JOINT HOUSE AND SENATE RESOURCES STANDING COMMITTEES September 27, 1996 Anchorage, Alaska 1:00 p.m. HOUSE MEMBERS PRESENT Representative Joe Green, Co-Chairman Representative Scott Ogan, Vice Chairman Representative John Davies (via teleconference) Representative Pete Kott OTHER HOUSE MEMBERS PRESENT Representative Gail Phillips Representative Jeannette James (via teleconference) Representative Pete Kelly (via teleconference) Representative David Finkelstein HOUSE MEMBERS ABSENT Representative William K. "Bill" Williams, Co-Chairman Representative Ramona Barnes Representative Alan Austerman Representative Don Long Representative Irene Nicholia SENATE MEMBERS PRESENT Senator Loren Leman, Chairman Senator Rick Halford Senator Robin Taylor (via teleconference) Senator John Torgerson SENATE MEMBERS ABSENT Senator Drue Pearce, Vice Chairman Senator Steve Frank Senator Georgianna Lincoln Senator Lyman Hoffman COMMITTEE CALENDAR Spruce Bark Beetle Infestation PREVIOUS ACTION No previous action to record WITNESS REGISTER JERRY BOUGHTON, Chairman Alaska Society of American Foresters P.O. Box 2938 Palmer, Alaska 99645 Telephone: (907) 271-2535 DR. ED HOLSTEN U.S. Entomologist/Forest Health Specialist 3301 "C" Street, Suite 522 Anchorage, Alaska 99503 Telephone: (907) 271-2535 DR. PATRICK MOORE, Director Forest Alliance of British Columbia 4068 West 32nd Avenue Vancouver, B.C. Canada Telephone: (604) 969-4250 TOM BOUTIN, State Forester Division of Forestry Department of Natural Resources 400 Willoughby Avenue, Third Floor Juneau, Alaska 99801-1724 Telephone: (907) 465-3379 LES REED, President F.L.C. Reed and Associates Ltd. 12471 Phoenix Drive Richmond, B.C. Canada Telephone: (604) 969-4250 LANCE TRASKY, Supervisor Southcentral Region Division of Habitat and Restoration Department of Fish and Game 333 Raspberry Road Anchorage, Alaska 99518-1599 Telephone: (907) 267-2335 GREG ENCELEWSKI, Assistant to the President Ninilchik Native Corporation 800 East Dimond Blvd., Suite 3-490 Anchorage, Alaska 99515-2044 Telephone: (907) 344-8654 JIM CAPLAN, Deputy Regional Forester Natural Resources U.S. Forest Service P.O. Box 21628 Juneau, Alaska 99802-1628 Telephone: (907) 586-8863 MIKE FASTABENT University of Alaska, Fairbanks Alaska Cooperative Extension Service P.O. Box 757020 Fairbanks, Alaska 99775 Telephone: (907) 474-7661 JACK PHELPS, Executive Director Alaska Forest Association 111 Stedman, Suite 200 Ketchikan, Alaska 99901-6599 Telephone: (907) 225-6114 CLIFF EAMES Alaska Center for the Environment 519 West 8th Avenue Anchorage, Alaska 99501 Telephone: (907) 274-3621 CATHERINE THOMAS, Incoming Chair Alaska State Chamber of Commerce ArcTech Services, Incorporated P.O. Box 3005 Kenai, Alaska 99611 Telephone: (907) 776-5515 JOAN NININGER, Owner Secretary/Treasurer Circle DE Pacific 6239 "B" Street, Suite 201 Anchorage, Alaska 99518 Telephone: (907) 349-3430 PETER ECKLAND, Administrative Assistant to Representative Bill Williams Alaska State Legislature 352 Front Street Ketchikan, Alaska 99901 Telephone: (907) 247-4672 ACTION NARRATIVE TAPE 96-81, SIDE A Number 000 The meeting was called to order in Anchorage, Alaska at 1:00 p.m. JOE GREEN, CO-CHAIRMAN, HOUSE RESOURCES COMMITTEE: ....The director of the Forest Service Tom Boutin. In Kenai we have Senator Torgerson, and in Fairbanks Representative James and I understand Representative Davies is in route. In Homer we have Speaker of the House Gail Phillips who would like to make an address in a few moments. And then on listen only, we have Mat-Su, Seward, Cordova and Washington, D.C. So we have a good listening audience as well as I'm pleased to say a good audience here. So without any further ado, I'd like to turn the meeting over briefly to my co-chair here, Senator Loren Leman of the Senate Resources Committee to introduce his members. Number 043 SENATOR LOREN LEMAN, CHAIRMAN, SENATE RESOURCES COMMITTEE: Thank you Representative Green. I'm Senator Loren Leman, the Chairman of the Senate Resources Committee, and we have here in Anchorage with us today Senator Rick Halford and on-line in Sitka, Senator Robin Taylor who are both members of the committee. And if there are other members of the committee who are listening in to please identify yourself or if later they arrive on the remote sites, please have somebody let us know so that I can acknowledge them also. Number 117 CO-CHAIRMAN GREEN: Thank you. Also at the table here we have the vice chair of the House Resources Committee, Scott Ogan from the Valley. And with that I would like to turn over for introductions to Jerry Boughton of the Society of American Foresters and after that I understand you'd like to make a statement and then I would like to have recognized Speak Phillips from Homer before we get into the next presentation. Number 148 JERRY BOUGHTON, CHAIRMAN, ALASKA SOCIETY OF AMERICAN FORESTERS: Okay, thank you Representative Green. I'd like to make some brief introductions. We have some individuals who will make some presentations here today that the Society of American Foresters has brought here. We have Dr. Ed Holsten. Dr. Holsten is a entomologist with the U.S. Forest Service here in Anchorage. He has been an entomologist practicing in Alaska for 15 to 18 years. In that range, he has been dealing with the spruce beetle situation throughout that time and is recognized as one of the leading experts on this situation and on the spruce beetle in Alaska. He's also involved in a considerable number of research efforts to understand the implications of this beetle and the biology of this beetle. We also have with us today two distinguished gentlemen of international fame. We have Mr. Les Reed. Here Mr. Les Reed is a past chief of the Canadian Forest Service from Ottawa. He is currently and international forestry consultant. He has experience working with these kinds of situations in many countries across the world. He has worked in over 40 countries across the world on forestry issues. We also have with us today Dr. Patrick Moore. Patrick is an individual who has been an environmental activist for a number of years. He is original -- one of the original founders of Green Peace. He functioned as a director of Green Peace International and Green Peace Canada for a number of years. He is an author of a book that's just out called "The Pacific Spirit," and he is currently with an organization, "The Forest Alliance of British Columbia," which is an organization that is trying to determine how to best deal with forestry issues in Canada, and he is also the chair of the Forest Practices Committee of that organization. So I think we have some distinguished gentlemen here of significant knowledge to share some information with you today. I would like to briefly read a statement, if I could, representing the Society of American Foresters. First we would like to thank the chairs of the House and Senate Resources Committees and the members that are here today to listen to this information and to consider this very serious issue that is effecting Alaska's forest. The Society of American Foresters has about 18,000 members. It is the national organization that represents all segments of the forestry profession in the United States. It includes public and private practitioners, researchers, administrators, educators and forestry students. It includes individuals representing many disciplines related to forest management such as hydrology, wildlife biology, entomology, et cetera. The objectives of the Society are to advance the science technology education and practices of professional forestry in America and use the knowledge and skills of the profession to benefit society. I'm proud to be here today with you as the chair of the Alaska portion of that society which has approximately 250 members. The members of the Alaska Society became concerned with this beetle situation and this increasing decline in forest conditions in 1993. At that time we developed a position statement about this situation that stressed recognition of numerous resource impacts and the need for coordinated owner efforts across ownerships to reduce further impacts and to restore already impacted forests. A copy of the position is in the information packets that have been distributed. The active infestation in 1993, at that time, was occurring at a rate of about 700,000 acres per year. Since that time, forest management to address this issue on all Alaska ownerships, but particularly on public administered lands, has not come close to matching the increased rate of infestation. Attempts by public managers have been met with debate, protest and litigation and relatively little actual treatment. All the while, the beetle infestation has continued to excellerate. The aggressive and coordinated efforts that were a hoped outcome at that time, as a result of this 1993 position statement, the Alaska Forest Health Initiative that was occurring at that time and other efforts simply have not materialized in a fashion to deal with this situation. Now in 1996, approximately 1.3 million acres are actively having trees killed on them by these beetles. That's nearly double the rate of how it was occurring in 1993. Nearly three million acres in total, possibly one-half of the white spruce forest type in Alaska have been heavily impacted by this beetle to date. The skyrocketing epidemic is threatening the very existence of our white spruce forests, certainly as Alaskans have known and used those forests for the past 100 years or so. Coordinated efforts to understand the ramifications of this forest removal on our fish, wildlife, recreation, watershed and timber values is not taking place. Which communities are at fire risk? What will be the future cost of reforestation? How will this effect tourism? And whole variety of other forest values is simply not being quantified at this time. In 1993, the National Office of the Society of American Foresters published a report that was to assess the task of managing the nation's forest to sustain their health and long term productivity of all forest values. That report stated that to achieve this goal will require strategies which meet the following criteria: (a) Maintain the structural and functional integrity of the forest as an ecosystem; (b) meet the diverse needs of the human community; and (c) commit the technological, financial and human resources needed for implementation. In Alaska, we have a crises at this point in time. It's of world scope in magnitude. We have the distinction of having the largest spruce beetle epidemic killing forest, not only in the United States, in North America and possibly in the world. What are we doing about it? In good consciousness, we can simply can no longer ignore this situation. Certainly, a strategy that meets the criteria that I just went over from that other report is needed for