Forest Service develops ‘sustained yield’ aimed at propping up Montana’s flagging timber industry

After the U.S. Forest Service unveiled a proposal last month to give Montana’s lumber industry a “predictable” timber supply from three national forests, questions about the agency’s plan to incorporate an 82-year-old law into a modern forest-management framework abounded.

Broadly speaking, the Tri-Forest Federal Sustained Yield Unit would direct the Helena-Lewis and Clark, Beaverhead-Deerlodge and Custer Gallatin national forests to supply local businesses with at least 35 million board feet of timber per year. The Forest Service is pitching the proposal as a tool to sustain local economies and encourage investment in the lumber industry for the 22-county region included in the unit. It’s necessary, the agency says, because the closure of the Pyramid Mountain Lumber sawmill in Seeley Lake and the shuttering of the Roseburg Wood Products facility in Missoula have demonstrated the industry’s vulnerability.

But at a recent hearing the Forest Service hosted in Helena, the proposal drew a mixed reception. Some commenters offered tentative support, tempered with skepticism that the agency will meet its established goals. Others voiced opposition to the overarching premise, arguing that logging shouldn’t take priority over other purposes national forests serve such as supporting wildlife habitat, providing the public with recreational access, and protecting healthy watersheds. Still others questioned whether a decades-old law that will limit competition for federal timber is the right tool to bolster Montana’s flagging logging industry.

Montana Free Press spoke with agency officials and local stakeholders to garner more information about the history of sustained yield units, how this one intersects with environmental laws, and what’s next for the Tri-Forest Federal Sustained Yield Unit. This is what we learned.

WHAT IS A SUSTAINED YIELD UNIT?

Congress passed the Sustained Yield Forest Management Act in 1944 to provide timber towns near national forests with a continuous supply of lumber. According to a recent policy analysis titled “Revisiting Sustained Yield Units,” the goal of the act was to give mills and timber-adjacent businesses enough raw material to stay economically viable while discouraging the “cut-and-run” approach timber barons used at the turn of the century.

This particular unit encompasses about 925,000 acres of national forest that has already been designated “timber emphasis land” on the Helena-Lewis and Clark, Beaverhead-Deerlodge and Custer Gallatin national forests. If all goes according to plan, at least 35 million board feet of sawlogs and other material felled from the 22-county area incorporated in the unit would be delivered and processed at facilities within the boundary each year. The proposal, outlined in a 12-page document, lists the 25 businesses incorporated in the unit. About half of them are mills; the other half includes fencing companies and construction businesses that work with the smaller-diameter material. According to Chelsea Pennick, the University of Idaho professor who authored “Revisiting Sustained Yield Units,” the framework has demonstrated shortcomings in the decades since the law that established it passed. Pennick wrote that the act gave the Forest Service considerable discretion to develop a sustained yield unit in pursuit of a larger “community stability” objective, but some clear tradeoffs emerged. Those include the “monopoly effect” they created and a reversal of the Forest Service historical orientation toward supporting competition and maximizing returns to the federal treasury. She also noted that development of sustained yield units stoked fears that private companies would have greater influence over national forest management.

HOW DOES A SUSTAINED YIELD UNIT DIFFER FROM THE STANDARD PROCESS FOR CONDUCTING A TIMBER SALE?

According to both the Forest Service and industry representatives, the proposal won’t dramatically change the volume of timber coming out of the three forests included in the unit. How timber is harvested won’t change significantly either, according to Nick Horn, Sun Mountain Lumber’s outreach forester. What will change is who is authorized to submit a bid in the initial timber sale and where the wood will go for processing.

The unit was drafted using areas that existing forest plans — overarching visions for managing a given forest to meet myriad objectives — designate as areas suitable for timber production. The agency said the proposal won’t authorize logging in wilderness areas or wilderness study areas, or pave the way for new roads to be built in established roadless areas — at least for the time being. (The federal government is in the process of revoking the roadless rule, so it’s unclear how long that will remain the case.)

Chiara Cipriano, a spokesperson for the Helena-Lewis and Clark National Forest wrote in an email to MTFP that the three forests incorporated in the sustained yield unit currently supply between 40 and 50 million board feet of commercial timber a year. Cipriano noted that figure is a portion of the timber that’s available on those three national forests.

Horn doesn’t anticipate that the unit will dramatically increase the supply of federal saw logs Sun Mountain processes at its mills in Deer Lodge and Livingston, 35-40% of which are currently sourced from the three forests included in the sustained yield unit. Putting more material from nearby national forests through Sun Mountain’s mills would require the agency to increase the volume companies like his can extract from federal forests, Horn said. Sun Mountain has expressed as much in its comments to the proposal, he said.

