RESTORATION WORK – Father Herman Belt keeps an eye on Lincoln Street traffic this morning as workers use a Snorkel Lift to pull rotten pieces of trim from the facade of St. Michael’s Cathedral. Several pieces recently had fallen off the cathedral, which dates to 1976, causing concerns about other pieces possibly falling off and hitting pedestrians. Belt says the plan is to fabricate new wooden trim and properly flash it. East bound traffic was diverted up American Street during today’s work. Contractors may close the street again Wednesday morning. (Sentinel Photo by James Poulson)
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Daily Sitka Sentinel
Forest Service Chief, Murkowski Talk in SE
By The Associated Press
and Sentinel Staff
The head of the U.S. Forest Service visited Alaska’s Tongass National Forest earlier this month at the request of Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski.
Murkowski was host to Forest Service Chief Vicki Christiansen during her July 6-7 visit, with a visit to Prince of Wales Island and stops at Wrangell and Ketchikan. The visit was not publicized in advance.
The Republican senator questioned Christiansen about the agency’s Southeast Alaska timber sales during budget hearings in May and the two agreed to tour the area together. Another area of interest for Murkowski is a timber swap between the Alaska Mental Health Trust land office and the Forest Service, which will make Tongass timber available to the Southeast timber industry, represented by the Viking Lumber mill on Prince of Wales Island.
Christiansen told Murkowski the issue of providing timber for industry was a challenge, and she was willing to visit Alaska to “roll up our sleeves and really look at this.”
The Forest Service did not receive any bids in a sale of Tongass old-growth timber that ended in June.
The visiting group from Washington spoke with invited Tongass stakeholders about the Trump administration-backed initiative to craft an Alaska-specific exemption from the 2001 Roadless Rule that would allow logging in more undeveloped parts of the forest.
The Forest Service is expected to hold public hearings on a draft environmental impact statement for an Alaska-specific Roadless Rule later this year.
Christiansen was receptive to concerns over timber supplies for commercial logging, said Frank Roppel of Wrangell. Roppel was an executive of Alaska Pulp Corp., which operated a pulp mill in Sitka and a sawmill in Wrangell before going out of business in the 1990s.
“We were encouraged that there’s some interest and willingness to try and help the industry,” said Roppel, who was one of those who spoke at the gathering in Wrangell.
Tribal leaders in Ketchikan offered the visitors a different perspective.
“We prefer that there is no change in the forest plan and I think most of the tribes are going that way,” said Ronald Leighton, president of the Organized Village of Kasaan.
In Sitka, Andrew Thoms, executive director of the Sitka Conservation Society, said he was surprised to learn that Murkowski and Christiansen had come and gone with so little notice, since he and others had asked for a meeting with the senator.
“It was a big surprise. No one heard about it until after the fact,” he said. “There’s been a lot of concern about the Roadless Rule.”
Thoms said a trip to Sitka and public meetings would have been in order to give Murkowski and Christiansen a more balanced view on the relative importance of old-growth logging as compared to other uses of the forest.
“If the senator is listening to people that worked in timber in the pulp mill days, that’s a failed model,” he said. “We need to have perspectives from younger Alaskans who have a stake in the future, rather than people trying to replicate some subsidized program of the past.”
Thoms said the focus of the visit on timber shows the current administration’s lack of interest in other management programs, and in favor of “keeping the Viking Lumber mill going at the expense of future forest management in Southeast Alaska.”
“With the timber sales the Forest Service has offered and the Mental Health timber there’s plenty for the next 10 years for Viking Lumber – that gets us through the transition period,” Thoms said. “Does Viking want to transition into sustainable forestry or keep logging till there’s none left? If the timber policy is going to be defined by people in their 80s who are retired from the pulp mill days they probably don’t have an interest in long-term forest management and talking about what comes next for the future. Nor do they care about concerns of the tribes.”
Thoms said the current trend by lawmakers seems to be to “scapegoat the Roadless Rule.”
“It’s easy to scapegoat the Roadless Rule for all of our problems,” he said. “The problem is much greater than that. We need our lawmakers to dive into the root causes instead of scapegoating. ... The high costs and lack of markets are the real problems we need to overcome.”
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20 YEARS AGO
April 2004
Photo caption: Sitka High students in the guitar music class gather in the hall before the school’s spring concert. The concert was dedicated to music instructor Brad Howey, who taught more than 1,000 Sitka High students from 1993 to 2004. From left are Kristina Bidwell, Rachel Ulrich, Mitch Rusk, Nicholas Mitchell, Eris Weis and Joey Metz.
50 YEARS AGO
April 1974
The Fair Deal Association of Sealaska shareholders selected Nelson Frank as their candidate for the Sealaska Board of Directors at the ANB Hall Thursday.