House GOP wants to increase logging on state land

In their budget proposal released last month, the Michigan House Republicans propose increasing the sale of timber from state forest land by 50 percent, which they claim will yield $25 million in additional revenue for the state. They also recommend transferring responsibility for timber sales from the Dept. of Natural Resources and Environment to the Dept. of Agriculture. Under this arrangement trees will be treated as an agricultural product and logging companies will be exempt from the state business tax.

Marvin Roberson, forest ecologist with the Michigan Chapter of the Sierra Club, bluntly called the proposal “a gift to industry and a load of crap.”

Roberson said the plan would actually reduce state revenue.

“Nobody is running out of wood these days,” he said. “Putting that much more timber up for sale is not going to increase sales but it will decrease prices.”

The move would also decrease revenues for private land owners that want to sell their trees, he said, and it wouldn’t create any new jobs because there is no increase demand for wood.

According to the House GOP increased harvesting is acceptable because, “The state’s forest cover has increased by 7 percent since 1980, largely due to the fact that the annual growth of forest is 2.7 times the amount harvested.”

Roberson said that this figure is meaningless because most of the timber in the state is privately owned and not available for harvest.

“DNRE is already required to put up 63,000 acres for sale each year,” Roberson said. “Michigan is the only state in the nation that requires that a number of acres be offered to loggers each year.”

Increasing that level he said, “would absolutely jeopardize the state forests sustainability certification.”

The DNRE seems to agree.

“We do not believe it is feasible to increase timber production to the level suggested in the document,“ Lynne Boyd, chief of the DNRE Forest Management Division, said in a emailed statement. “It is not a sustainable volume for production from State owned forested lands and would cause significant conflicts with other uses of the forests, such as recreation programs, hunting and wildlife habitat management.”

Republicans say that shifting responsibility for conducting state timber sales to the Dept. of Agriculture will reduce costs by 10 to 15 percent, or approximately $4 million.

The plan is to have the Dept. of Agriculture subcontract out the work of marketing the timber sales.

Roy Mattson, executive director of the Delta Conservation District, and a member of the legislative committee for the Michigan Association of Conservation Districts, said that the MACD supports the idea of moving timber sales to the DoA.

Conservation Districts are local units of government established under the environmental stewardship division of the Dept. of Agriculture. They receive no state funding and raise their own funds through grants and services.

According to Mattson, because the employees of conservation districts are not unionized, the groups could could carry out timber sales at a fraction of the cost of the Dept. of Natural Resources and Environment.

“We figured we could do it at one third the cost of DNR,” he said.

Under current state policy before offering a piece of state forest for timber harvest, foresters with the DNRE survey the area and work with fish and wildlife experts to come up with a management plan that is subject to public review.

It is unclear what role state environmental officials and the public would have in the plan proposed by the House Republicans.