Alaska. What to do is often quickly channeled into a question of "To log or not to log?" And it becomes a debate, it becomes a philosophical emotional debate. The Society is urging you, as the state's policy makers, to not fall into that debate, but to look at the bigger picture. How is this dramatic and tremendous forest changes that's occurring in Alaska, how is it effecting the resource values that we hold dear and that we want to have for future Alaskans. Because of these tenants, many members of the Alaska Society of American Foresters are compelled to bring this subject before you. It is our hope that this will be the start of long overdue aggressive, coordinated and positive actions to slow or prevent this further decline and to restore impacted areas. These actions are imperative to maintain our existing resource values to the greatest extent possible and to ensure quality resource values for future generations of Alaskans. Number 1005 CO-CHAIRMAN GREEN: Thank you very much Jerry. I really want to express the appreciation of the House Resources Committee and I'm sure that Co-Chair Senator Leman would say the same. We appreciate your volunteering to come up and make these facts known to us. It doesn't take one very long to drive outside of the city and see dead and dying trees. So we're aware. We weren't perhaps aware, to the extent that you're bringing to our attention, how serious this is, but I am actually here kind of as a surrogate for my Co- Chair Bill Williams who was unable to be here or on teleconference, but he handles forest activities for the House Resources. My comraderie, the Senator Leman, handles both - everything that comes before his committee. But I did want to make that statement and then introduce some other people who we would hope to hear from today and perhaps set the ground rule. What we're hoping to have today is not a confrontation meeting at all. It's strictly a data gathering and educational meeting and if there are people who will perhaps differ from what you suggest to us, I would certainly be willing to stay here after we adjourn this meeting, but I would like to hold any confrontational type questions till after this meeting is adjourned. In fact, I would like, if it's permissible all the presenters to hold all questions until all the information is on and then feel free to ask any questions of any of the presenters. And if that's acceptable, we have with us on teleconference Tom Boutin of the Division of Forestry for the state, we have Greg Encelewski of the Ninilchik Native Corporation, Larry Hudson U.S. Forest Service, Mike Fastabent of the Alaska Coop Extension, Jack Phelps is here with the Alaska Forest Association and finally, I hope - I haven't seen him but Lance Trasky with -- oh there he is, yes - is here with the Division of Fish and Game and I would hope that all of these people would be able to add something to our database. With that I would like to hear from -- Gail are you on? REPRESENTATIVE GAIL PHILLIPS: I certainly am. CO-CHAIRMAN GREEN: Would you like to make some comments please? Number 1216 REPRESENTATIVE PHILLIPS: Thank you Joe and thank you very much Senator Leman and Representative Green for this opportunity and for putting this meeting together. I really appreciate the attention the Resource Committees are paying to this critical issue. During the course -- I attended the meetings yesterday in Kenai and during the course of your hearing today, you will receive expert testimony from the professionals and the experts on this subject. There are very very sobering facts that will be presented to you. I am going to speak coming from a resident of this highly volatile area of infestation, but also as a person that many many years ago served on an interagency task force when the spruce beetle epidemic was first getting a stronghold on the Kenai Peninsula, and had we taken our legislative responsibility seriously at that time, I don't feel that we would be in the position we are today. As Alaskans, we pride ourselves often on being the biggest state, having the tallest mountains, having the greatest miles of shoreline, and all these other superlatives. We are faced with a superlative today that is shameful and that is we in Alaska have the largest infestation of (indisc.) beetle in our forest of any state in the union and possibly the largest infestation in any country in the world. And that is terribly terribly shameful as far as I am concerned. When we all as legislators were sworn into office, we took an oath of office that we would uphold our constitution and one of the points in the constitution is our responsibility to protect and wisely use and manage the resources that we have in this land. Ladies and gentlemen, we are doing a terrible terrible job of that responsibility. In fact, I believe that we have been totally irresponsible in the ignorance that is portrayed and in our ignoring this major major health problem in Alaska's forest. No longer are we looking at just an outbreak on the Kenai Peninsula, and a small area of the Kenai Peninsula at that. When you see the pictures today you will see an ugly ugly picture, but no longer is it just on the Kenai Peninsula, it is throughout this whole state. I think that we are at a point, and my involvement with this goes back many years, I think we are at the point today where legislatively we must take our constitutional responsibility to heart. We must legally enforce that responsibility. We must declare a state of emergency and we must take action. We have talked about this issue for years. We have have had numerous task forces, both from the state, the borough, the federal government. We can talk until we're blue in the face and exactly what's gonna happen is what has happened today in that our forests in Alaska are being destroyed by a little bug and we sit here and fiddle while Rome burns. Ladies and gentlemen, as you listen to the testimony today, please keep in mind that I feel that it is time for the legislature to step to the plate and take in our responsibility and declare an emergency on this. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. Number 1601 CO-CHAIRMAN GREEN: Thank you very much Gail. I would like to recognize that Senator - or excuse me, Representative Kott has joined us. Would any members of either the House or Senate Resources Committee like to say anything before we get started? Senator Leman. Number 1621 CHAIRMAN LEMAN: I'd just add I'm anxious to get started only to get as much covered as possible and I agree with you if we could do that and then get into the questions, it's probably the best use of our time. Number 1635 REPRESENTATIVE JEANNETTE JAMES: Representative Green. CO-CHAIRMAN GREEN: Yes. REPRESENTATIVE JAMES: This is Jeanette in Fairbanks and Representative Pete Kelly has just come in and Tim Kerr from John Davies office is here. CO-CHAIRMAN GREEN: Okay, thank you very much Jeannette. Number 1644 SENATOR RICK HALFORD: My only comment was to the Speaker's comment. I agree with what she said, but I wonder if she has some new way that I could never find. I wonder how the legislature goes about declaring an emergency. Number 1704 REPRESENTATIVE PHILLIPS: We figure out a lot of other things. I think we can figure out that one. CHAIRMAN LEMAN: That was Senator Halford. I'm sure you recognized the voice. CO-CHAIRMAN GREEN: If there are no other comments, then we will get into the meat of the project. And I guess, Jerry, you'd like Dr. Holsten to go first. MR. BOUGHTON: Yes, if Ed could provide an overview of the situation. Number 1731 DR. ED HOLSTEN, U.S. ENTOMOLOGIST/FOREST HEALTH SPECIALIST: Sure, my name is Ed Holsten. As Jerry said, I've been working with spruce beetle for basically since early 70s, full time with the Forest Service here since 77. A majority of my work has been involved in research of a variety of nature, everything from management techniques to reduce impacts of the beetle to the other extreme, pesticides as well as involved quite a bit in monitoring areas of intensification of this outbreak as well as technical assistance. What I want to do here is just kind of lay a little ground work, a little historical perspective so the rest of the specialists can kind of build on that. As that graph there shows spruce beetle has been around for quite a while. What we see on that graph is just based on what written records that we have had. And since about the 70s, we do a fairly intensive aerial survey of the whole state, all forested areas. So you can see there has been quite a dramatic increase, most notably about ten years ago. So the point - one point is we've always had beetles as long as we've had spruce and spruce beetle occurs wherever spruce is found in the state, from Southeast Alaska up to tree line in the Brooks Range. Outbreaks build up and have been most prevalent in Southcentral. Southcentral is kind of the banana belt for spruce beetle. We have had outbreaks and we do have outbreaks in Southeast Alaska. The probability of having problems in Sitka spruce stands are less, not to say we don't have outbreaks there. That photo over there is of Kachemak Bay and that's a Sitka spruce site. Southcentral Alaska, without going into a lot of reasons why, is just perfect habitat for the beetle. The right type of trees, the right type of climate. Even though we have very extensive white spruce stands up in the Interior, we have a whole different complex of insect fest up there that potentially could cause problems, but right now we don't have major spruce beetle outbreaks lets say along the Yukon- Kuskokwim River. We have had problems there, but nothing to the magnitude that were seeing now on Kenai, Anchorage Bowl and especially the Copper River Basin. That map over there is of Copper River Basin area, the Glennallen Copper Center area. Those dark green areas portray areas of infestation that we've picked up from aerial surveys this year. As Jerry stated, we're up to about 1.4 million acres of -- that's active and ongoing and new infested areas, not areas where the beetles have come gone. So that 1.3 to 4 million figure is "a record high." What helped and I won't go into, but is it still somewhat debatable, as most of you remember 1993 was the mother of all summers, at least in Southcentral, record high temperatures - early temperatures. We already had quite a large population of beetles. Do to that whether regime there, beetle populations doubled statewide in one year. So we already had quite a large base of beetles and doubled that, so in 1994 populations really started climbing. One of the differences I've noticed and a lot of people -- I've just finished up having a national steering committee made up bark beetle specialists that was going on this week down in the Kenai, so there were about 27 people from Canada and the Lower 48 up