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Sweet Home On-Line (SHOL) - Sweet Home, Oregon USA - www.sweet-home.or.us
"Save a Logger
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"Save an Owl
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Northern Spotted Owl -- Caught in
the Middle
A SHOL K-12 Education Site
The federal government sharply restricts logging in a 2,000-acre radius around known spotted owl nests, requires that at least 500 acres of the largest trees in that zone be left uncut and prohibits logging within 70 acres of a nest.
By Ron Schaleger
New 1998 Northern Spotted Owl Suit filed in Sweet Home
against Oregon Forestry Department
Karen's Ride - A K-12 science case
study
For many years the Willamette National Forest produced and sold more sawlogs than any other national forest. The loggers and mill workers in Sweet Home had plenty of work and family wage jobs.
Then, everything changed. Harvest technologies, mill high tech equipment, spotted owl closures, all combined to cut off a steady stream of logs.
The nearly 200,000 acre Sweet Home Ranger District -- one district of the vast Willamette National Forest -- in the 1980s annually produced 86 million board feet of timber. By 1992, the height of the Northern Spotted Owl controversy, the district produced only 100,000 board feet. In 1997, district officials predict selling 12.7 million board feet.
As one observer noted, the logging trucks in the 1990s no longer passed bumper to bumper down Sweet Home's Main Street.
Men showed up for work at the mills and went home early -- with pink slips. Timber dependent small family-owned businesses closed their doors.
Men, needing to support their families, moved elsewhere, to find family-wage jobs. The handwriting was on the wall. The local timber industry no longer offered jobs to high school youth dropouts, nor provided work for those not versed in modern computer technology. Sweet Home's family life and community were rapidly changing.
Many former mill workers and loggers, when possible, retrained for other jobs. The other jobs all too often proved to be entry level, minimum wage jobs. Men could not support their families on such jobs. They lost their houses -- for some, their homes and family life. The Sweet Home community rallied to the displaced workers' needs through the Sweet Home Emergency Ministries (SHEM) and other local helping organizations.
In 1988, the timber industry generated an actual $12.7 million for Linn County.
In 1996, the timber industry generated only $2.1 million for Linn County. The US tax payer paid almost $5.3 million as an additional "owl guarantee" to supplement the Linn County's treasury.
County, city and local government agencies lost timber dollars. They then raised property taxes to try to keep essential operations functioning.
Property taxes around the state and in Linn County increased proportionately as timber income went down. Oregon voters passed Measure 5, which limited property taxes to $15.00 per $1,000. Ten dollars would be earmarked for local governments, five dollars for public schools.
Assessors raised the value of property, taxes again went up. Voters passed Measure 41 reducing property taxes further.
The Sweet Home School District at one time received a significant amount of its annual budget from "stumpage" - sale of logs cut from area timber lands.
In 1984, when our family first moved to Sweet Home, then Superintendent Gerald Bennett, bragged about how Sweet Home School District 55 was funded mostly through taxes on "stumpage" -- the money the timber industry paid to the US Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management (BLM) or state, for cutting trees off federal and state timber lands. Sweet Home property tax payers paid relatively low yearly property tax to support the local public school system.
Sweet Home School District funding has changed from the forest industry paying 60 percent, plus local property taxes earmarked for schools in 1988, to The State of Oregon funding 62 percent of the 1997 school budget.
The local school board has essentially lost control of the school district to the state level which funds the Oregon education system and makes the rules.
The City of Sweet Home does not get a significant portion of its annual operating budget from timber dollars. The general fallout from Measures 5 and 41 affects the city's serial levies for public safety and the city library
The Northern Spotted Owl controversy has, according to Cascade Timber Consulting, Inc. President Larry Blem, caused numerous lumber and timber mill closures in the Northwest due to lack of raw material (logs) available from federal and state timber lands.
Cascade Timber Consulting, Inc., manages thousands of acres of private timber land in and around the Sweet Home, Oregon, community.
Mill closures have resulted in less competition for private timber "stumpage" -- logs cut and sold from timber lands.
The price for logs from private lands has lowered, adversely affecting the income of private forest timber land owners.
Sweet Home in 1989 joined with Mill City, Oregon, the first Community for a Great Oregon, to work together to inform the public about the timber crisis caused by listing the Northern Spotted Owl as an endangered species.
