Western Oregon Plan Revisions

Draft plan released, and its a whopper!

The BLM released its Draft Environmental Impact Statement for the "Western Oregon Plan Revisions (WOPR)" on August 10, 2007. The preferred alternative would increase logging of trees 200 years and older sevenfold over the next decade. Yes, you read that correctly, a 700 percent increase in logging Oregon's last old-growth forests!

Click here to read the Siskiyou Project's technical comments on the WOPR.

Click here to read the comments collectively provided by many environmental groups.

To learn more about the proposal and how you can help please visit our coalition website at Oregon Heritage Forests.

Below is the summary of an economic analysis by Rodger Brandt, a resident of southwestern Oregon.

Answering the Economic Questions Sidestepped by the WOPR

Summary

The Western Oregon Plan Revision (WOPR) states that the jobs this plan will create for the timber industry are expected to come at the expense of job and income loss in other sectors of the economy, and the greatest losses are expected to be in southern Oregon.

The authors of the WOPR side step giving any further details about these losses and this prompted effort to get these answers for myself so I could have an understanding of what these planners expect Oregon residents to sacrifice. The results of this research is  summarized below:

Most land owners in the O&C corridor will lose between $5,000-10,000 in property value. In Josephine County, the total loss of property value will be about 300 million, which represents as much as 30 million in lost revenue for real estate agents. For the average land owner, it will take about 70 years of so called O&C tax breaks to recover what will be lost in property value. Home owners are covering the cost of their own tax breaks.

Tourism jobs will be the hardest hit by the plan. The intense clear-cuts proposed by the WOPR, which the BLM describes as having no standing green vegetation that will create landscapes of distracting visual impacts, destroys the scenery that 50-70 percent of Americans travel to see. Travelers work hard for their vacation time and if a community doesn’t provide the experiences these traveler seek, then Oregon can expect 50-70 percent of its travelers will go to communities that provide these experiences, risking the loss of tourism revenues to another state. The loss of scenic landscapes is a disadvantage for Oregon communities who spend advertising money to attract and retain spending by travelers. Communities are put into a position of losing revenues worth millions of dollars and these lost revenues place tourist dependent businesses at risk. Lost revenues result in job loss and the potential value of jobs lost from tourism appears to be a straight-across trade for an equal value of jobs created in timber. The WOPR is a strategy of trade-offs, not job gains.

The prospect for jobs trade-offs is actually much worse. Timber jobs have experienced a steady decline over the past 20 years due to automation, mechanization, advances in technology, outsourcing to over sea mills, export of timber, and selling of private timber land to land developers. The WOPR projects it will create 3,600 timber jobs but these are unlikely to be sustainable due to automation and other factors. Ironically, the WOPR is actually facilitating a future of timber job loss by converting the forest into plantations that can be managed at all levels of the production cycle by mechanized equipment with one person doing the job of dozens.

The biggest concern for future job loss will be triggered by the eradication of forest values that attract small businesses, entrepreneurs, innovators, home-based telecommuters, retirees, and others who make significant contributions to a community’s economy and can live anywhere they want. Some authorities point to these jobs as the most promising financial foundation for rural communities in the emerging global economy. These people look for and move to communities that offer a high quality of life and bring with them the skills to create their own employment opportunities or small businesses that support jobs. The WOPR will eradicate the values these people seek and, hence, reduce Oregon’s ability to attract an economic sector that represents the future of rural communities in the emerging global economy. 

Many far-reaching economic objectives could be achieved on O&C lands with less cost to society by retaining and growing forest values that contribute to quality of life. This opens the door for using O&C lands to contribute to the economic stability of all industries, which is what the O&C Act directs the BLM to do, and can be accomplished while HARVESTING A SUSTAINABLE YIELD OF TIMBER. The BLM adamantly dodges the management objectives that benefit the greater number of Oregon residents for an objective that appears focused on making Oregon into the next corporate trophy. They have justified these objectives with a campaign of cut-and-paste distortion of law to obliterate those objectives in the O&C Acts that were written to benefit the economic stability of all Oregon industries, not just the timber industry.

The authors of the WOPR disregard the purposes of timber management given to them in the O&C Act and the resulting plan will launch these lands into a future of the lowest possible productivity at a great cost to Oregon residents in both monetary loss as well as freedom to pursue a future of their choosing. 

read the entire report...