that work with different bark beetle type problems. One of the things that came to light quickly for those folks, these are folks who have worked quite extensively with bark beetles, it's not so much the extensive nature of this outbreak - the large acreages that are involved, but intensiveness of the outbreak. Spruce Beetle historically will come in and out of a stand for one or two years, stakeout a certain percent of the large spruce. What we're seeing in the last few years is incredible mortality in some of these stands. That photo there those stands are about 90 percent dead in the matter of three four years. Not all areas of the state are being impacted to that degree of severity, but there are some very very large notable areas - the Copper Center area, extreme heavy mortality in those stands and in the lower Kenai. Elsewhere in the state, depending on the stand structure of the types of trees, the mixture of species, the overall impact is less. But there is huge areas with very very severe intensive mortality that has been occurring. A lot of this discussion, that's gonna take place afterwards here, will have to do with impact and I'm not gonna go into a lot of detail because there is a lot more specialists than myself on impact. But when I'm referring to impacts, they could be negative as well a positive - the effects that the beetle is having on our forest community. Unfortunately, like Jerry mentioned, there is a real paucity of information to quantify and qualify these impacts. But quickly, obviously there is one of loss of wood fiber. Sawlogs, three years - after they've been dead for three years quickly lose their value. However, for chips they hold their value quite well for a long period of time. There has been a number of studies that have been done by the University of Alaska as well as the University of Arizona on the impacts that the beetle is having on aesthetic quality. "One of the portions of recreation experience, especially on the Kenai." And there is some very very good results coming out about how the public, both residents and nonresidents, view bark beetle outbreaks. Wildlife habitat, there is some fish and game folks here which will talk a little bit more about that. That hasn't been looked into too much up here by wildlife biologists. In other words, what are the impacts having on habitat of those animals that are associated with live green spruce forests? And a lot of people kind of assumed this outbreak would come and go in a matter of years - the overall impact wouldn't be very severe. The last few years there has been formed an interagency committee made up Fish and Game, Fish and Wildlife Service, Forest Service and Division of Forestry, entrusted to quantify and qualify some of these impacts that may be occurring to wildlife habitat for a variety of species due to bark beetles. Fuel build-up is a major concern and I don't know if John See is here, I don't think he's here, but he is the fire behavioral specialist for Division of Forestry. There is a real concern, especially in view of what happened this summer up in Wasilla and the two fires down on the Kenai, what effect beetle killed timber will have on risk of wildfire and there is some fairly good data especially coming out of the Crooked Creek fire and the Hidden Creek fire. We know for a fact that about five to ten years after beetles infest a stand those trees snap off and come down. What that means is large woody fuels. The amount of that material increases from 2 tons per acre, under normal conditions, up to 30 to 40 to 50 tons per acre. So we seeing in over a large scale a dramatic increase in large woody fuels, which is a major factor in large fires. Also, once these stands open up, a lot of these stands not all, but very many of them on the Kenai, are being invaded by a grass, kellamagrostis(ph.). It's a blue joint grass. It's a very tall grass with - probably most of you have seen - it's a perennial grass, and that occupies the site. Being a perennial grass it dries out every winter and that's our main fine flashing fuel that starts most of the fires and carries most of the fires in Southcentral Alaska. So one of the concerns from fire folks in many areas is increased fuels due to beetle infested areas, and also a dramatic increase in kellamagrostis grass which aids in the quick spread of fires. So the overall risk of large fires is slowly increasing not only due to fuel build-up, but with encroachment of grass. So that's a real concern to those that are dealing with fire. The other thing is is what we're seeing, and we're not quite sure, is we're seeing in these large scale areas like up at Copper Center those pure spruce stands have been heavily hit by beetles. There is very little regeneration occurring underneath those stands. They're very even aged, fairly uniform stands. And the real concern is is without intervention what type of vegetation, what type of forest are we going to have down the road? We have very little replacement growing stock, plus the seed source from the spruce as the years go on is being reduced as the trees are being killed, so we're lacking the seed source. We're gonna see a change and we are seeing a change in many of our forested areas, not to say that that change necessarily is bad. There will always be some type of vegetation out there, but whether that forest vegetation will provide the amenities or products that we're used to only time will tell. So one of the misperceptions is that once the beetle comes through a stand, the stands naturally regenerate right back to spruce again. That isn't necessarily what's happening in many many areas. There is very little regeneration coming back in for the reasons that I just talked about. So we will be seeing a change and a change is occurring in (indisc.) forests here due to beetles to be good or bad, but we're not without some type of intervention in high valued areas, we're not gonna get back the same type of forest structure assuming that's what we want - what we have now. So I think it's that last point I kind of want to get home. Again, there is a real misperception that the beetle is a natural agent. People can argue whether that's natural or unnatural, but it's almost a moot point, but the main misperception is the regenerative powers. In other words, once beetles come through, spruce will just come right back. We've been monitoring areas that have been impacted by the beetles for close to 20 years now in a particular plot and we see very little if any regeneration coming back on these sites due to competition of grass. So we're seeing some large changes in forest makeup. And on that note, I think I'll just leave it there and, hopefully, that's enough ground work - background information. I'll let everybody else add on to it. Thank you very much for the opportunity. Number 2932 CO-CHAIRMAN GREEN: Thank you very much Dr. The next person that we had to give us a perspective is Dr. Patrick Moore. Number 2940 DR. PATRICK MOORE, DIRECTOR, FOREST ALLIANCE OF BRITISH COLUMBIA: Thank you very much. Number 2941 REPRESENTATIVE PETE KELLY: Mr. Chairman, this is Pete Kelly in Fairbanks. The last testifier, could I get his name please, Mr. Chairman. CO-CHAIRMAN GREEN: Yes, that's Ed Holstein - H o l s t e i n. DR. HOLSTEN: e n. CO-CHAIRMAN GREEN: e n. Number 3000 REPRESENTATIVE JOHN DAVIES: Mr. Chairman. CO-CHAIRMAN GREEN: Yes. REPRESENTATIVE DAVIES: This is John Davies up in Fairbanks. Just want to let you know I'm here. CO- CHAIRMAN GREEN: Thank you John. Anybody else. Have they joined us since we had the opening notices from teleconference sites. UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: This is Kenai. We have Senator Salo's staff here. CO-CHAIRMAN GREEN: Okay. UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: And Representative Davis staff. TOM BOUTIN, STATE FORESTER, DIVISION OF FORESTRY, DEPARTMENT OF NATURAL RESOURCES: Mr. Chairman, this is Tom Boutin. Here in Juneau we have Paula Terrel from Senator Lincoln's office and Annette Kreitzer from Senator Leman's office. CO-CHAIRMAN GREEN: Okay, thank you very much. UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: Mr. Chairman, do you wish to hold questions until after? CO-CHAIRMAN GREEN: At least I think we should get through these first three speakers because, again, we want to make sure that it's factual data rather than digressing off on personal questions. I have a bunch myself. Dr. Moore. DR. MOORE: Thank you, Representative Green. It's a pleasure to meet with you this afternoon, members of the House and Senate Resources Committee. Unfortunately, after flying over the Kenai Peninsula yesterday for a couple of hours from one end to the other, it is sad for me that I have to report to you that you do really have an environmental emergency on your hands here in Alaska. I've seen forests around the world from Western Australia to Northern Europe to Brazil, all across Canada and the United States, and I have to say I've never seen anything quite so extensive and devastating as you have presently got occurring here in the state of Alaska in the way of forest destruction by a natural agent, in this case the spruce bark beetle. One of the reasons that there has been inaction to date on this problem is the paralysis that's been caused by the basic philosophical controversy within your community as to whether or not this is a natural phenomenon that should simply be allowed to take it's course as nature does or whether you have a disease or plague or a parasite on your hands here that should be treated as such. I'm afraid to tell you that this has been a false question and it has been very unfortunate in the same way that you've been led to believe this is a choice between logging or not logging, you've been led to believe this is choice between seeing this as a natural event or some kind of disease. If I could just read a couple of paragraphs from my book to show you how I've tried to explain this in a way that gets rid of this duality that's been imposed in this debate. "Some people might say that diseases are a natural part of the forest so they must be good for trees in the long run. Species of beetles that chew the life out of pine trees and spruce trees are after all part of the biological diversity of the forest. Why should we refer to them as a disease when they have just as much right to live as the trees. This is about the same as saying that smallpox and the HIV virus are good for humans. Disease may well play a positive roll in evolution, but this is hardly going to convince us to let epidemics run their course. The same is true for domesticated plants and animals. When confronted with a disease that threatens to destroy crops, our reaction is to find a control for the disease, not to welcome it as part of biological diversity. It is a bit utopian