),” he said.
The one possible bright spot within the Stanislaus is the north edge of the forest, where Calaveras County officials, loggers and environmentalists teamed up several years ago. They trained a work force of forest-thinning crews and did the studies needed to get federal funding for forest-thinning projects.
Skalski said those projects in the West Point area are the first within the Stanislaus to allow forest restoration on a large scale and the first such to qualify for at least some federal funding.
She said a proposal to do more thinning around West Point is now being reviewed by the secretary of agriculture. If approved, it could bring funding to the Stanislaus.
She said forest staffers are beginning to plan for similar efforts in areas in Tuolumne County that were damaged by the Stanislaus Complex fires of 1987. That fire burned 145,980 acres and was the 12th largest in California history, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.
“Those forests all need treatment now. Otherwise we are facing a reburn,” Skalski said.
Meanwhile, Stanislaus officials are also worried that the failure to carry out proposed projects will hurt the viability of the soon-to-reopen mill in Standard, which SPI retooled so the mill could process smaller-diameter saw logs.
“Industries like SPI trying to reopen their mill could use all the help they can get,” said forest spokesman Jerry Snyder. Snyder said it is a setback not to be able to do all the projects forest staff have proposed.
Contact reporter Dana M. Nichols at (209) 607-1361 or dnichols@recordnet.com. Visit his blog at recordnet.com/calaverasblog.
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