The regional forest supervisor with the United States Forest Service issued a final decision on the Wrangell Island timber sale project on Monday.
Addressing a number of objections to the project as it was proposed last year, the scope of the sale approved by the Tongass National Forest supervisor’s office in Ketchikan will be but a fraction of what it had been.
Among five alternatives presented, it was Alternative 2 which the USFS opted for. Of the plans, it had the greatest amounts of acreage and timber deemed to be sustainably
harvested, at 55.8 million board feet (mmbf) over 4,767 acres. Following a draft decision to this effect made public in July, five objections were lodged by members of the public, industry and environmental groups, and the City and Borough of Wrangell.
Those objections varied in nature, including one
which sought greater public access to logging roads during the project. As a nod to that, the final sale package would leave just over a mile of one indicated road open to the public, and includes the construction or reconditioning of 3.7 miles of permanent federal road and 2.6 miles of temporary roads on the island.
Other objections regarded the economic viability of the project, which when coupled with ecological considerations led to the reduced scope
of the project. In his announcement Monday, Tongass Supervisor Earl Stewart decided only 428 acres from the Alternative 2 model would be included in the sale, yielding between 5 and 7 mmbf of timber over a 10-year timeframe. The selected parcels would include the 25 “most economical
timber harvest units” from the alternative.
“I am deferring the remaining harvest units in Alternative 2 pending additional analysis in the future to determine if any options exist to improve timber sale economics and/or address other concerns identified in the objections,” he wrote.
The decision was not a surprise, being indicated in a response to those objections issued by the USFS late last month. However, the city had been disappointed with the decision. Early on in the process, Wrangell had been hopeful for a larger sale to be devised, in the hundreds of millions of board feet rather than a single-digit percentage of that.
“It will have a very minimal impact on anything,” explained Wrangell’s economic development director, Carol Rushmore. The scope of the project as it now stands would be enough to
sustain what remains of the local timber industry, but not allow it to grow.
The sale itself is still some time
from occurring. The USFS will need to inventory the identified acreage and assess its value before it can go out to a bid process, and only then if values come out in a net positive.
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