to expect otherwise. Professional foresters who concern themselves with forest health are no different in this respect from medical doctors, veterinarians and plant pathologists. They prefer healthy productive forests that are not infested with fungi and insects that damage or kill trees. They have developed a whole range of strategies to reduce the incidence of disease in trees and many of these have resulted in dramatic improvements in growth and survival. Some pests, like bark beetles, must be more less accepted as a fact of life and the only approach is to manage around and with them. Whatever tactics are used, the knowledge of and treatment of tree diseases is an integral part of forest science. The desire to cure disease is at least as natural as the disease itself." And that's why this is a false debate. There is nothing unnatural about trying to cure a natural disease such as the bark beetle and I believe that in the case of the situation you have here in Alaska today, you have not choice if you were to exercise responsibility towards the people and the ecosystem of the great forest you have here in Alaska than to take some intervention. Already there has been a great intervention in the form of suppressing natural wildfires throughout the whole state of Alaska, throughout North America, very successful. That's part of the reason why forests get older these days than they did before fire suppression was brought in and that's part of the reason why these forests are more susceptible to beetles, it's because they didn't burnt down before they got old and became susceptible. It's very ironic and not necessarily intuitive to people. When you're told as you've been told that when these forests die from the beetle, they aren't just necessarily gonna grow back into beautiful spruce forests right away again, they're gonna turn into grasslands. That's partly because they're not going to burn. If these forests, which die, were to have huge clematis wildfires go through them, and with the heavy fuel loading you'd have deep burning of the organic layer in the soils, that would go back down and expose the mineral soil, then the spruce would come back. But so long as you have heavy organic soils after these trees have died, you'll have a very difficult if not impossible time to get your spruce forests back again. That's why it's not just a question of logging or not logging. Obviously, in many areas of the state where even all the spruce trees have been killed such as in some of your national parks, you're probably not going to go into an extensive logging program although that may be wise from an ecological perspective because the problem is is every tree that becomes infected becomes an infection center to infect ten more trees, because one beetle goes in and lays a whole pile of grubs under the bark and then every one of those grubs comes out as a new beetle and that's why there is expediential growth in these populations. So getting rid of the infected trees is really the best way to stop the epidemic and really the only effective way short of aerial spraying over mass areas with pesticides which is not acceptable either ecologically or socially. So sanitation is the way to go. In Scandinavia, it's virtually illegal to leave dead trees that have been killed by beetles in the forest. As a matter of fact, it is illegal. It's illegal to leave timber along the roadside for a lengthy period of time because it can become a reservoir for beetles. The great irony here in the United States is it's practically become illegal to cut the dead trees down because of various environmental legislation, which I believe runs counter in this case to the real needs of the environment. Ecological restoration is what's needed here, not just extractive logging. That's (indisc.). Logging is part of the solution in many of the areas, particularly the state forests which are meant to be managed on a sustained yield basis for multiple values. It's not just the timber that's being killed. You think logging has negative environmental impacts, you don't log the whole forest at once like this beetle is killing it all at once. At least with logging there is lots of forest at various stages of growth if you're on a sustained yield basis. But with this beetle, you've got massive wipe out of forests over the broad landscape and the elimination of the habitat that that forest provides for many many bird, insect, plant and mammal species. So the impact of logging should no longer be really considered to be the primary question here. The impact of the beetle kill is the primary question and the way to deal with it in areas where you want to see spruce forests growing back again is through ecological restoration. If you want to see the ability of foresters to successfully intervene and recreate the ecosystem, the natural ecosystem, not a monoculture pulp plantation or a phony forest, but a real forest that looks like the one that was there in the first place, you don't need to go any further than the Mt. Saint Helen's disaster in Washington State where professional foresters, through the simple intervention of site disturbance and salvage plus the replanting of healthy two-year-old trees to get a good head start was able to recreate that ecosystem decades before nature is able to do so on its own. It is possible through the science of ecological restoration to recreate these ecosystems far faster than they would be recreated under normal means. I want to make sure my colleague, Les Reed, has lots of time to make his presentation so I'll stop there, but I'd be glad to answer any questions you might have later. Thank you very much. Number 3906 CO-CHAIRMAN GREEN: Thank you Dr. Moore. So with that, we'll go right to you Les. Number 3911 LES REED, PRESIDENT, F.L.C. REED AND ASSOCIATES LTD.: Thank you very much. It's a great pleasure for me to address the committee of the legislature. I've looked forward to this ever since I heard this was gonna take place and I do hope that our time here in Alaska will be - you look back on it as some help. I would like to say that my visit here this time as part of this international panel is a sequel to one held in 1993, where Governor Hickel's foresight put in place an addition of on forest health and in 1993, three people came here to overfly the forests and give advice on what might be done. Fortunately, -- unfortunately, very little happened after that. I am glad as an active member of the Society of American Foresters, and my friend Jerry Boughton here, I'm glad to be part of the association. I've been a member for years and I think they're doing a terrific job to bring this to public attention. I will try and confine my remarks to eight points and squeeze them in to ten minutes as my friend Patrick has done. Number one, my departure point is summarized by this proposition, Alaska's land and renewable resources are world class without parallel on this globe. Their vastness, their diversity, their majesty, their accessibility are legendary. It follows that this incomparable landscape deserves world class stewardship. Number 2, no one should take an asset like this for granted. There is no such thing in nature as a static equilibrium. Just when the community was really comfortable with being told that nature was kind and benign and that nothing had to be done, disaster strikes, the spruce beetle hits and the worst epidemic ever recorded, in my opinion. Just let nature take its course they say. Well that's what happened and now you can see you have an emergency on a classic world scale. Not just the trees. It's not possible to separate the trees from the other assets, the wildlife habitat, the watershed, recreation and all these other assets. So any kind of a solution which focuses simply on trees and their salvage is a false solution. Number three, based on my international experience, I have to say - and I speak with great reluctance, but I have to say that sustainable forestry is not being achieved in Alaska. Maximum sustained yield is not being realized at the present time. International criticism will soon be aimed at Alaska. You can brace yourself, it's coming. You're customers, for one, will demand changes just as they have in B.C., Oregon, Brazil, Southeast Asia. You're customers will certainly demand changes and they will want to know for certain - they will want some kind of certification to say that you're managing forests sustainably. Number four, some good news. World markets are growing. There is an economic side of this that is good news. The world markets are growing rapidly for you're fish, you're big game, you're tourism for forest products. The potential markets open to Alaska are double or triple in these fields. In my opinion, the forests of Southcentral Alaska are now, for the first time, economically operable, fully feasible now to occupy these forests and utilize them. It's not just a question of higher prices, which are developing around the world which will make it easier for you to cover your costs of extraction and processing, it's a question of a lot of other things. For example, we have developed now new pulping processes which allow us to make wood pulp with no effluent. Now that will sound strange, but you can actually do this. We have a duel mill in Saskatchewan which produces ground wood pulp for newspapers with no effluent. There are now alcohol pumping processes which produce pulp with no effluent. Not only that, they are closed loop systems that guarantee that you can recover a lot of byproducts like vadiliton(ph.) and fertilizer, lignin, xylitol sweeteners for chewing gum and pop. There are a whole range of things that you can do with these new processes. We're on the threshold - a breakthrough in technology in pulping. Salvage of beetle kill timber will yield immediate economic benefits, not just on the timber side, but in less fire danger, improved habitat, improved tourism and recreation potential. So I repeat don't separate please the salvage of the timber from these other values. Number five, what's the cost of doing nothing? In the classroom I had some fund with my students. I told them I just created Reeves number one law of policy formulation and it goes very simply - it says that anyone who recommends a policy without telling you what it will cost, that person is both reckless and irresponsible. The costs of uncontained beetle destruction and a subsequent restoration and of loss of property and the cost of fire suppression - these costs are enormous. Sooner or later, it will hit all of you in the pocketbook. Here are some costs of doing nothing. Catastrophic wildfires, you saw some this year - earlier this year. Number two, destruction of private property, parks, recreation areas, lower property values, higher home insurance costs. Number three, unprecedented