Green, Greener, Greenest: Forestry Bills Heading for Action in the Maine Legislature
I’m pleased to report that the full funding of the Forest Practices Act was included in the Budget by the Appropriations Committee on Friday. This includes money for the beefed up data collection for a forest assessment which the Agriculture, Conservation and Forestry Committee has included in the Committee bill. This fulfills the commitment to the NO voters, but as you’ll read below, they arrogantly went beyond. There will soon be (1) a separate Committee Bill from the Agriculture Conservation and Forestry Committee, (2) a minority report from Pat Lane as an alternative to the Committee bill, and (3) there is the 4-point plan of the radical enviros which you’ve seen and heard widely advertised. That plan will be in LD 1766 sponsored by Rep. Shiah, which originally was the entire Compact word for word, but is now the 4-point plan. Rep. Shiah as well as Rep. Volenik carry the water for the enviros. They both voted “Ought to Pass” for LD 1766 today.
The work session on Monday, March 16th, produced a horrible, although temporary, concept called “The Forest Sustainability Council”, which was assigned the duty of benchmarking according to several criteria reminiscent of those auditing benchmarks we saw in the Compact. (Water quality, wetlands and riparian zones, Aesthetic impacts of Timber harvesting, biological diversity and more). Representative Gooley offered a proposed list of 16 categories of people to serve on the board of the Council, two of them to be representatives of Maine Audubon and the Natural Resources of Maine.
If the Compact had won, the Committee might have claimed justification for setting up such a Council, but it lost in spite of $8 million, the support of the Governor, the media and from the tax-supported agencies of the Dept. of Conservation and Fish and Wildlife. The message of defeat was lost on the committee in their excitement of reaching “consensus” over creating the Sustainability Council. Too bad to burst their bubble, but it had to be done.
Normally, one doesn’t speak at a work session from the audience, but fortunately, House Chairman George Bunker let me speak to the Committee so that I could tell them they were going in the wrong direction from how the people had voted last November. The Forest Sustain- ability Council as they described it would create more mischief and regulation on an already over- regulated industry, and they were traveling the wrong road. One which would establish a systems approach for outcome-based forestry. I wondered to myself just what part of “NO” they didn’t understand.
I wasn’t the only one alarmed by the Council. The next day (Tuesday) in work session it disappeared as suddenly as it had appeared the day before.
The “benchmarks” have been renamed to something else because the Senate Chair Kilkelly called them “the hated benchmarks” in deference to me and thousands of others. But I will continue to call them benchmarks and they are in the Committee Bill under the jurisdiction of the Bureau of Forestry, where they began…a vast improvement from the Forest Sustainability Council, but still onerous. So Rep. Lane’s minority report will contain much the same things as the Committee bill, minus the “hated benchmarks” and new controversial clearcut separation zones. For this reason, the Lane bill is superior to the Committee bill, but “NO more rules and regulations” is violated with any of the bills, applying the test of common sense.
If you can, a word of thanks to Rep. Pat Lane would be in order. She stood out over the last two days as 1 in 13 who truly got the message of the Compact defeat. Her e-mail is alane@telplus.net.
Ask your legislator to send you the Committee bill and the Lane alternative just as soon as they are printed. Most of what is in that Committee bill came from the Forest Service recommendations, and there are far-reaching changes in clearcut separation zones as well as a new requirement of reporting the reason for clearcutting and amending the definition of a clear-cut and several other items, too numerous to mention here. Several of the changes are controversial already among foresters. There will be no public hearings on these proposals. People in the business will want to get their hands on the Committee bill, the Lane alternative and the enviros bill, LD 1766, as soon as they are ready.