Redd Bull tour gives opportunity for group input

Tricon Timber hosted a meeting about Redd Bull on July 18 in St. Regis. The event was to give an update of issues impacting federal forest management and to take a field tour of the project area.

Travis Joseph, president of the American Forest Resource Council, and Tom Partin, with TDP Consulting, joined several agency members and local business leaders to discuss issues their organization is working on at the national, regional and forest level and how those could benefit the products industry in Region 1.

Mineral County is unique because of its strong coalition group, and many of the audience members were coalition members. It consists of individuals who represent different economic aspects of the county, including local, state and federal agencies such as the Department of Natural Resources, the U.S. Forest Service, local schools, county commissioners, state officials and local businesses like Tricon.

“It’s good to have these different economic groups get together,” said Partin. “The one thing they all have in common is that it’s good to manage the federal forests. That determines not only the health of the forest but the health of the communities, counties and obviously, employment.”

It wasn’t lost on the group that now, as wildfires burn in and around the county, know it’s vitally important to get into the forests and thin them out.

“If you really care about sustainability and the long-term health of the forest system, forest resiliency, climate change, drought, and disease and how you respond to those issues, this is the best way to go.” Joseph said. “Our business model is based on having forests forever. We have very serious risks to our public lands and we would like to work with diverse people to figure out what are their environmental priorities and how do we work together to achieve that common ground.”

More than 40 people packed the St. Regis Community Center on Tuesday morning, drinking coffee and snacking on doughnuts. This gave them the opportunity to visit informally before taking the Redd Bull tour.

“This is a huge project,” said Tricon President Ken Verley of the nearly 90,000-acre project. “There’s a potential for 300 million board feet of timber which could be 10 years [of work] on a one-shift basis. We won’t make that much but maybe we can get 100 million out of it.”

The project is located south and west of St. Regis in Dry, Little Joe, Two-Mile, and Ward Creek areas. There have been a few other public meetings and tours with recreational and other components suggested for the proposal.

For example, Kevin Chamberlain, who used to be the Montana State University Extension Agent, said in a previous meeting that a 40-year plan should be considered, “with this cycle, it would make the area sustainable. It would also require stewardship, thinning and trail maintenance.”

Other ideas are to develop the rockslide area and Moore Lake into recreation areas.

Verley said that he appreciates all the work the local Forest Service and District Ranger Carole Johnson has done to keep the forward-momentum going. On this tour, they saw proposed timber harvest areas, prescribed burning, roads and replanting.

“One of the reasons for this is that we can look at it during the planning stages before it’s actually implemented. We would like to see this project treat a lot of acres and this is a good template for moving forward on other projects,” Partin said.

The benefit of having all these agencies meet is that it gives the different type of groups the opportunity to have their input. For example, counties have the opportunity to receive more receipts back from their timber dollars. It also gives the Forest Service the chance to see how important the timber dollars are to the local communities.

Joseph said his organization is working at the national level to get more funding from timber and that it takes efforts from all levels to move projects like this forward.

“In the past the different groups did their own thing and provided their input on a case-by-case basis. When you bring everybody together and have a larger group, you have better momentum and it really presents a unified vision to the forest on how important forest management is and a variety of perspectives is very positive,” he said.

The Forest Service is looking at this large landscape and, oftentimes, they’ll come out with a scoping proposal and after that is when the various groups would get involved. But with this effort, it’s looked at even before scoping. There are hopes that this will help to peel back some layers of bureaucracy and give everybody more of a voice to what should happen.

“The Forest Service is listening and providing some input back and we’re learning from them the rules and regulations they have to live with as well. So it’s really a two-way street,” he said.

A serious issue that these projects face is litigation from environmental groups.

“We reach out to those groups and talk to them about the issues. But at the end of the day, they have tools at their disposal that we don’t have and that’s objections and litigation. So, if we can’t come to an agreement, it just takes one person to say “nope, this isn’t something that I can support” and we end up in the court room. And that’s really frustrating,” said Joseph.

Cooperation is what’s lacking right now and Joseph points out that this isn’t a political but rather a community issue,

“We should be able to work together because we have a lot of the same moral objectives,” Joseph added.

Nick Smith, executive director of Healthy Forests, Healthy Communities, commented that there are moderate conservation groups, like the Nature Conservancy, that look hard at the science and they understand what active forest management is and that the forest products infrastructure is needed to do the landscape scale forest restoration,

“And so you do see those groups come to the table. It’s those handful of groups to the far left who don’t participate, who are more ideologically driven, and who just sit back and file their objections and lawsuits. That’s what’s so effective to stymie the forest health projects. It’s important to understand the environmental groups who want to be part of the solution and those who are ideologically driven and don’t want human beings in the forest,” Smith said.

Part of the American Forest Resource Council’s job is to get involved, provide input and then follow the process through to the end. They also have a legal team and if the project gets litigated they go to court and protect their members.

One piece of important legislation currently circulating through the U.S. House and Senate is Bill 2936, which includes several policy tools designed to make projects like Redd Bull more efficient and helps to expedite the process and hopefully cut down on litigation.