Timber industry awaits new deal.

• Author: Kleeschulte, Chuck
• Position: Bills pending in Congress will affect logging in Tongass National Forest - Company profile

Timber Industry Awaits New Deal

For Keaton Gildersleeve, the past several years have wrought an odd form of torture. President of Gildersleeve Logging of Ketchikan, he is a contract logger who used to log mostly in the Tongass National Forest. Lately, though, he sand his 70- to 80-member crew have been logging increasingly for private land owners, notably the Sealaska Timber Corp.

One reason for the pain, even though timber markets have been at or near historir highs, has been the uncertainty that has plagued the Southeast timber industry for the past four years as Congress has debated changes in management of the nation's largest national forest.

"It's been very difficult to be at the end of the deal. WE used to operate on multiyear contracts with the pulp mills. But with the uncertainty over the future of the industry, the mills have offered only single-year contracts. That has made relations with out bankers difficult. It's difficult to get loans for new equipment when you have no stability," says Gildersleeve, a 30-year logging veteran and owner of three floating camps on the southern Panhandle.

Gildersleeve is attempting to build more stability by working increasingly on the 400,000 acres of Native-owned timber on the Panhandle. But many of the other nearly 4,000 loggers, road builders, logging truck drivers and saw and pulpmill workers who make their living from timber can't separate themselves from dependency on the 16.8 million acre national forest for their wood.

Althoug their long wait may be about over, it's not certain they will like the outcome. Odds are good that Congress this fall, either just before or just after you read this -- possibly later this fall in a post-election lame duck session -- will reach final agreement on a version of a Tongass Timber Reform Act. The bill likely will make major changes in how the forest will be managed, changes that will have anywhere from a slight to a devastating effect on the timber industry, depending on which version passes and on whom you talk to.

"While no one in the industry is happy with the changes we are looking at, everyone wants the issue settled, as long as we don't have to sacrifice any more than we already have agree to," says Thyes Shaub, governmental affairs director of the Alaska Logfers Association. "The uncertainty over the future of the long-term supplies has been too disruptive. Small firms especially have been troubled. It is time that the issue is settled."

Bart Koehler, a representative of the Southeast Alaska Conservation Council, agrees in part. "We want to get this over with. Everyone is looking at resolving it this year, but we still want it done right," he notes.

At issue isn't whether management of the Tongass will change, but how changed it will be. The U.S. House of Representatives in 1987 and again in 1989 as well as the Senate early this summer passed legislation making major changes in timber operations.

Both bills repeal a 4.5 billion-board-feet-per-decade harvest availability mandate that was tucked in the Alaska lands act of 1980. Both bills repeal a formerly automatic $40 million appropriation to the U.S. Forest Service to subsidize marginal timber harvest. And both bill establish mandated 100-foot buffers along the sides of major salmon streams in the region, althoug the Senate bill doen't go as far in protecting smaller tributaries.

Main differences are that the House bill would outright repeal the remaining nearly two decades of the 50-year timber contracts held by Louisiana-Pacific's Ketchikan Pulp Co. mill and Alaska Pulp Co.'s Sitka mill, while the Senate's act only would require mandated renegotiation of some of the points.

The House bill would add 1.8 million acres in 23 prime, old-growht timber tracts to wilderness, cutting logging...