 The appended article provides an unusual (and therefor interesting) example
of the rapidly escalating efforts to "commercialize, motorize and privatize" our
National Forests. In this example the timber company " Plum Creek" is working
with the US Forest Service to achieve Plum Creek's stated goal which, in their
words is " to capture the most value from every acre that we own.”
The USFS could, of course, have chosen not to create a problem for the US
taxpayers. They could have chosen to manage the public lands in the public's
best interest. But that is not how the USFS thinks. It is not how the USFS
operates ... not when there are private interests involved seeking to capture
dollars.
There are almost invariably private interests involved and they are always
seeking to capture dollars.
Scott
--- begin quoted ---
KALISPELL — Not far up the road from Steve Brown’s house, out west of
Whitefish and just around the corner from forest burnt black by the Brush Creek
fire, a quarter-mile of new road is headed off into the woods.
The short stretch will cross U.S. Forest Service land, using that public
patch to connect Plum Creek Timber Co. with the rest of the world. Plum Creek
has another route in, a winding six-mile twist of road used seasonally to haul
logs, but the new neighbors weren’t going to put up with that.
The reason? Plum Creek’s not going to log that land anymore. Instead, the
company plans on selling it as subdivided real estate parcels.
And so the Forest Service has granted a new easement to hasten access, that
quick quarter-mile over public land.
“I’m baffled,” Brown said. He’s lived here for years, and knows the fire
danger. “If the Forest Service is really all worried about wildfires, why would
they grant easements that encourage more houses in the woods? I’m just wondering
why, if they’re as broke as they say they are, and they’re spending all their
money protecting houses from fire, then why would they go and do something like
this?”
Because, said Lisa Timchak, the government just can’t say no.
“Fire costs are huge,” said Timchak, the district ranger who had to review
Plum Creek’s easement request. “We’re becoming a skeleton of an agency. But
right now, when they ask for something like this, the Forest Service doesn’t
have the tools to deny it. Fire costs are not part of the review
criteria.”
And that worries taxpayers like Brown, as well as land stewards like
Timchak.
“Given Plum Creek’s new emphasis on real estate,” she said, “we have to
assume this is just the beginning of these requests. Subdivision is where it’s
headed.”
Plum Creek’s new direction has been the focus of considerable discussion in
recent months. In the first days of 2007, the Missoulian explored the company’s
conversion of forest land into residential lots, looking at the impacts to
neighbors.
Anglers and hunters told stories of lost access to woods and water.
Foresters told about lost opportunity for Montana’s lumber mills. Investors told
of Plum Creek’s business structure since 1999, the company’s Real Estate
Investment Trust and how it means they pay no corporate income taxes in the
state.
Planners told of the difficulties they face designing coherent growth in
the face of unknown Plum Creek land development. Firefighters warned of the
increased danger and cost associated with building homes in the woods.
State and county leaders discussed budgets strained by infrastructure needs
in neighborhoods that not so long ago were working woods. Now, those far-flung
homeowners want roads and snowplows and police and bus routes to schools, but
property tax revenues from the new subdivisions don’t begin to cover the
costs.
As far as those worries are concerned, not much has changed here at the end
of 2007, except perhaps that more people than ever are watching and
wondering.
The singular exception is with regard to fire, where two things happened
this year to ratchet up the discussion about Plum Creek’s land management.
First, a red-hot wildfire season sent state firefighting costs soaring into
the tens of millions of dollars, forcing lawmakers to redirect money that was to
be spent elsewhere.
Second, Bozeman-based Headwaters Economics completed a long-term analysis
of expected future firefighting costs if more of the land is developed.
Headwaters crunched the numbers across the West, including the six counties
that make up western Montana. In those six counties, the economists learned,
Plum Creek owns half of the private land adjacent to fire-prone public land. In
Missoula County, for instance, the company owns 63 percent of that
interface.
“We have 1,300 square miles of undeveloped land in the wildland-urban
interface in the six western counties,” said Ray Rasker, executive director at
Headwaters. “Of that, 91 percent is still undeveloped. Plum Creek owns half of
it. So you can imagine, if the company continues to sell to a bunch of
individual buyers, that’s quite a bit of land where you now have to fight fire
and protect homes.”
State land managers say fighting fire in these areas is half again as
expensive, on average, as fighting fire in undeveloped forestland. (The 2007
Jocko Lakes fire, with 3,000 structures threatened, cost $1,000 per acre to
fight. The 2007 Chippy Creek fire, with fewer than 100 homes threatened, cost
$157 per acre.)
The distinction is not lost on federal forest officials.
In fact, the average annual federal budget for fighting fire has tripled
since 2000, and now pushes $3 billion per year. The portion of the Forest
Service’s total budget burned up by fire has gone from 25 percent in 2000 to 44
percent today, resulting in an estimated 35 percent reduction in non-fire
program funding.
Last May, months before the fire season heated up, a coalition of former
Forest Service chiefs who served as top bosses from 1979 to 2007 penned a letter
warning “the Forest Service has been put into an untenable financial situation
due to the way fire suppression funding is being handled in the federal
budget.”
Current land managers concurred, with Don Black, the Northern Region’s
assistant director of fire program budgets, noting “fire suppression cost is the
most significant overarching issue for the Forest Service right now.”
“The big sucking sound you hear is fire,” Rasker agreed. “That’s where all
the money goes.”
Not a little of that money is spent on private land in woodsy neighborhoods
that are growing faster than forests.
