McClintock talks with local forestry folks

U.S. Rep. Tom McClintock, R-Granite Bay, has been on a tear about the U.S. Forest Service. He has collected a “growing volume of complaints” from constituents in District 4 “protesting the increasingly exclusionary and elitist policies of this agency.”

Congressional District 4 includes all or part of nine counties from El Dorado north to the Oregon border. It encompasses the Eldorado, Tahoe, Plumas, Lassen and Modoc national forests.

As a member of the House Natural Resources Committee, the National Parks, Forests and Public Lands Subcommittee and the Water and Power Subcommittee in the Republican-dominated House of Representatives, McClintock is one of the conservative leaders dealing with natural resource issues.

He was elected to Congress in 2008, from District 4 in Northern California after serving 14 years in the California Assembly and eight years in the Senate. During his time in the California Legislature, he represented districts in Southern California, where his home was in Thousand Oaks.

Local members of the timber industry, who work closely with the U.S. Forest Service, invited McClintock to meet with them last week. They were seeking an opportunity to provide solutions for reform of the agency. He accepted..

On Thursday evening the Amador-El Dorado Forest Forum and the El Dorado/Mother Lode Chapter of Associated California Loggers jointly sponsored a dinner with McClintock. Originally set at the D’Agostini Ranch in Mt. Aukum, cold weather rescheduled the event to Three Forks Grange Hall in Somerset.

The grange hall was packed with approximately 150 people, from infants to white-haired retirees, some who came from around the corner and others from as far away as Humboldt County. They were timber operators, truckers, road builders, mill workers, forestry scientists, licensed foresters, consultants, legislative advocates, public relations professionals, U.S. Forest Service personnel, forestry organization leaders and many families.

After a down-home meal prepared by members of the D’Agostini family, Matt Waverly, from Sierra Pacific Industries, and president of the Amador-El Dorado Forest Forum, greeted the assembly. Among the attendees were the four district rangers on the Eldorado National Forest, the vice president of Associated California Loggers, El Dorado County Supervisors Ray Nutting and Jack Sweeney, and Placerville City Councilwoman Patti Borelli.

Robert D’Agostini Jr., second-generation owner of J and R Logging, and chair of the El Dorado/Mother Lode Chapter of Associated California Loggers, gave a picture of local forestry conditions. “We are growing 300 million board-feet a year in the Eldorado and Stanislaus national forests. We are harvesting 50 million board-feet. Twenty years ago, there were eight sawmills in El Dorado and Tuolumne counties. Now there are two. We’ve had three decades of bad publicity and failing public policy,” he said. He later pointed out that California imports timber from British Columbia, Washington and Oregon.

D’Agostini listed the three principles of the Associated California Loggers: 1) maintain healthy forests; 2) pass them on to the next generation; 3) be profitable.

He mentioned one ray of hope: Sierra Pacific is restarting a mill in Sonora and expressed the wish that the company could do the same in Camino.

Before McClintock began his prepared speech, he remarked that he was “bowled over by the attendance.” He said it used to be that local meetings were attended by around 15 people. “This [activism] is happening across the country.”

He started by saying that he estimated over 50 percent of the Fourth Congressional District is owned by the federal government, “and the problem, of course, is that the federal government is a lousy neighbor and a worse landlord.”

His list of complaints included:

• Imposing inflated fees that are forcing the abandonment of family cabins held for generations.

• Charging exorbitant new fees that are closing down long-established community events upon which many small and struggling mountain towns depend for tourism.

• Expelling longstanding grazing operations on specious grounds — causing damage both to the local economy and the federal government’s revenues.

• Obstructing the sound management of forests through a policy that can only be described as benign neglect, creating both severe fire danger and massive unemployment.

• Severe restrictions on vehicle access for such activities as collecting firewood, retrieving game, loading or unloading horses or other livestock, and camping.

• Forcing organizations to cancel longstanding events by charging exorbitant fees and/or pulling an approved permit.

He compared former and current forest management approaches: “A generation ago, we recognized the importance of proper wildlands management. We recognized that nothing is more devastating to the ecology of a forest than a forest fire. And we recognized that public lands should be managed for the benefit of the public. We recognized that in any living community — including forests — dense overpopulation is unhealthy.

“But that was before a radical ideology was introduced into public policy — that we should abandon our public lands to [animal] overpopulation, overgrowth, and in essence, benign neglect.”

He charged that the result is both environmentally and economically unsound.

"One victim of this wrong-headed policy is the environment itself. Recent forest fires throughout our region make a mockery of all of our clean-air regulations.

“These policies also carry a serious economic price. Timber is a renewable resource — if properly managed it is literally an inexhaustible source of prosperity. And yet, a region blessed with the most bountiful resource in the state has been rendered economically prostrate.”

McClintock talked about the Quincy Library Group and the model law that U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein and U.S. Rep. Wally Herger co-authored as a result of the consensus reached by the groups involved. The Forest Recovery Act “is being challenged and undermined by a constant stream of litigation from groups purporting to support the environment,” he said.  The lengthy delays have caused mills in Quincy, Camino and other places to collapse, he added.

McClintock said the actions of the U.S. Forest Service “evince a clear design to do the bidding of the radical greens, whose objective is to restore the environment to its pristine, prehistoric condition — it means closing the people’s forests to the people.”

He compared the situation to 13th century England, when King John took one-third of the land in southern England for his exclusive Royal Forest, one of the actions that led to the Magna Carta.

He reported that under Congressman Rob Bishop, of Utah, chairman of the Natural Resources Committee, the committee “is now engaged in a top-to-bottom review of the abuses by this increasingly unaccountable and elitist agency — and to take whatever actions are necessary to restore an attitude of consumer-friendly public service, which was Gifford Pinchot’s original vision and for which the U.S. Forest Service was once renowned and respected.”

He invited the local forestry people to join in his efforts.

“Your experiences with the Forest Service will be of great help in raising these issues in Washington,” he said.

McClintock listened to comments from the audience. The Quincy Library Group was praised and efforts to remove obstacles to implementing the Forest Recovery Act encouraged.

The forest rangers were also complimented for their work. There was widespread acknowledgment that local U.S. Forest Service decision-making has been disconnected and replaced by centralized control in Washington, D.C. A reform suggested by more than one is a return to reliance on the judgment and experience of professionals familiar with conditions in the forests.

Following McClintock’s visit, forestry leaders said they were pleased that he had visited with them, viewing the evening as the beginning of a dialog with their congressional representative.