“We spoke with them and they’re having a hard time moving on that number,” he said, alluding to the agency’s commitment to the 35 million board-feet figure. “We’ll see when the final draft comes out.”

Horn also offered that Sun Mountain appreciates the agency’s intention, but stabilizing supply to help mills stay open — and fully staffed — requires other changes, including assurance that litigation or wildfire won’t derail planned timber sales and increased agency staffing to prepare units for bid.

WILL ENVIRONMENTAL REVIEWS CHANGE IF THE FOREST SERVICE MOVES FORWARD WITH THIS PROPOSAL?

The Forest Service insists it will comply with all applicable federal laws in its administration of the sustained yield unit. More specifically, the agency said the unit and the individual timber sales inside it will be managed in a manner consistent with the Endangered Species Act, the National Environmental Policy Act, the Clean Water Act, the National Historic Preservation Act and the Healthy Forest Restoration Act.

Two of those laws — the ESA and NEPA — have thwarted a number of logging projects across the state in recent decades. Often, lawsuits determining the fate of a logging project hinge on whether the Forest Service adequately analyzed and disclosed its impacts to wildlife habitat for threatened and endangered species such as grizzly bears and Canada lynx. The plan doesn’t specify how agency employees will take wildlife habitat into account in its application of the ESA and NEPA.

WHAT DO ENVIRONMENTALISTS SAY ABOUT THE PROPOSAL?

Environmental groups have expressed a range of views related to the Forest Service’s objective and strategy.

Hilary Eisen, federal policy director with the nonprofit Wild Montana, expressed cautious optimism that it will be a “big nothingburger.” In a recent conversation with MTFP, Eisen said it’s unlikely the unit will dramatically change the Forest Service’s process for extracting lumber from national forests in Montana. But it could lead the agency to prioritize the timber program over other objectives, she said.

“We also have all of the changes that are happening to NEPA, we have the repeal of the roadless rule, and executive and secretarial orders saying we’re under a timber emergency and we need to cut as many trees as possible,” she said. “This isn’t happening in a vacuum.”

Eisen added that sustained yield units have historically been used to support communities that lived and died by the health of the local logging industry. That’s not necessarily the case in central and southern Montana, she argued, adding that Headwaters Economics and other groups have demonstrated how public land supports the sizable economic footprint of the outdoor recreation industry.

Eisen says other economic development tools would be more appropriate to keep the logging industry viable in Montana, such as workforce-housing initiatives or cost-share grants to help companies buy new equipment or refurbish their existing infrastructure.

Other environmental groups are preparing for a high-impact outcome — one they don’t welcome. Alliance for the Wild Rockies wants the Forest Service to prepare an Environmental Impact Statement that takes a rigorous, holistic look at the proposal. Michael Garrity, Alliance for the Wild Rockies’ executive director, wrote in his comments to the proposal that he anticipates the proposal will have a “significant individual and cumulative impact” on environmental considerations such as wildlife habitat, water quality, climate resilience and the spread of noxious weeds.

Garrity has also long been skeptical of the agency’s claims that removing fuel from national forests will mitigate wildfire risk to communities located miles away. And he’s critical of the “forest health crisis” language that’s featured prominently in land managers’ support of logging, thinning and prescribed burning initiatives generally. (At the April 1 hearing, Emily Platt, forest supervisor for the Helena – Lewis and Clark National Forest, nodded in that direction, arguing that mill closures hamper the agency’s forest management objectives, which “in turn, affects forest health, wildfires, the safety of our communities and the safety of our firefighters.”)

Clint Nagel, president of Gallatin Wildlife Association, is concerned that the Forest Service will find a way to use the proposal to subvert NEPA. He also argues that history has shown that other benefits intact forests provide to federal land — watershed protection, for example — have been “corrupted by the timber industry.” He fears that will happen here, too.

WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?

According to Cipriano, there aren’t any regulatory mechanisms that will “increase or enforce program outputs” even if the agency decides to move forward with the proposal. She wrote that the unit is instead designed to “demonstrate the Forest Service’s long-term commitment to a sustainable supply of timber for local processing infrastructure.”

This is one of Horn’s critiques of the project. He described it as a “landscape-level directive” that’s “not enforceable by anyone.” Between wildfire and litigation, he said, a lot of variables exist that could keep the Forest Service from hitting its targets.

Cipriano said the Forest Service anticipates adopting a final decision on the proposal in the coming months.

If it authorizes the plan, the unit will remain in effect for 10 years. At the end of that 10-year period, the agency could dissolve the unit, make adjustments to it, or reauthorize it for another 10 years.

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This story was originally published by Montana Free Press and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.