Timber supply still issue for R&R Lumber
Cancellation of WOPR, Happy Camp sale of concern to Illinois Valley’s last mill
From our weekly issue dated October 28, 2009
U.S. Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar announced on Wednesday, Oct. 14 that the Bureau of Land Management will offer 230 million board feet (mbf) of timber this fiscal year in western Oregon.
Of that, some 21 mbf will be offered through BLM’s Medford District.
Salazar’s statement includes the promise that a plan to replace the Western Oregon Plan Revision (WOPR) will be completed in March. WOPR was part of the settlement to a lawsuit brought by the timber industry and other groups after passage of the 1994 Northwest Forest Management Plan, which placed restrictions on logging throughout the region.
However, WOPR was scuttled earlier this year amid protests from various environmental groups.
Link Phillippi, president of the Illinois Valley-based Rough & Ready Lumber Co., said that Salazar’s decision avoids the larger issue of providing a reliable timber supply to area firms.
“It becomes difficult to count on the federal government to come up with a program that has some certainty that we could operate a business around,” Phillippi said. “The certainty of some federal timber supply doesn’t have to be 100 percent of the supply, but some part of our fuel supply and log supply has to come off of the federal lands around us.
“If we can’t get that supply, our business has a more difficult time surviving.”
Rough & Ready currently is getting much of its timber from California, Phillippi said, between 200 and 250 miles from the company’s headquarters. Around 90 percent of its raw materials used to come from the immediate area, but that’s now down to less than 5 percent, he said.
“Affordable resource is critical to our business. That’s what makes our business go or not go,” Phillippi said. “It shouldn’t be this way. We should be saving energy and finding raw materials closer to home to be successful.
“That’s the way it used to be in the past. The source of our raw material was right in our backyard.”
On Aug. 20, the company purchased timber from a salvage sale in the Happy Camp area. But Phillippi said that the U.S. Forest Service pulled the sale the following day, after an appeal was filed by Ashland-based Klamath-Siskiyou Wildlands Project.
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The sale was for an area that had been scarred by fire in October 2008, Phillippi said, and may be repackaged by USFS and brought back to the market in a few weeks. That may be too late, he said, adding that the company will be unlikely to offer a bid.
“We could have salvaged it this year, and the wood would have been fine,” Phillippi said. “But two years after the fact is too late. The pine will stain. Bugs and stain are already working into the logs. That degrades the values.
“The longer you wait, the worse it gets,” he noted.
Phillippi added that it is unfortunate that the sale was canceled.
“There was very nice wood on it,” he said. “It’s wood that would have helped our business and helped the community. When you talk about jobs, economics and how bad the economy is in rural communities in Oregon, it would have been a real shot to the arm to us, our employees and our valley.
"To sell it, then throw it all away doesn’t make any sense to me.”
The global recession and a slumping housing market certainly have contributed to the timber industry’s woes throughout the past couple of years, as demand for timber products has dropped. However, Phillippi remains concerned that the long-term viability of the last few remaining mills could be threatened by federal policies that emphasize thinning projects at the expense of other harvesting alternatives.
“Thinning is fine,” he said. “It goes so far, but you can’t thin forests forever,
“I’m disappointed by the WOPR decision, but certainly, Salazar’s interim proposal is a short-term fix for the larger, longer-term problem of BLM timber harvest.”
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