Forest Service Lawlessness on the
Payette National Forest, Idaho

By Erik Ryberg

In unveiling their "Healthy Forest Initiative" the Bush Administration claimed that "vital projects are often significantly delayed and constrained by procedural delays and litigation" (Healthy Forests: An Initiative for Wildfire Prevention and Stronger Communities, page 13).

As a supposed "case in point," the Bush Administration highlighted the Payette National Forest in Idaho:

"The Payette National Forest in Idaho reports that every thinning project or timber sale is appealed and litigated. Seven cases currently are in litigation"
(Healthy Forests: An Initiative for Wildfire Prevention and Stronger Communities, page 14).

The following account from Erik Ryberg - who has been monitoring timber sales on the Payette National Forest since 1992 - will expose the shocking level of Forest Service lawlessness on the Payette National Forest and clearly reveal the justifiable reasons these timber sales are being appealed and litigated.

(Erik Ryberg is with the Payette Forest Watch and Idaho Sporting Congress. Mr. Ryberg has been monitoring Forest Service timber sales since 1989 and monitoring the Payette National Forest since 1992. He may be contacted at in Moscow, Idaho at (208) 883-8074 or ryberg@seanet.com.)

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Chief among the opposition to Payette National Forest (NF) logging projects is not the environmentalists, but sportsman and the Idaho Department of Fish and Game. (IDF&G). The IDF&G no longer stocks the Weiser River with fish because those fish die from lethal stream temperatures generated by logging in the Payette National Forest headwater streams.

The IDF&G raised loud opposition to a large current logging project on the Payette NF - the West-Pine Brownlee timber sale - because the timber sale would remove some of the last elk cover in the area.

IDF&G has had to reduce elk hunting permits and stated in a letter to the Forest Service "The data clearly show elk numbers have declined and are below objectives for total bulls and cows [in the southern portion of the Payette NF]. We need elk hiding cover restored to previous timber harvest units before progressing with more logging."

Concerning the Little Weiser timber sale - also a current timber sale on the Payette NF - the IDF&G stated: "The amount of road construction and timber harvest of the proposed actions will most likely result in the end of general bull elk hunting in [the area] and would have a domino effect on adjacent units as well."

We appealed both of these sales. We settled the appeal on West Brownlee timber sale in exchange for the Payette NF's agreement to withdraw logging plans in the areas IDF&G complained of - which were also in a roadless area. We appealed the Little Weiser timber sale and are now litigating the Little Weiser timber sale.

As for fish, the Payette NF has no better a reputation than it does for elk. We found a copy of a list of proposed timber sales on the Payette NF that had "Sell before bull trout listing," written next to the sales that occur in bull trout habitat. The Payette National Forest wanted to be sure to get these timber sales "out the door" before the bull trout were listed as an endangered species under the Endangered Species Act.

At least four times in the past ten years the Forest Service has authorized logging projects in roadless areas without acknowledging they were in roadless areas. The Mill Creek, Arrowhead Springs, Cottonwood Springs, and Brown's Creek timber sales all occurred in roadless areas, but the Forest Service did not acknowledge this. We successfully appealed all of these timber sales.

The Payette NF likes to call its logging projects "salvage" timber sales but frequently cannot justify this. Every single "salvage" timber sale the Payette NF issued under the 1995 Salvage Rider (I believe there were nine of them) had to be withdrawn when Secretary Dan Glickman modified the direction to mean that the sales had to include a genuine salvage component. All of these projects had to be re-issued by the Payette National Forest as green timber sales, since that's what they were.

The Payette NF has often started out with a "salvage" timber sale but then - at the logging industry's urging - amended the project afterward to include valuable green trees for logging.

For example, entire green units were added to the Fall Creek "salvage" timber sale in 1996 after the timber purchaser complained that their foresters thought more green trees should be cut. What started out as a genuine thinning project turned into a very profitable traditional logging operation for the logging industry.

The Payette NF also modified its Salvage Rider sales to permit logging huge green ponderosa pine trees that it had promised the public it would leave as future snags. But the logging industry complained to the Payette National Forest about not being able to cut these huge, green ponderosa pines, and so in early 1996 the Payette National Forest authorized them to be logged.

Finally, the Payette National Forest added large green tree units to its roadless "salvage" timber sales in July of 1996, allegedly to pay for slash removal from the earlier timber sales. The Payette NF claimed the unit comprised of trees that - though green - would soon die. The Payette NF later acknowledged that only about 50% of the trees would have died, and expressed its regret…but too late as they were already logged.

Just 70 days after Chief Dombeck announced to Congress and the national media that the Forest Service would no longer target roadless areas for future timber sales, the Payette NF scheduled 19 sales in roadless areas.

But when environmental groups requested a list of previous sales that had occurred in roadless areas, the Payette Forest neglected to mention ten of the thirteen roadless sales that had occurred in the past ten years.

The Payette Forest disguises old-growth logging as "salvage" logging. We sued them when we discovered that the District Ranger had forged old-growth survey sheets in the Wolf Rock timber sale. These survey sheets had been completed by wildlife technicians in the field but did not show what the Payette NF administrators wanted them to show, so they scratched out the numbers and changed them to suit their needs and justify more old growth logging.

Also, the Fourmile timber sale - labeled a "salvage" sale and designed to protect against fire - indicates the "desired condition" of old growth to be 20%, the current condition to be 19%, and the condition after the logging is completed to be 13%.

In the nearby Hard-Hazard logging project the Payette NF modified the stream buffers to permit more logging of valuable trees. The Payette NF realizes that they can't appease the logging industry with thinning and undergrowth removal - they need to give the logging industry the big trees. So that's what the Forest Service does under the guise of thinning and salvage.

The Idaho Statesman newspaper did a study on road obliteration and found that in Idaho approximately two miles of road were obliterated for every mile constructed. But on the Payette NF nearly six miles of road were built for every mile obliterated in the same time period. When we asked the Forest Service to identify where the roads were that were obliterated, the Payette NF could not do so. They spent $75,000 on road obliteration, but could not identify where those roads were!

The Payette NF was identified in the General Accounting Office (GAO) report on taxpayer costs to the logging program as the number one money loser in Region One - with about $16.5 million lost in the three-year period studied. It also had the biggest yearly loss, about $7.2 million.

An good illustration of this is the Camp Creek timber sale, which even the Forest Service admitted would lose about $7,000. The Forest Service also admitted that no proposed logging alternative would meet wildlife or water quality concerns for that project.

These examples of blatant lawlessness by the Forest Service are the reason that all timber sales on the Payette National Forest in Idaho over the past eight years have been appealed, and many have been litigated.

Again, for more information, contact Erik Ryberg of Payette Forest Watch and Idaho Sporting Congress at (208) 883-8074 or ryberg@seanet.com.