PORT ANGELES — Members of the Clallam County Trust Lands Advisory Committee have been given a crash course in forest management.
Kyle Blum, state Department of Natural Resources deputy supervisor for state uplands, outlined the complexities of DNR management of Clallam County trust lands in a nearly four-hour meeting last Friday.
The presentation laid the groundwork for future meetings of the advisory committee in February and March.
The 20-member advisory committee was tasked by county commissioners to determine whether it makes sense for Clallam County to take back the management of 92,525 acres of revenue-producing forest trust lands.
If reconveyance is not recommended, the committee will look for ways to help DNR fulfill its trust mandate to the county and its citizens and junior taxing districts that rely on revenue from timber sales.
The elected Charter Review Commission voted 10-4 last summer to recommend the trust lands committee.
A motivating factor was arrearage — timber that DNR was supposed to sell but did not sell in the past decade.
On Feb. 19, DNR officials and a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service expert will brief the committee on the Forest Practices Act, DNR’s Habitat Conservation Plan, the federal Endangered Species Act and other environmental requirements.
“And then I’ll come back in March and talk about the sustainable harvest and how it’s constructed and what the numbers are and how we performed,” Blum told his fellow committee members Friday.
“And that will feed into a really good discussion about the arrearage and what it is.”
The committee will provide an interim report to county commissioners by April 15 and make its final recommendations by Dec. 31.
Members on the panel include representatives from the timber industry, environmental groups, political parties, local governments and junior taxing districts.
Clallam County’s forest trust lands generate revenue for state and local schools, county government, county roads, the Port of Port Angeles, emergency management services and local park, library, fire and hospital districts.
In 2014, timber sales generated $7.74 million for Clallam County trust beneficiaries, including $1.09 million for county roads, $1.05 million for general county government, $616,992 for local schools, $586,245 for fire districts, $460,754 for hospitals, $366,843 for libraries, $146,240 for the port, $101,837 for emergency management and $70,906 for parks, according to Blum’s statistics.
The remaining $3.25 million went to state school and maintenance and operations levies.
Since 1992, DNR has sold an average of about 20 million board feet of Clallam County timber, generating roughly $8 million in annual revenue.
“You can see this fluctuates quite a bit through time,” Blum said.
“There are a lot of explanations for a lot of different aspects of this.”
Tree thinning, or the selective removal of trees to provide more space for other trees to grow, has resulted in diminished returns in recent years.
“That’s tied back to a commitment we made under a settlement agreement, a legal settlement agreement,” Blum said.
DNR’s sustainable harvest calculation was sued by environmental groups a decade ago.
Under the terms of a 2007 settlement agreement, DNR agreed to do one acre of thinning for every one acre of regeneration harvest in the Olympic Experimental State Forest, which covers the West Ends of Clallam and Jefferson counties.
“We fell tremendously behind that one-to-one ratio because the recession hit and the price of wood declined dramatically and thinnings just would not pencil on the West End of the Peninsula,” Blum explained.
“So we were able to do some regeneration harvest but no thinning. And then here in the last few years we’ve had to make up a tremendous amount of thinning.”
DNR collects a 25 percent management fee on revenue generated from timber sales to covers its costs.
Direct costs include setting up timber sales, road design, environmental assessments, acquiring and granting access to trust lands, regulatory compliance monitoring, growing seedlings and replanting stands, pre-commercial thinnings, vegetation management, site lease administration, maintaining wells and water rights and conducting land transactions.
Indirect costs include human resources, information technology, facility maintenance and compliance with public disclosure laws, Blum said.
Management fees, which are set by the state Board of Natural Resources, fluctuate based on balance projections and changes in economic and market conditions.
“I hear a lot from folks about DNR’s management fee and that it is way, way higher than any private landowner that’s managing forest lands would take,” Blum said.
“I think as a general rule, DNR is not going to be as efficient in its land management as a private land owner. I’ll own that right up front. There are a lot of reasons for that.
“There are just expectations that the public has as a public land manager that are different than a private land manager,” Blum added.
For information on the Clallam County Trust Lands Advisory Committee, including reference materials, visit www.clallam.net/bocc/trustlands.html.
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Reporter Rob Ollikainen can be reached at 360-452-2345, ext. 5072, or at rollikainen@peninsuladailynews.com.
