Wasatch-Cache National Forest says it made mistakes in its official forest plan issued in 1985, so it will drastically cut the number of trees it will allow sawmills to harvest through fiscal 1995.
Under the original Land and Resource Management Plan, issued in 1985, the forest envisioned offering more than 14.6 million board feet per year. It never actually sold that much; the peak was 14 million board feet in fiscal 1989, while the lowest level was 8.6 million in fiscal 1990.The Forest Service now says it will offer an average of less than 7.5 million board feet yearly for next four years. After that, a new forest plan will be written.
The proposed changes have been discussed for months, drawing fire from Wyoming's two U.S. senators.
The changes become official in a document intended to supply a midcourse correction to the original plan, called the "Five Year Monitoring Report," issued June 1.
The reduction could have "a big impact on the Kamas area," said Jack Sergent of Sergent Timber, based in Oakley, Summit County. Oakley is about five miles north of Kamas.
"There are a lot of people dependent upon the timber industry in this area," he said. "It's a trickle-down effect. There are families involved. There are probably 100 kids that eat off my sawmill."
According to Sergent, the change may not have a huge effect on him directly, because he harvests trees on private land, no longer using Forest Service timber areas. If he had been forced to depend strictly on the public forest, "I'd have been out of business years ago," he said.
"We've been forced to log basically on private ground, because of the decisions of the forests," he said.
Because of restrictions already in the Kamas Ranger District of Wasatch-Cache National Forest, he said, most of the mills in the Kamas area are harvesting timber from Uinta National Forest.
Dick Kline, public affairs officer for the forest, headquartered in Salt Lake City, said timber mills that could be affected by the change are in Evanston, Wyo., and the Kamas area.
"In essence, we do recognize in that monitoring report that there were some procedural as well as inventory errors" in the 1985 plan. "The bottom line is, that is now resulting in a lesser offering of timber."
Some timber companies have been briefed about the change, he said. "Obviously, they're not pleased with it because it does mean they'll have to find various other types of timber."
Timber cutters will have to look outside Wasatch-Cache National Forest, possibly to Uinta, Bridger-Teton and Ashley national forests. A longer haul to the timber mill will drive up costs of operations.
According to the monitoring report, methods for calculating the amount of timber available were incorrect. Also, in some situations, the predictions of timber growth were over-optimistic.
The report says, "As the forest plan has been implemented we've encountered some areas where some on-the-ground reality has not agreed with assumptions made in the forest plan."
Wrong assumptions were made about high-elevation spruce stands, the monitoring report adds. The forest plan expected that stands could be harvested in two or three stages, with growth occurring between timber cuts.
"We have found that while waiting for new trees to grow back in these overmature stands, many of the residual trees left unharvested die," says the report.
Another inaccuracy in the original plan was mathematical: The Forest Service erred in its formula for converting cubic feet of timber into board feet. And the plan's methodology was wrong, resulting "actually counting the same trees as both dead and live" in some cases.
Also, Kline said regeneration predictions turned out to be incorrect.
"That's just another factor that led to lesser volume being available (for cutting)," he said. "We're not getting that regrowth, either through natural or artificial reforestation that we'd like to see. . . . We're trying to grow timber on some pretty tough country."