State Resource Panel Adopts Forest Plan

A controversial 80-year plan for managing a state-trust forest was unanimously adopted Tuesday by the state Board of Natural Resources.

“Normally, we don’t bring individual forest plans to the board,” Public Lands Commissioner Jennifer Belcher said.

“This one, as you know, is unique.”

That’s because the department’s management of the 134,000-acre Loomis State Forest has been criticized by a coalition of agencies that use forest timber-sale revenues to build prisons, government buildings and schools and universities.

The plan “will make a lot of money for the State School Trust over the years,” Art Stearns, deputy supervisor of Belcher’s Department of Natural Resources, told the board. “We believe it will position the trust very well for the long term.”

A Chelan County judge last week denied a request by Okanogan County and 15 school districts that he force the state to step up logging of insect-damaged areas of the Loomis in north-central Washington, the state’s largest trust forest.

The “landscape” plan adopted Tuesday calls for more logging, but not enough to satisfy the counties and schools that want immediate payoffs, Stearns said. It also calls for more new roads and resource protection.

The plan, which has been the subject of recent public hearings, calls for harvests of a total of 100 million board feet of timber over the first five years, followed by harvests of an additional 70 million board feet over the next five years.

The Loomis State Forest stretches from the Cascade mountains east to the Okanogan Valley and north to the Canadian border. It is considered important habitat for the rare grizzly bear and gray wolf, 222 kinds of birds and the North American lynx.