“There’s a real lack of accountability out there,” Rasker said. “The
counties approve the subdivisions, Plum Creek sells the land, the developer
builds the house, the buyer moves in, and then the public, a la the Forest
Service, bails them out. That has to change. We can’t afford to keep writing the
blank check.”
If Rasker were a Missoula County commissioner, “my worst nightmare would be
to see homes on all that Plum Creek land, because I’d know my tax base simply
couldn’t afford it.”
Plum Creek is the largest private landowner in Montana, with 1.2 million
acres in the state, and more than 8 million acres nationwide. It is private
property, to be managed as the owners see fit.
But even Plum Creek admits that, with the shift to real estate, there will
be fallout for locals.
“We now have a community relations person in Montana, and we have been
working to increase our public outreach efforts,” said company spokeswoman Kathy
Budinick. “This is important as we are a member of the community in
Montana.”
Whether they’re a good neighbor, however, depends upon your
perspective.
“Plum Creek is a huge corporation, and the real decisions regarding policy
and course of action are made in Seattle at corporate headquarters, and it
appears that at that level there is little interest in local community life and
integrity.”
So wrote Joe Brenneman, a Flathead County commissioner, in his testimony
regarding a massive and controversial Plum Creek land development proposal in
Maine. The folks there wanted to know what folks here thought of Plum Creek’s
commitment to responsible development.
Flathead County and Plum Creek often are at odds, for many of the reasons
already explored, such as effects on habitat, water quality, recreation,
planning, public budgets. In fact, the county and the company have engaged in
litigation over some of those issues.
The players have successfully negotiated, Budinick said, with regard to
road costs and densities and much else. In the Seeley Lake area, the company has
spent months with locals trying to find a way to preserve 13,000 acres of lynx
habitat, in exchange for the right to develop lands elsewhere.
Nevertheless, Brenneman remains unconvinced of the company’s commitment to
doing anything more than the minimum required by law.
“It seems clear to me that Plum Creek’s real intentions for the development
of their land is very much in keeping with the managing of their timberland,” he
wrote his peers in Maine, “which appears to be an effort to make every dollar of
profit they can for their out-of-state owners and to leave the local community
to deal with the consequences as best they can.”
In fact, the company’s mission statement is clear: “We work to capture the
most value from every acre that we own.”
There is, or should be, Brenneman believes, a higher ground, and a
responsibility to those affected by company decisions.
“Plum Creek could have chosen to be a good neighbor,” he wrote, “instead of
spending millions of dollars on attorneys.”
Plum Creek has about a quarter-million acres targeted for residential real
estate development nationwide. Include the 975,000 acres of company lands to be
sold for recreation, as well as 500,000 acres to be sold for conservation, and
about 1.7 million acres are on the block. Another half-million acres of
“non-strategic” timberlands are under review for possible sale as well.
In 2004, Plum Creek reported the sale of 375,000 acres for $300 million. In
2005, 232,000 acres sold for $292 million.
This year, the company announced it’s hoping for land sales in the
neighborhood of $340 million. The third quarter showing, however, was dismal,
with Plum Creek profits down 36 percent from the previous year.
The reason: a national credit crunch and, not surprisingly, wildfire.
Fires stopped logging and, more importantly, scared off potential land and
home buyers.
Still, in announcing the losses, company officials predicted that many of
the scotched sales would be completed by year’s end.
Whether that has come to pass remains unknown, and Budinick said no
announcement regarding recent real estate deals would be made until
fourth-quarter earnings are released Jan. 28.
So far, she said, 30,000 Montana acres have sold in 2007, less than 3
percent of the company’s acreage here. Much sold into conservation easements,
rather than residential development.
That, she said, is a good indicator of what to expect in the future.
Economists such as Rasker see a future of more cost, and more
cost-shifting.
The Forest Service, he said, will have to begin handing off the
firefighting price tag.
“I think that’s happening already,” Timchak agreed.
The cost, then, will fall on the states, and when unable to bear the
burden, the states will in turn shift some weight to individual counties.
And that, Rasker said, is when Plum Creek’s land program finally and
abruptly changes.
“Because the counties are the ones with the tools to control this,” he
said. “They have zoning and building standards, and they can say ‘no.’ ”
As soon as county commissioners are hit with additional firefighting costs
on top of the existing costs of developing the hinterlands “they’ll start to
look seriously at how they permit subdivisions, or even whether they’ll permit
subdivisions.”
The Forest Service may still have to grant that easement out by Steve
Brown’s house, but it could prove a road to nowhere.
“When the cost comes home,” Rasker said, “as a county commissioner I’d be
very concerned. The question is, do you wait for that to happen, or do you plan
for the inevitability of it? Do you wait until you’re broke, or do you get
serious about land-use planning now?”
Brenneman, for one, chooses now, and says taxpayers no longer can afford to
subsidize corporate profits.
And as he and others ask tougher questions, Plum Creek increasingly has
looked to involve itself at the local level. The past year saw not only the
arrival of the new Montana-based public relations staff, but also involvement
with any number of hometown meetings.
Plum Creek is engaging the chambers of commerce, Budinick said, as well as
the schools and special interest groups involved with timber, real estate and
taxes.
“We are committed and active members in the communities in which we operate
and serve,” Budinick said. “As good neighbors, we feel it’s important to be
involved in neighborhood meetings and establish lines of communication with
members of the community with respect to our current projects.”
But for Rasker, the real question after 2007 is “can Montana afford those
projects? Our analysis suggests not. Not even close.
“If we think it’s expensive now, we need to realize what we’re seeing is
just a tiny hint of what’s coming.”
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- Privatization 
