Forest Service would let big logger-turned-builder turn logging roads into streets for subdivisions

"The Bush administration is preparing to ease the way for the nation's largest private landowner to convert hundreds of thousands of acres of mountain forestland to residential subdivisions" by granting greater rights to cross national-forest property and turn logging roads into residential avenues, Karl Vick reports for The Washington Post. "Local officials were stunned and outraged . . . The deal was struck behind closed doors between Mark E. Rey, the former timber lobbyist who oversees the U.S. Forest Service, and Plum Creek Timber Co., a former logging company turned real estate investment trust that is building homes."

Jennifer McKee of The Missoulian reported last week, "At issue are decades-old agreements Plum Creek has with the Forest Service that allow the timber company to drive across federal land to log its own property." McKee's story reported that Democratic U.S. Sen. Jon Tester had asked the service's parent agency, the Agriculture Department, to block the deal until the two years of Rey's private negotiations with Plum Creek can be investigated. Rey has said he expects to conclude the deal in August.

"Forest Service lawyers leveraged promises from Plum Creek to moderate the impact, including mandating 'fire-wise' measures to reduce the danger from summer wildfires," Vick writes. "Under the new agreement, logging roads running into areas controlled by Plum Creek could be paved -- and would thrum with the traffic of eight to 12 vehicle trips per day to and from each home," according to Missoula County official Pat O'Herren.

The county "is threatening to sue the Forest Service for forgoing environmental assessments and other procedures that would have given the public a voice in the matter," Vick reports. "County officials say their objection is not to change, which traditionally rural jurisdictions have struggled to manage, but to being blindsided by Rey's announcement of a far-reaching change negotiated in secret. Plum Creek owns 57 percent of Missoula County's private land, a posture that under state law gives it veto power over any zoning." It owns 1.2 million acres in western Montana and 8 million nationwide.

The deal "threatens to dramatically accelerate trends already transforming the region," Vick writes. "Plum Creek's shift from logging to real estate reflects a broader shift in the Western economy, from one long grounded in the industrial-scale extraction of natural resources to one based on accommodating the new residents who have made the region the fastest-growing in the nation. Environmentalists, to their surprise, found that timber and mining were easier on the countryside." Most of the new homes "are the second, third or even fourth homes of wealthy newcomers who have transformed the local economy -- 40 percent of income in Missoula County is now 'unearned,' from, say, dividends -- and typically visit only in the summer." Vick interviewed one, a hedge-fund partner who expressed dismay that the valley where he built has "almost become kind of a housing subdivision."

Some locals are dismayed, too. "A clear-cut will grow back, but a subdivision of trophy homes, that's going to be that way forever," Ray Rasker, executive director of Headwaters Economics, a nonprofit group that focuses on Western land management, told Vick. Melanie Parker, executive director of the environmental group Northwest Connections, told him, "For us, this is kind of an arterial bleed, and we're either going to get a handle on it or not." But Larry Swanson, director of the O'Connor Center for the Rocky Mountain West at the University of Montana, tells Vick, "It's a pretty straightforward proposition: The region's economy is moving from extraction to amenities." (Read more)

Amid the controversy, Plum Creek, the Nature Conservancy and the Trust for Public Land announced the groups would pay the company $510 million for about 500 square miles of forest, much of it abutting and connecting wilderness areas, to keep the land from being developed, Kirk Johnson reported for The New York Times. The cost will be split between private donations and the U.S. government, "under a new tax-credit bond mechanism" that Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., added to the Farm Bill. On its Web page about the deal, the Nature conservancy called it "one of the most significant conservation sales in history." (New York Times map)