The controversy erupted over the Northern Spotted Owl and its listing as an endangered species. The Endangered Species Act of 1973 prohibited "significant habitat modification or degradation." This resulted in closing federal and state timber lands to logging.
"Loggers and mill owners were suffering under federal and state timber land closures," recalled Jean Reynolds, a member of Sweet Home Communities for Great Oregon.
"Our purpose was to present the loggers' and mill owners' side of the environmental crisis, to educate the public and let people know what was really going on with the timber issues," said Reynolds.
The Communitis for a Great Oregon adopted the symbol of the yellow ribbon and eventually formed the "Yellow Ribbon Coalition."
On June 14, 1991, Sweet Home for Communities for Great Oregon filed suit in the US District Court of Columbia against Manual Lujan, Secretary of the Interior, and John Turner, Director of the US Fish and Wildlife Service.
The suit finally went to the US Supreme Court during the court's October 1994 term as Babbitt versus Sweet Home.
The supreme court handed down its ruling against Sweet Home on June 29, 1995.
The US Supreme Court's decision in
the Babbitt versus Sweet Home case:
Babbitt v. Sweet Home Chapt. Comms. for Ore., 63
U.S.L.W. 4665 (1995).
Docket 94-859 -- Decided June 29, 1995
The Forest Service has funded many projects in the Sweet Home community to help relieve the impact of changing federal forest timber harvest practices. Through the Rural Community Assistance program, thousands of dollars have funneled into community investment projects to "create a more diverse and sustainable future for Pacific Northwest communities."
Foster Lake Marina Access Road
Downtown Revitalization
Downtown Improvements
Economic Development Project
Fiberoptics Feasibility Study
Commercial District Development
Tourism Coalition Projects Start
Community citizens asked the Rural Development Initiatives, Inc. (RDI) for help to create a strategic plan for developing Sweet Home's economy.
SHEDG has over two hundred members. Yearly membership dues are $1.00. SHEDG is a private non-profit 501c6 corporation governed by a nine member Board of Directors. SHEDG has representation from the City of Sweet Home, the Sweet Home Chamber of Commerce and the Sweet Home Business Association, as well as many other community organizations, businesses and community members.
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Oregon Jamboree
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Rural Development Initiatives, Inc. (RDI), has been providing technical assistance to SHEDG with their Revitalization Project implementation. RDI has also provided leadership training to three SHEDG members through the Rural Futures Forum (RFF) leadership program. SHEDG's RFF graduates, with the assistance of RDI, facilitated SHEDG's development of a Vision and a new Strategic Plan for Sweet Home. This Strategic Plan was developed during five planning sessions from October, 1993 through January 1994.
An Oregon Supreme Court decision on a Boise Cascade Corp. suite brought against the state 4/12/97, coupled with the US Supreme Court decision in March of 1997, in favor of farmers in the Klamath River basin in Southern Oregon, has private timber land owners optimistic that the environmental issue pendulum over the spotted owl and other "indicator" species, is beginning to swing toward moderation and recognizing human needs as well.
In a US private timber land grab, "The government has never before gone to court using the Endangered Species Act to stop harvesting on private land," said a timber industry attorney.
US Forest Service and State of
Oregon Forestry have changed timber land emphasis from
consumption to conservation.
Management of both Federal and state forest timber
lands has shifted from lumber production to
environmental protection.
The results are that some of the best forest production
lands in the nation and in the State of Oregon, have
been declared off-limits to timber harvesting.
US Forest Service
Ex-US Forest chief Jack Ward Thomas urges reverence for Earth
The most critical issue that members of the class of 1997 will face in their life time will revolve around natural resources, said Jack Ward Thomas. Thomas is the retired chief of the US Forest Service (from December 1993 - November 1996). He gave the commencement address May 3, 1997, at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, as reported by the Oregonian 5/5/97.
"As humans we must exploit natural resources," said Thomas, who retired in November. "The issue is not if, but how. We are part of the land, not apart of it. We are not masters of the land, but we have the power to alter it."
In his retirement statement, October 10, 1996, Thomas said, "In the last three years, we have taken ecosystem management forward nationwide, integrated science into management decisions, brought about a cultural change, diversified the Agency's leadership, and set the Course To The Future for the Forest Service.