damage to forest and watersheds accompanied by the erosion of land and major reductions in fish and wildlife populations. Number four, foregone options to diversify the income and employment basis of the state. Just as a sidelight for those of you who live in Anchorage, I saw a map this morning which shows that if you have a fire starting up.... TAPE 96-81, SIDE B Number 001 MR. REED CONTINUED: ....there are no water mains to fight fire with. So it's gonna take the firemen - they're gonna have to do some really inventive work to curtail a (indisc.) a fire of that magnitude. I'm not saying it's going to happen, but I'm saying the risk is so real that something has to be done to do some work in this populated area. After all, half the people of the state live in this region, within 50 miles of where we sit, so it must be very important to you in the legislature. Another loss is potential state revenue. You'll lose revenue from timber or other revenue sales. You'll spend more on clearing up the mess so that the revenue position of the state is very important to estimate. We'll see impairment Native lifestyles who depend for food chain and other things on a healthy stable renewable resource. You'll find that you'll see damage to your international reputation as a wise trustee of forest lands. So the cost of doing nothing -- now I said earlier that the cost of -- the guy who makes a recommendation and doesn't tell you what it's gonna cost, he's a bad character. So I'm gonna give you an idea of what it will cost to restore the land. These are just crude figures, but based on some experience we've had in British Columbia you might start here with the cost of $50 to $100 million a year to salvage the timber and replant and restore those watersheds. Fifty to $100 a year. Remember the forestry did not cause this problem, therefore, they should not be expected to foot the entire bill for rehabilitation, that would be absurd. I've heard a dozen times since I came here, people say well it wouldn't pay to rehabilitate because the timber you take out is only worth $30 a ton and that won't pay the costs, per acre, of restoring. And I say that's -- you're asking the wrong question, not whether the forest salvage work would pay the entire bill. That's not the question, the question is whether when you restore habitats and watersheds and viewscapes and you may have your self a $100 million bill, but lets hope that in the process you've got yourself some real handy revenue benefits on the other side and that these people will help to pay for the restoration. Onamisters(ph.) are strange people, particularly forest economists. They've got this little narrow focus on the tree, the wood yard and they refuse to look beyond that to the big picture, so I urge you to look at the big picture as you think about restoration. Item number six in my list of eight, I've almost finished. The goal must be world-class stewardship, not gridlock. Somehow this has to be broken. A full consensus may be entirely impossible. All I can say is that what I've seen happen in other parts of the world is that the politicians finally say, "We can't wait anymore, we've got to make a decision and we're not gonna get everybody to agree, but if we can get 90 percent of them to agree, we'll go ahead." It's incumbent on us to leave our assets as citizens, and I speak as a citizen of the world and a citizen, in some ways, of your own country because we're all in this together. It's incumbent on us to leave these assets in better shape than we found them. I learned that from my father in a farm, I didn't learn this in forestry school, I never went to forestry school. But I did learn that stewardship of resources means you leave it better than you found it. You've got a big task here to leave it better than you found it. Number seven, the urgency of this is if I haven't conveyed to you a sense of urgency then I've failed. I shouldn't have come. So then you go a strategic thinking and you begin say, "What will we do next?" And it's not that difficult. The paper that I have left with you will give you some of the things that have to be done. First of all, you treat the beetle as an emergency it truly is. Second, you prepare a strategic plan, an integrated one, comprehensive one. Third, you establish specific goals. How much habitat do you want? How many fish and wildlife? What populations do you want? What do you want out of the forest economy? Number four, you strengthen the mechanisms for cooperation and coordination. This will mean streamlining your regulatory system. It'll mean doing something to improve the response time among the various state and federal agencies. Number five, we'll have to build constituency support, residents, visitors, nongovernment agencies, state and federal officials, the whole works, students, educators. Number six, examine the revenue potential and the expenditure tracks. Number seven, review legislation and regulation. In the process, you'll pick some revisions perhaps and make specific people and specific functions in state government accountable to achieve your goals in the strategic plan. Number eight, address some information gaps. You already have more data than you need to make a strategic plan, so I would urge you not to wait until you got perfect data. You don't need perfect data for a strategic plan. Sometimes you need better data out of the field to correct a certain problem, but there can be no question that any longer delay would just simply add to the catastrophic nature of your problem. Nine, I would urge you activate some kind of a citizens force land advisory council to deal with the epidemic, not confining it to simply a government task force, but to make it a little broader, make sure the group is small and give them four or five months to come up with a strategic plan. If you give them two years, they'll take it. So give them a small budget and tell them that you've got to have a quick answer. When I ran the Canadian Forestry Service, I used to do that. They said, "Well we'll come back in six months and have some meetings and tell you." And I said, "You forgot, I have to find money for you in the legislature - in the Parliament. You will have to come to me with an answer next week." And they say, "Oh, we can't do that." And I'd say, "Fine, go away, leave (indisc.) me, I'll write it myself." Now I have a great firm belief that sometimes the best people to handle a thing like this are community leaders and legislators without technical academic credentials in hydrology or in forestry or entomology. Sure you've got to draw on these people, but perhaps it's not the best idea to put them in charge of a strategic plan. Number ten, table an annual report. Make it mandatory, in your legislation, to table an annual report on the status of Alaska's renewable resources every year and it'll be addressed to the House and Senate and it'll be distributed simultaneously to the public. This could be - I say again, could be done. You could have your first preliminary done be February of next year. Strategic planning isn't a complicated forecast. The strategist simply looks at the problems and looks at the direction you're headed and says, "Is that where you want to go?" That's strategic planning. So, you have a chance to choose your future here in Alaska. It won't be the chance you had ten years ago, but it's still very much a worthwhile choice and I thank you. Number 822 CO-CHAIRMAN GREEN: Thank you very much, Les. We have several state presenters. Is it the feeling of the committee that we should go right on through or answer some of the questions that may have arisen now and then go to the state presenters. I would prefer - it's a little after 2:00 now and I understand some of you may have to leave, so I would like you to get all the data if you can for the (indisc.). Charge ahead, okay. Number 847 UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: I just wanted to ask a quick question. Les, you said that paper was here. Is it in our packets or is it available? Thanks. Number 904 CO-CHAIRMAN GREEN: Okay, with that then we'll move on into the state organizations and we would hope that we would hold our comments to somewhere between five and ten minutes. I would like to also -- I understand Cliff Eames is of the Alaska Center for the Environment is here, yes. And perhaps at the conclusion of the other state agencies, you might like to make some comments as well Cliff if that's alright. We do have some room at the table here if some of the people would like to come up. First, I'd like to call on Tom Boutin from teleconference. Tom, are you still with us? TOM BOUTIN, STATE FORESTER, DIVISION OF FORESTRY, DEPARTMENT OF NATURAL RESOURCES: I certainly am, Mr. Chairman. Can you hear me okay? CO-CHAIRMAN GREEN: Very well, sir. Can everybody out there hear? Go ahead. MR. BOUTIN: Okay, good, I've got some notes that I'll read from if I might, Mr. Chairman. I know once I get to talking, of course I won't be able to hear you so I'll just go right on through and try to go as quickly as I can. For the record, Mr. Chairman, I'm Tom Boutin, State Forester and Director of DNR, Division of Forestry. Thanks for inviting me to talk with you today. I want to specifically thank you for inviting all of the players to the table. DNR asked that the United States Fish and Wildlife Service, the University, the Mental Health Land Trust and other landowners be invited. We also wanted the Department of Fish and Game to come since we've looked to them for answers to questions such as what will be the impact of the bark beetle on fish habitat, game habitat and water quality; and we work with them to mitigate the effects of logging on those values since logging followed by reforestation is the only large-scale response that has been available to DNR. Also, Fish and Game and the United States Fish and Wildlife Service have participated in a group of scientists and land managers called INFEST has has been looking at the infestation and I think the perspective that Fish and Game has is important here today. DNR also wants to thank you for inviting the environmental community. Environmental interests have had a key role in determining what options are available to public land managers who are trying to respond to the bark beetle. There's a briefing paper in your packet that the the Division of Forestry updated for this hearing. We have briefing papers on most of our initiatives and issues. We began updating this one when we happened to learn that the Society of American Foresters had planned meetings on this issue. The state of Alaska owns about 2.1 million acres of land in the Kenai Peninsula Borough. Half of that is in state parks, refuges and critical habitat areas. Of the 1.1 million acres that is in the public domain, 449,000 acres are