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59 °F Forecast | Road Cams Saturday, May 7, 2005 Today's News | Shop Our Valley | Tempo | Health | Community | Home Delivery | Contact Us SECTIONS Home Page Local News Sports Business Obituaries Life Opinion Tempo AP News Weather Classified Archives Site Map SPECIAL SECTIONS Since We Asked Outdoor Journal Menu Guide How To Guide Health Readers' Choice Real Estate Showcase Real Estate Guide Joy Magazine Homelife Magazine Wedding Guide Passport to the Rogue Valley SHOP OUR VALLEY AutoFinder HomeFinder JobFinder Classified Place an ad TOP JOBS EXTRA Ashland News NIE Personals Movie Times TV Times E The People Volunteer Moving here? eSouthernOregon CUSTOMER SERVICE FAQ's Advertise with us Home Delivery Employment Contact Us Media Kit Oregon Road Conditions & Cams Email Story to a Friend May 7, 2005 Aaron Foster of Corvallis cuts limbs from marketable logs being removed from the Penny Stew project. The project is designed to improve forest health while providing local employment. Mail Tribune / Roy Musitelli Thick and thin In the midst of the troubled Scattered Apples site, hints of compromise By PAUL FATTIG Mail Tribune WILLIAMS — Peace in these woods sounds like a swarm of angry giant hornets. But it’s only worker bees like Ashland resident Nick Cicero, 30, wielding chainsaws with 20-inch bars as they buzz their way through the doghair thicket in the center of the U.S. Bureau of Land Management’s Penny Stew project. "I feel passionately about this work — it’s not just a paycheck," said Cicero, who works for the Lomakatsi Restoration Project based in Ashland. "We’re restoring forest health," he added. "We’re not just out here extracting a product and leaving the forest in worse condition." The 100-acre project itself is smack dab in the middle of the controversial Scattered Apples timber sale. While BLM officials have described Scattered Apples as commercial thinning to reduce fire hazard and improve forest health, environmental activists say the 3.7-million-board-foot sale will accomplish neither. Advertisement That sale has ended up in court with participants currently in the midst of court-ordered mediation. But participants have largely found common ground in Penny Stew. Officials and activists alike describe the work that began this past week to remove brush and harvest small-diameter trees as an effort to reduce wildfire hazard and improve forest health while providing local employment. "If the agencies did more projects like this, and they are able to financially pan out, it would be a win-win," observed Marko Bey, director of Lomakatsi, which focuses on forest restoration. "If we stopped cutting the big trees and started focusing on stuff like this, there would be a lot of support," he continued. "Projects would move forward. More timber would be coming out." About two dozen people, all from within the region, are employed on the project. Penny Stew is in two units, including the roughly 40-acre unit now being thinned. The 60-acre adjacent site will be done next year. The project is the result of groups such as the Williams Creek Watershed Council and Lomakatsi working with the BLM to come up with a project supported by the lion’s share of participants. BLM officials note that stewardship projects were always part of what they call the Scattered Apples landscape plan when it was originally proposed in 1996. They weren’t given authority to issue stewardship contracts by Congress until 2003. Stewardship contracts get the fuels-reduction job done while saving taxpayer dollars, officials said. Basically, it’s a goods-for-service exchange that allows community groups to harvest and sell merchantable material that most commercial timber firms would not find cost effective to harvest. "For a number of years, we’ve been looking at lands that are kind of marginal, that don't fit easily into fuels treatment, silviculture or timber sale programs," explained Terry Fairbanks, the BLM’s supervisory forester on the project. "When the authority for stewardship contracting came along, we knew this would be a good opportunity," she said. The thinning work in Penny Stew will reduce forest fuels that should keep wildfires on the ground and out of the canopy, she said. Thinning out the small vegetation — much of the material is six to eight inches in diameter with some only 1.5 inches in diameter — will improve forest health, she said. "The end result will reduce the cost of treatment," Fairbanks said. "If we are going to create a landscape where fire can go through without destroying the whole thing, then we are going to have to do some sort of treatment in places like this." But there are thousands of acres in the wildland urban interface that need the work, she said. In fact, the Williams area is one of 26 rural communities in the BLM’s Medford District listed as at-risk for summer wildfires. "We can barely afford to treat them," she said. "But if we can remove some merchantable material, sell it to the community, that reduces the cost of the treatment." The agency has estimated there will be about $20,000 in material from Penny Stew. Total cost for the work is roughly $90,000. "We will still have a forest here when it’s done," she said. "All the components are still here. It’s still growing. "Fuels treatment is the first step," she added. "Perhaps in southwest Oregon we can become a community that understands the role of fire and use it as a tool." A century of fighting wildfires has left local forests unnaturally overstocked, said Oshana Catranides, grant writer for Lomakatsi. "We are returning it to that resiliency so that fire can return," she said. "This is historically a pine- oak ecosystem habitat. The work being done here is being done with an ecological concern. The products are results, the byproduct of the restoration of the habitat." Joseph Vaile, a biologist with the Cascade-Siskiyou Wildlands Center, one of the plaintiffs in the Scattered Apples lawsuit, is impressed with the work, both from the BLM and the community. "This is a perfect example of where the BLM should be focusing its energies — near rural communities," he said. Penny Stew is seen as a model to determine if the market is there for smaller products, said Jim Berge, special forest products forester for the BLM’s Grants Pass Resource Area. "In the old timber sale scenario, you’d want enough volume to come out of your unit where it would offset other work you’d be doing out there," he said. "This is one where the value a contractor from this would get would not pay for the labor." But the potential to create a market niche for small-diameter products while collaborating with the community boosts Penny Stew’s face value, he noted. At a nearby sorting yard, 10 workers employed with drawknives are peeling the bark from the green logs. With a grant from Sustainable Northwest, Lomakatsi is hoping to market the poles, small logs and other materials harvested from Penny Stew. A price list will be placed on its Web site at www.lomakatsi.org . Said Justin Cullumbine, utilization coordinator for Lomakatsi, "This is stuff that over the years has been thrown into piles and burned. We think there is a market for it as well as jobs." Reach reporter Paul Fattig at 776-4496 or e-mail him at [email protected] Mail Tribune Home | Local News | Sports | Business | Obituaries | Life | Opinion AP News | Archives | Site Map | Community | Classified Copyright © 1997-2005 Mail Tribune, Inc. All rights reserved. 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