"It has been a privilege to have represented the Forest Service. Among its ranks are some of the most dedicated conservationists I have ever met. Forest Service employees are true Conservation Leaders."
Current US Forest goals conflict, says GAO report
"The Forest Service's decision making process is
clearly broken and in need of repair," the General
Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress,
said in a report.
The Forest Service has increasingly shifted its
emphasis from consumption to conservation as it
established management plans for individual national
forests over the past 10 years, the audit said.
"The increasing emphasis on sustaining wildlife and
fish conflicts with the older emphasis on producing
timber, and underlies the Forest Service's inability to
achieve the goals and objectives for timber production
set forth in many of the first forest plans," the GAO
said.
Oregon State Forestry lands
These state lands, in terms of timber production,
are some of the world's best, blessed with mild winters
and huge amounts of rainfall. And much of the acreage
is just reaching minimum size for harvest.
Their proposal covers more than 600,000 acres of
northwest and western state forests, including the:
Tillamook and Clatsop at the Portland area's back door.
It seeks a balance between profiting from the acreage's
timber and safeguarding the forests' rich array of fish
and wildlife.
Sweet Home's Future
Please see also
Perhaps one of the strangest email requests for information that we have yet received was recently sent to Sweet Home On-Line (SHOL) for the City of Sweet Home. The person asked: "[is there] an organization devoted to the conservation of the Northern Spotted Owl?"
To try to find an answer, SHOL sent this request to various major Oregon newspapers as well as the "hot beds" of extremism on both sides of the issue.
No one who used the owl to close down logging on national and state forest lands, admitted that they had a specific love for the cute little bird and wanted to preserve it for the bird's own sake.
When Cascade Wood Products Inc. imported Radiata pine to make porch posts 10 years ago, managers of the White City mill considered the wood a novelty item. Little did they know that a decade later, they would rely on the Chilean pine for three-quarters of their production. As its timber dwindles, the Northwest becomes just another stop in global wood production.
Meanwhile, the battle rages on in state court over harvesting on private timber lands.
New 1998 Northern Spotted Owl Suit filed in Sweet Home against Forestry Department
Alvin and Marsha Seiber of Sweet Home have sued the Oregon State Department of Forestry (ODF) in Linn County Circuit Court in April of 1998, seeking unspecified compensation for land that they say the state will not allow them to log.
For Sweet Home timber interests, this may be the most important legal action since Sweet Home lost its case taken to the US Supreme Court in Babbitt versus Sweet Home on June 14, 1991.
Sweet Home On-Line (SHOL) interviewd the Seibers and their attorney.
The ODF claims 41 acres of Seibers' land is home to "a pair" of northern spotted owls, said the Seibers who want to regain the use of their land "taken" by the owl. "We are suing to make our land better for timber production," said Marsha Seiber. Now the Seibers can do nothing on the "owl" set aside acreage.
Seibers' attorney, Phillip Chasdsey of Portland, states his client's case: For Alvin ad Marsha Seiber, it's a 5th Ammendment issue, which they say deprives them of the use of their land without "just comensation."
The Oregon Small Woodlands Association on August 20, 1998, joined the Sweet Home couples' suit against the Oregon State Department of Forestry, for taking their private timber land for use by the northern spotted owl. The association asked the court to certify the case to become a class action suit on behalf of all timber land owners.
Chadsey successfully brought Boise Cascade's suit against the Oregon Department of Forestry last year. In that suit, Boise Cascade won payment for loss of property value due to the state "taking" the company's land for owl use.
Karen's Ride - A K-12 science case study
By Paul Chilson (Based on information from Sweet
Home On-Line).
This story may be used to get
students to think critically about science issues
swirling around the Northern Spotted Owl issue. Chilson
authored the case study as part of his series focusing
on environmental issues around the world.
"I have also decided to focus on the loggers and the
forests for my North American case studies, " wrote
Chilson. "Would you mind if I were to use information I
found on your web page in writing these case studies?
You did such a fine job in presenting the information
and I would like to use some of the figures you
documented and possibly base my story around your
town."
You are Invited to Explore Sweet Home, Oregon USA
This is the Karl Loren Happiness On Line Web Site Karl Promises To Answer Any Personal Message, Personally.
