WA - Collaboration With CNF Generates Millions For Economy

The Northeast Washington Forestry Coalition has released a new fact sheet that highlights the economic benefits their collaboration with the Colville National Forest and the local timber industry bring to the tri-county area

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Collaboration With CNF Generates Millions For Economy

Wednesday, 13 May 2009

Job creation, economic development among top priorities for Coalition

With employment opportunities and the economy top on nearly everyones mind, the Northeast Washington Forestry Coalition, a group that includes timber businesses, foresters, conservationists, and other citizens, has released a new fact sheet that highlights the economic benefits their collaboration with the Colville National Forest (CNF) and the local timber industry bring to the tri-county area.

The fact sheet, which is available on the coalitions web site at http://www.newforestrycoalition.org/, outlines the important role the Coalitions collaboration with local Forest Service officials plays in maintaining and creating jobs and local mill and other timber industry infrastructure in the tri-county area.

"The Local timber industry spends over $200 million in the Tri-county annually, said Coalition President Lloyd McGee. All of that economic activity supports thousands of jobs and businesses and has a huge impact on the entire community whether you have anything to do with timber industry or not.

Over the past six years, the Coalition has brought together the timber and conservation community and Forest Service staff to collaborate on over 22 projects and to find solutions to forest management problems on the CNF.

Despite these successes, the economic downturn has created potentially devastating challenges for the local timber industry and has put our regions exceptionally unique milling infrastructure in jeopardy.

Not only are the timber industry and thousands of jobs in northeast Washington at risk by the downturn in the economy and housing market, added McGee, but addressing significant forest health and hazardous fuel priorities on private and public land may not be economically feasible if we lose the local infrastructure to treat those problems.

According to McGee, the Coalition is the only group that has brought together the right participants to work with the Forest Service and develop supportable projects that maintains and even increases the timber flow off the CNF. The depressed timber market has limited the availability of logs from private lands.

Without the proactive attitude of Forest Supervisor Brazell and his staff to collaborate with the Coalition to keep logs coming off the CNF, we might be seeing more mills going out of business and more people losing their jobs, pointed out McGee.

Forested lands make up approximately 80 percent of Ferry County, 92 percent of Pend Oreille County, and 83 percent of Stevens County and the regions six sawmills, a plywood mill, paper mill, and a state-of-the-art green energy producing facility, are vital for the future management of private, state, and federal forest lands.

In addition to helping to maintain critical industry infrastructure, the Coalitions collaboration with the Forest Service has supported thousands of jobs in our communities. An estimated 12 jobs are created for every million board feet (MMBF) of timber harvested according to an economic analysis completed by Headwater Economics for the Coalition in June 2007.

The Coalition hopes to continue to increase the CNFs annual harvest rate beyond this years jump to 61 MMBF of harvest volume.

Currently, there are over 2,000 workers employed directly by the mills and in logging and trucking of raw materials in the tri-county area, said coalition Executive Director Claudia Michalke. And those jobs support hundreds of other businesses and families throughout the region. We cant pass up an opportunity to come together to maintain and hopefully create even more jobs.

With this years budget shortfalls, the CNF currently has a budget for only 30 MMBF annual harvest volume, which is a disappointing setback for the Coalition and the CNF staff. However, it has given the Coalition and the CNF another opportunity to work together to find innovative ways to get the volume back up closer to last years 61 MMBF level.

Valuable additional jobs created

The Coalition is pursuing grant funding opportunities and has requested 1.5 million from the USFS under Title VII to hire local private contractors and consultants to create a large-scale turn-key harvest project on the CNF, This proposed project would be at least 50,000 acres in size.

If funded, the proposed turn-key project will be in addition to on-going USFS projects and will be selected based on forest health problems and risk of catastrophic wildfire as assessed by county wildfire protection plans.

The proposed project will create valuable additional jobs and supply much needed material to our local timber companies. We would like eventually to see a project of this magnitude happen in each of Stevens, Ferry and Pend Oreille Countys. The CNF is working closely with the Coalition and doing everything they can to make this happen. Everyone seems to realize that we all need to stick together in these tough times and not let funding challenges keep us from moving these large scale projects forward.

The Healthy Forest Restoration Act, passed by Congress in 2002, requires National Forests to collaborate whenever projects designed under those authorities are proposed. Over the past six years, the Coalition has helped implement that law by bringing interested participants together to find forest management solutions on the CNF, while operating on a shoestring budget, an all-volunteer board, and a part-time Executive Director.

According to the groups fact sheet, the Coalition board members, including representatives from Vaagen Brothers Lumber, Avista, Conservation Northwest, Columbia Cedar, The Lands Council, and Ponderay Newsprint, represent nearly 100 years of conservation experience and over 250 years of professional forestry experience. It also notes that the Coalition donates over 2,300 hours of volunteer labor annually in the field, at meetings, and working on several committees for the betterment of our forests and communities.

Click here for Northeast Washington Forestry Coalition Fact Sheet

Additional Information

Web Site: http://www.statesmanexaminer.com/content/view/11035/60/

Category: Forestry>Industry Press Releases

Region: Washington

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