forested land. Of that 449,000, over half is west of Cook Inlet and 201,000 is on the Kenai Peninsula and Kalgin Island. Most of that forested land is heavily impacted by the spruce bark beetle. The goals that DNR has had in its bark beetle program are to accelerate reforestation, maintain diverse forest types and ages to support a wide variety of public uses, and capture the economic value from infested trees before they decay. The key feature of our program has been timber sales. Out of the 201,000 acres on the Kenai Peninsula and Kalgin Island, timber sales for fiscal years 94, 95 and 96, totaled about 8,750 acres in 25 sales. Our 5 Year Sale Schedule for the Kenai Borough proposes sales on about 28,000 acres. Of that acreage, 19,000 is on the Kenai Peninsula. Prior to 1994, DNR had sold an average of 200 acres of timber sales, per year, on the Kenai Peninsula. In timber volume we've sold between 30 and 40 million feet of salvaged timber on the Kenai since 1994, up from a program of less than one million feet per year. This sort of increase in a public timber sale program has required additional public process. We asked Borough Mayor Don Gilman to put together a panel of citizens to review our 5 Year Schedule. We committed up front to complying with every recommendation upon which the panel could reach a consensus and there were 18 consensus recommendations. We addressed concerns underlying those recommendations on which there was no consensus as best as we could. We transferred money to the Department of Fish and Game so a habitat biologist could be on the ground with us while we did our silvicultural prescriptions and the timber sale layout. We borrowed a silviculturist from the United States Forest Service. We committed to having a public meeting in communities near every timber sale and the habitat biologist and the silviculturist came to every one of those meetings and explained our program. We met with media in Anchorage and on the Peninsula. We had most of the Peninsula media out on different timber sales. When a large sale, Kalgin Island, received no bids, we got together with the timber industry to design a sale that would sell and then it did sell. We asked the United States Forest to bring research people up from Portland to record how timber in different stages of beetle-caused decay held up for conversation to lumber, chips and veneer. We provided the logs and staff for the recovery study and passed the study results on to the industry and have used them in our sale appraisals. We have programs that do not include timber sales and we have also used those to respond to the bark beetle. Our forest stewardship program helps private landowners determine objectives for their forested land and what must be done to meet those objectives. As you might imagine, the bark beetle is a major feature of that program on the Kenai Peninsula. Our urban and community forestry program holds meetings and workshops, and distributes information for homeowners to use in combating the beetle. Our fire prevention program has held numerous defensible space workshops for rural homeowners on the peninsula. We produced a paper for the tour companies on the Kenai Peninsula to use to explain the beetle epidemic to their customers. With this record, Mr. Chairman, you could think that everyone cheer us on, but there has been some unhappiness. On September 22, 1994, Trustees for Alaska and four other groups appealed our 5 Year Schedule in Anchorage Superior Court. The case is known as Alaska Sportfishing v. DNR. For a period of time, the plaintiffs asked for a stay on each of our timber sale auctions, but all of the stays were denied. I think there were ten sales altogether for which the judge said we had done a good job and that the plaintiffs were unlikely to win on the merits of their case. Individual sales have been added to the complaint and the list of appellants has expanded to nine groups. For the first 18 months, there was constant churning of motions and filings; DNR had to catalog, index and file over 10,000 pages of documents. On June 5, 1995, the court ruled in DNR's favor on a motion to recover expenses in the case and Trustees sent a check for good funds. Final oral arguments are now scheduled for next month and a decision could come this year. We have also had a number of administrative appeals of our Kenai Peninsula timber sales, which have all been denied, and one appeal of our coastal consistency funding on the Falls Creek Sale, for which the Coastal Policy Council ruled in DNR's favor. I cannot honestly say that these administrative and judicial appeals have materially delayed any timber sales or our program has a whole but we certainly have spent time on them that would have been spent on another part of the program had they not come. Mr. Chairman, I think DNR has figured out how to responsibly and efficiently meet the new statutory public process requirements that came at the same time as the update of the Forest Resources and Practices Act. I don't think anyone in the timber industry anyway believes that DNR could be doing more to respond to the bark beetle using what we have for people and money. But I want you to know that 5 Year Schedules, Forest Land Use Plans, which are required for every timber sale, public meetings and field trips, appeals and litigation amount to significant expense for the sale of dead and dying spruce trees that are short, sparse, small and a great distance from much of a market to begin with. I need to mention the market from a land manager's perspective. Jack Phelps will talk about the market in some detail, and I share his long-term optimism, but right now owners of low grade timber are suffering. Pulplog prices have dropped from as much as 35 to as much as 75 percent since last fall. Companies that were actively buying Alaska wood for Lower 48 pulp mills have gone home. The remaining Alaska pulp mill is reported to be in very serious trouble. DNR has had a number of timber sale auctions at which there were no bids. In the Interior, those sales seem to be picked up later, but beetle-killed timber sales in Haines are not selling and one sale on the Kenai did not sell. Mr. Chairman, DNR's timber sale program, as a whole, returns more money to the state than it costs. The state has no deficit timber sale program. But salvage sales do not usually pay for themselves. In particular, Kenai sales only pay for part of the reforestation costs and usually do not pay for all of their preparation and administration. Reforestation of salvage sales is not required by the Forest Resources and Practices Act and private landowners requested and DNR recently completed regulations that set out the procedure for exempting salvage sales from reforestation. But DNR has committed to reforesting all timber sales to the stocking standards in the law even in the case of salvage sales. On the Kenai Peninsula, we have one buyer but all landowners are very fortunate to have that one buyer because if that firm had not developed their market, I doubt that anyone would have done so and the market would have completely shut us down at this time. As it is, I know of a number of firms in Southeast and in Southcentral that have extraordinarily large decks of low-grade logs. In this sort of market, Lower 48 pulp mills would not give a new supplier an order at any price. markets always change, but I don't know that we can find a good market in time for much of the dead and dying spruce that can be offered. I would like to cover just a few more topics. One is fire and the bark beetle. While the situation is not simple at all, and you have probably heard that, there is one simple fact. The Miller's Reach fire, the fire in Big Lake last June, was in no way involved with the spruce bark beetle. The spruce bark beetle was not a feature of that fire. Our briefing paper includes an attachment that describes the wildfire implications of the bark beetle epidemic. I also want to make it clear that DNR has not accomplished this alone. The Alaska Legislature enacted HB 121, sponsored by Representative Bill Williams, to allow expedited sale of salvaged timber. HB 212, sponsored by Representative Jeannette James, was thoroughly improved by the Resources Committees and allows a more expedited public process. Both of these bills were signed into law by Governor Knowles. Governor Knowles put money for salvage timber sales on the Kenai Peninsula into his capital budget. Governor Knowles' office has helped DNR work out some timber sale issues in a way that allowed us to proceed when some of those same issues on earlier timber sales had come to wreckage three years ago. We now get together in the Governor's office and work these things out. The United States Forest Service has given DNR money and expertise that it could not have found any other place. Funding to do the job came along with the Forest Service silviculturist that I mentioned a moment ago. That silviculturist went right to court with us and you can't ask for a better partner than that. The forest stewardship and urban and community forestry programs are totally federally funded. The Alaska Department of Fish and Game has helped at critical moments. Commissioner Frank Rue weighed in on our Falls Creek timber sale and as a large sale - largest salvage sale the state has ever had near Ninilchik on our Falls Creek timber sale in a way that allowed it to proceed. He told the very new Administration that sale had been done well and should proceed. Therefore, the appeal sitting on my then new boss' desk, John Shively, was denied and I think Trustees were put on notice that what they had begun in court would find its conclusion in court and I hope you can appreciate how important that was at that point in time. The timber industry, and particularly the Alaska Forest Association, has provided expertise, support and patience, especially patience perhaps for timber sale program. They have provided affidavits on a moment's notice time after time to help in our defense against Trustees. They've stood with us on our initiative to move to operator reforestation with our best customer, the firm that I mentioned had found a market for Kenai timber, showing all foresters some innovation in meeting reforestation requirements. I need to also mention that that firm is reforesting areas that it is not required to reforest even while experiencing a severe market downturn. When a judge makes an example out of a timber operator that showed a wholesale disregard for the law and the environment I think that's great. But do I cringe when the media beats up the timber industry in general because I think that this firm that I'm talking about, a firm which found a market for dying timber that we public land managers are stuck with, and then does reforestation on the Kenai out of its own