Daily Sitka Sentinel

Wildfire Bill Attacks Co-op Tongass Plan

By Sentinel Staff

Sen. Lisa Murkowki held a hearing in Washington last Thursday on a bill to increase and stabilize federal funding for fighting wildfires, but halfway through the hearing took a sudden turn to focus on her opposition to work under way in Alaska to update the Tongass Land Management Plan.

Murkowski is chairman of the Senate Committee on Environment and Natural Resources. The Alaska Republican said her “Wildfire Budgeting, Response and Forest Management Act of 2016” is intended “to end the destructive practice of ‘fire borrowing,’” in which agencies take money from non-fire accounts to fund firefighting.

Murkowski’s draft would provide a budget cap adjustment that the government could tap if the cost of fires exceeds a 10-year rolling average.

“People across the country are realizing that wildfires are a growing crisis,” Murkowski said. “Alaskans, in particular, know how devastating wildfires can be. About half of the 10 million acres that burned last year were in my home state, and we have already seen over 200 more fires this season alone.”

Her proposal has support from Democratic senators Ron Wyden of Oregon and Maria Cantwell of Washington.

But Robert Bonnie, undersecretary for Natural Resources and Environment in the Department of Agriculture, testified that the Obama administration believes Murkowski’s draft is not environmentally sound and doesn’t solve the Forest Service’s bigger budget problem – the rising cost of wildfires, which consume more than half the agency’s budget.

Bonnie said Murkowski’s draft attacks the budget transfers but doesn’t address the rising 10-year average, meaning the agency would continue struggling to fund forest management and other programs.

Another part of Murkowski’s wildfire bill addresses a separate issue, the transition of the Tongass Land Management Plan to a second-growth timber harvest. The bill would put the revision on hold for an indefinite period, until a nationwide inventory of young-growth timber is completed. In the meantime, the Southeast Alaska timber industry would continue to be based on old-growth.

Murkowski clashed with Bonnie on that issue also. Bonnie has been working for the past two years with a project in which the U.S. Forest Service is collaborating with a broad-based coalition, the Alaska Timber Advisory Committee, to prepare the way for the second-growth transition.

An inventory of second-growth timber is currently under way in Southeast Alaska in a cooperative venture funded jointly by the State of Alaska and the Forest Service. 

“The level of the inventory that I think you’re talking about is unnecessary for us to arrive at a decision on planning,” Bonnie told Murkowski at Thursday’s hearing.

But Murkowski countered that Bonnie’s position seemed to contradict the TAC, which she said has called forest inventory a top priority that modeling can’t replace.

“I’m really stunned by that level of a statement,” Murkowski said about Bonnie’s comments, and asked, “Are you going against the TAC recommendation?”

Bonnie denied that assertion. The inventory under way is “very much in keeping with what the TAC has asked,” he said.

The Senate hearing was streamed live on the Internet, and immediately afterward Andrew Thom, executive director of the Sitka Conservation Society and a member of the TAC, gave his own reaction. He objected that Murkowski, in justifying her call for an extensive inventory that would delay the transition plan, had cited the TAC’s Jan. 21 work group report to support her position.

“She used this out of context and didn’t cite the rest of the paragraph,” Thom said in a statement to the Sentinel. “The TAC actually recommended the Forest Service enter into a partnership with the State of Alaska to put State Division of Forestry staff on the job of doing the inventory and train other Southeast Alaskans from rural communities to do the work.

“The Forest Service and the State of Alaska did an amazing job putting together that agreement and currently have crews out on the ground right now doing inventory work on all the 55-year-old and older stands of young growth which will likely be the young growth timber sales that are offered over the next 10 years.

“There was a robust program for workforce development that trained locals from Prince of Wales communities to do the work. I am very confused on how the Senator can spin a process that is successful that we should be celebrating and turn it into a barrier to progress. This is the exact kind of thing that has made so many Americans extremely frustrated with our Congress right now.”

The only Alaskan Murkowski invited to testify at her Washington hearing on the wildfire and forest management bill was Eric Nichols, a partner in Alcan Forest Products, which operates a large sawmill on Prince of Wales Island. Nichols is a member of the TAC, but testified at the hearing in favor of Murkowski’s plan to hold off on a young-growth forest management plan, citing uncertainties that he sees in young growth inventories that could potentially be fatal to the forest products industry in Southeast Alaska.