profits. The DNR commissioner and his office have provided constant support for our Kenai program. Deputy Commissioner Marty Rutherford has traveled to countless late night public meetings on the Kenai to explain our timber sales. I've seen her bring her baby to more than one all day Saturday meeting down there. The Department of Law has been an exceptional partner in our timber sale program. The attorney assigned to us is a professional forester and he worked in the woods before going to law school. Our foresters believe in him and he works at least as hard as we do. Last spring, we gave the Attorney General a gallon of maple syrup and told him that the Division of Forestry would see that he never runs out so long as this attorney is assigned to us. Finally, I want to say I am proud of the division. We've gone from 200 acres a year to several thousand while being sued and sometimes beat up in different places. I think we've lost six or seven foresters to budget cuts during that period of time, since fiscal year 94, while at the same time forest practices on private land has required greater and greater amounts of work. During the same period we have improved our documents to where I think they are becoming both entirely responsive and also perhaps bullet proof. We'll see what the judge tells Trustees and us later this fall. There are some things that we have been unable to do. One of those is that we have not been able to find a wildlife manager who believes that the spruce bark beetle epidemic will be detrimental to wildlife in the long term. Likewise, we have not been able to find a fisheries biologist that believes that the epidemic will have a long term impact on fish habitat or water quality. Also, the wildlife managers and fisheries biologists we know are reluctant to say that logging, even if done well, will have fewer impacts than letting the epidemic run its course. I have an excerpt here that I want to read. It comes from a memo that Fish and Game Commissioner Frank Rue wrote to the Governor last July, and while it's probably not good to take it out of context, I think it summarizes very well what fish and wildlife managers have been telling foresters about the beetle epidemic on the Kenai for some time. Commissioner Rue wrote: "However, from a fish and wildlife perspective, the loss of large mature spruce trees will not have an impact on fish and wildlife species of primary interest to Alaskans. Fire and bark beetles are an integral part of the boreal forest and the animals that live there depend on the periodic renewal of the forest. We are not aware of any state strategy to deal with bark beetles, other than logging the trees before or after they are dead. However, this has its own problems." Mr. Chairman, I think you can see why DNR has not relied on impacts to fisheries or water quality, lost wildlife habitat, or for that matter lost tourism dollars, danger to recreation sites and real estate devaluation to justify our Kenai salvage program. DNR produces net revenues as well as jobs from state resources, but it has to deal in the real world of appeals and litigation. If we don't have at least a consensus among credible professionals for what we propose then we head in another direction. As stated a moment ago and at the top of our briefing paper, our goals for the state's bark beetle program are to accelerate reforestation, maintain diverse forest types and ages to support a wide variety of public uses, and capture economic value from infested trees before they decay. I'll wrap this up, Mr. Chairman, by telling you where DNR will go from here. We'll continue to prepare and offer the sales in the 5 Year Schedule of Timber Sales as the budget permits so long as there are buyers for our sales. That includes the Kenai Peninsula salvage sales in the Governor's capital budget that was signed into law last summer. We will continue to reforest all of our timber sales including salvage sales. At the same time, the prospects for doing as much timber production in the future as we have done in the past are quite small. As I stated earlier, we've lost six foresters to budget cuts since fiscal year 94 when our Kenai salvage program began. we lost a total of seven positions, not all of them foresters, in this fiscal year alone. At the present time, I've been directed by the legislature to come up with a way to replace Division of Forestry foresters doing Forest Practices Act inspections with a program in which timber landowners would hire certified consultants, and the budget realities that state government faces dictate these sorts of examinations even if I had not been specifically directed to do so by the legislature. The estimated five or six forester positions that we would be able eliminate, all but one of them filled right now, once the program of certified consultants is up and running, also lay out timber sales from Ketchikan to Kenai. So our timber sale program, including Kenai salvage sales, is definitely not on the increase. We'll continue to participate with the United States Forest Service in their annual forest insect and disease survey. We will continue to contribute to the group of scientists called INFEST that is looking at the bark beetle epidemic from an historic and scientific perspective. We will continue to distribute information to homeowners and landowners on bark beetle remediation and defensible space. These efforts are pretty much all federal funds so I cannot choose to cut them instead of timber sales. Over the years, I've talked to many groups in public meetings about the beetle infestation and our program - the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Trustee Council, the Resource Development Council, the Board of Fisheries, various chambers of commerce and many others - and I'll continue to do that. We'll continue to keep the Board of Forestry involved. We'll continue to defend the state vigorously in court. Finally, Mr. Chairman, DNR also enforces the Forest Practices Act on private and municipal land, along with our state land responsibilities for the private landowner response to the spruce bark beetle has brought an increased work requirement and we'll continue to live up to the law on that. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, I'll be happy to answer any questions you might have at any time. Number 2902 CO-CHAIRMAN GREEN: Thank you Tom. You bring a certainly different perspective than we've heard earlier. You mentioned a couple of things that perked my interest, the fact that you're schedule is somewhat predicated on a buyer and the ability to escape the stays of the Alaska Center for the Environment. You mentioned that the ADF&G commissioner had indicated that there was no adverse effect on habitat. And I'm wondering on that basis if Mr. Trasky, would you mind going next to kind of keep that thought in mind? And then we'll continue down as we've got them listed. Certainly, I hate to change that, but it seems like that's a kind of a package. Number 3002 LANCE TRASKY, SUPERVISOR, SOUTHCENTRAL REGION, DIVISION OF HABITAT AND RESTORATION, DEPARTMENT OF FISH AND GAME: Mr. Chairman, members of the committee, my name is Lance Trasky. I'm the Regional Supervisor for the Habitat Restoration Division, Department of Fish and Game, and our division has primary responsibility for forest practices and, as Tom Boutin pointed out, we work very closely with them in logging bark beetle issues. I guess the question that I was called here to answer today is, "How was the spruce beetle outbreak affect fish and wildlife populations in Alaska. And we've really done -- the department has four things to look at that. First, we searched the vast body of scientific literature for information on the impacts of spruce bark beetles and other similar insects on fish and wildlife populations. We did this through a computerized search of all the national biological data bases, so it was very extensive. As you are aware, the department has conducted long-term surveys of fish and wildlife populations throughout the state. Monitored these populations very carefully because that's how we managed the harvest, and so we have records in areas where we've had spark before and after these spruce bark beetle outbreaks have occurred in these areas. Third, we've looked at the historical literature on spruce bark beetle outbreaks in Alaska and as probably most people are aware, there has been thousands of them over the years and in particular there has been some pretty severe ones on the Kenai Peninsula and in the Mat-Su Valley in the early 1900s. The other things is we've considered, you know, what the experts within the department know about the life history of the animals that Alaskans are really interested in how these intuitively might be effected by loss of mature spruce trees. What we found is that there was really no scientific information in the literature to indicate that spruce bark beetles or other similar insects have caused declines in fish and wildlife populations in interest of Alaskans. And I have to define are the ones that are primary interest Alaskans are moose, black bear, brown bear, salmon and some of the recreational fish species. Certainly, species that are dependent on mature spruce trees like pine squirrels, spruce hens, marble merlots(ph.) are gonna be harmed by the loss of mature spruce trees. No question about that, but fortunately those are not of primary interest to Alaskans and we don't really manage them. So there are no ADF&G surveys of data that we have in these areas where the beetles have taken their toll on spruce trees which indicates that have been any declines in salmon, moose and bears in the areas effected. Actually, because of the very good weather conditions they probably favor the spruce, actually I think our salmon populations have been near historic records. And brown bear are declining on the Kenai Peninsula, but that's primarily because of defense of life and property. There is so much habitat now that there is more bears killed because of defense of property that are produced. So they are declining, but it has nothing to do with spruce bark beetles. We have also looked at historic mostly Forest Service reports from the early 1900s on very large bark beetle outbreaks on the Kenai Peninsula and I think you may have heard a little bit about this in Kenai. There was a report that we have, and I have some copies with me if you'd be interested then, most of the trees in the Homer area were dead by 1900 from an outbreak that occurred in the mid 1800s on both sides of the bay. Probably a lot of us are familiar with what it looks like before the latest bark beetle outbreak. So there was obviously a lot of recovery during that period of time and there is also records from the stumps down there about when diseases occurred, so there is some information on that. There was also a very interesting outbreak in the valley, in the early 1900s, that centered in the Willow Mountain area. It was very widespread and the forester predicted that it might wipe out all the spruce trees in the valley. Of course it didn't do that, but one interesting effect of it was it was centered on Willow Mountain and what happened on Willow Mountain is it did eliminate all the spruce trees. Willow Mountain came back in almost complete willow cover and as a result it's probably some of the moose habitat in the state, and the legislature actually designated it as a critical habitat area because of the importance of that area for moose. So some species such as moose depend on deciduous vegetation, not spruce, actually could benefit from something like this on certain sites. It depends on the site, as the forester said, what you get back. As I said, the loss of mature spruce trees will likely favor species which thrive on successional change and there is a lot of species such as moose, black bear, rabbits, ruffle grouse, that do benefit from this. And probably from the healthiest thing from a fish and wildlife perspective, actually have a mosaic of a forest where you have everything from early successional to mature trees and patches of this so the animals can move around. They have the edge effect. It gives your maximum production most long-term stability. So that's, from our perspective, that's the best situation. The spruce bark beetle epidemic will harm species, as I said, like certain birds, pine squirrels, marbled merlots, and as far as fish like salmon and stuff, it's probably a wash. If you just -- without any other effects, the loss of the trees, the riparian zones are important, but the vegetation there will probably still function and filter out cell turbidity and pollutants. We will get probably a lot big slug of large woody debris in streams. We would like to see it go in over a long time, but a lot of that wood in the smaller streams we found will stay there 100 to 150 years if it's not blown out in bigger steams and that comes from the U.S. Forest Service. So that's probably not a disaster. We understand there is a concern about changes in hydrology. That can happen when you move the forest cover within a drainage that you can see changes in hydrology. I think, you know, usually that's associated with extensive clear-cut logging where you get that sort of thing, but I suppose the bark beetles can have a similar effect. We have been monitoring the Kenai River. We haven't seen anything like that happen, but probably my guess is that the natural fluctuations of (indisc.) we've seen in recent years would mask that anyways unless you just removed all the vegetation from the hillside. So as Tom pointed out, we have been working with the Division of Forestry in laying out timber sales. Our objective there has been to protect fish streams on the Kenai, because of the value of the fish produced there and also there has been some opportunities to improve moose brows by encouraging birch, cottonwood, those species and we've been pretty satisfied. Mike Weaver and Steve Albert that have been working on those are here today. I guess in closing, I'd say if the department found and found indications that the spruce bark beetles were harming fish and wildlife of interest to Alaskans that we'd be the first ones to squawk. We'd be the first ones to ask, you know, somebody to do something about it if there was something that would improve the situation. But to date, we haven't seen a serious problem and we don't know of any solutions, you know, that would make the situation better. So anyways, I'll answer any questions you have. I hope that's -- covered most of the bases here. Number 3718 CO-CHAIRMAN GREEN: Well I appreciate that Les. Thank you very much. Next we have Greg Encelewski, Ninilchik Native Corporation. Number 3728 GREG ENCELEWSKI, ASSISTANT TO THE PRESIDENT, NINILCHIK NATIVE CORPORATION: Hi, I'm Greg Encelewski. CO-CHAIRMAN GREEN: Do you want to come up so that the people on teleconference can be sure and hear you. MR. ENCELEWSKI: Sure. It's an honor to be able to speak here today. Yes, I am with Ninilchik Native Corporation. I serve as the assistant to the president. And as private landowners on the Kenai Peninsula, no one wants - no one more than us wants to see healthy trees on our lands and that's our goal. However, we have different response to the spruce bark beetle than the state at large has. We were aggressively harvesting our lands and pursuing timber harvest and trying to reap economic value off of these dead trees and in the process were having improvements put upon our lands in the way of roads and access to our lands and that will serve well for future things like hunting and access there. We also have been able to put shareholders to work and local people to work and help out the local economy, and of course the stumpage value that's derived from the saw logs and the pulp. Ninilchik Native Corporation has approximately 100,000 acres that have been patented to it and, of that, roughly 70,000 is on the east side and 30,000 on the west side of Cook Inlet and we're still 65 to 70,000 acres shy of our entitlement that still hasn't been conveyed to us. Presently, we have actual ownership to about 65,000 acres due to some buying and selling and distributing some 40 acre parcels to our shareholders, and of that 65,000 acres I'm told that 50,000 acres of it has been infested by the beetle - so an astronomical percentage. And so we believe that the best approach is to do what we can to get some economic value out of that and, obviously, we want to see new trees come back. We have the greatest vested interest being the landowner. And one of the things that has helped us to be effective is having actually - having the presence down there and having people in the field to tour the logging operations every day, drive the roads, inspect things, and that has helped us in the areas of quality roads and cleanup and... Hasn't always gone perfectly, there is a learning curve, but over time we've learned more and more and so we're getting better. Also, there is the Forest Practices Act which has specific requirements regarding reforestation and stream side buffers. And so not only do we have our own guys who are patrolling and monitoring things, but we have the different state agencies reviewing the sales and going on inspections. Another thing that we have noticed differently is that we have actually had timber buyers literally knocking down our door to buy our timber. We've had a tremendous deal of interest. We manage the large timber tracks of Cook Inlet Region, Incorporated, and manage and market their timber and have noticed an incredible amount of interest in purchasing our sawlogs and pulp. And we've also noticed that a lot of our logging areas end up looking quite well and are not unsightly. Just this fall, I was moose hunting and driving through many of those roads and they're not an unsightly site. We engage in what's referred to I believe is selective harvesting. We cut down to a 6-inch top. And then in CIRI's case they have with their high value recreational lands, they only cut down to a 9-inch top, and then in both cases we leave two seed trees of 12-inch DBH. However, the beetle has absolutely no remorse. The beetle kills the two seed trees that are left. The beetle kills the trees in the high value recreation areas where we leave the trees at 9-inch DBH or less. The beetle kills those even under 6 inches, the beetle kills those trees as well. As far as reforestation goes what we've noticed is the areas that have where the ground has been disturbed by the different - whether it's machinery or logging equipment in there, those are the areas that tend to have the best results as far as regrowth, that the natural disturbance of the soil and turning up the nutrients ends up working best. As an example, the summer logging tends to have better results as far as regrowth because the tires or whatever it is, the equipment can penetrate the soil whereas winter logging we haven't had near the success in regrowth. However, we do have loggers go back in the summer and scarify those areas that were winter logged. We do take part in seed cone collections and have a nursery in Washington that has a stock - a seed source stock. And so anyway, we believe that this is the best course of action and it's providing - it's providing jobs that were able to - - one of the few Native corporations in Alaska that are able to provide dividends to their shareholders due to this and -- so anyway, I'll close with that. Number 4404 CO-CHAIRMAN GREEN: Thank you very much Greg. The next person we have to hear from is Larry Hudson, U.S. Forest Service. Number 4411 JIM CAPLAN, DEPUTY REGIONAL FORESTER, NATURAL RESOURCES, U.S. FOREST SERVICE: Mr. Chairman, my name is Jim Caplan. I'll be taking Mr. Hudson's place today. CO-CHAIRMAN GREEN: Could you spell your last name? MR. CAPLAN: Certainly, it's C a p l a n. CO-CHAIRMAN GREEN: Just like it sounds. MR. CAPLAN: Yup. CO-CHAIRMAN GREEN: Thank you. MR. CAPLAN: Although frequently spelled with a K. CO-CHAIRMAN GREEN: Okay. Number 4426 MR. CAPLAN: Larry was kind enough to take my place on the trip to the Kenai yesterday, so I'm taking his here today. I'm the Deputy Regional Forester for Natural Resources with the Forest Service here in Alaska. I want to thank you for the opportunity, you Mr. Chairman and the members, for being able to appear here today and talk about the Forest Service and it's management of the national forest here with respect to the beetle. You have already heard from many people, and I won't repeat, the contributions that my agency has made since after the turn of the century with respect to this infestation. It's been a fact of life for us beginning when we arrived here as managers in 1902, and continues on now. It has always been a considerable concern to foresters and forest managers here. You've heard about he State Private Forestry Division and it's contributions to the state - money that's put forth for state programs. Also how entomologists with State and Private Forestry, including Dr. Holstein and our Research Division, has been responsible for much of the information that we have available to this when we're trying to manage the forest with respect to the beetle. The national forests in Alaska are at one time national forests, they are Alaskan forests and they are community forests. We respect our relationship at all those levels and that forest health has long been an issue, nationally, that the Forest Service has taken up and has lead the discussion, along with a lot of other interested parties, about how to manage forests into a certain condition of health. Health is defined as the ability to heal, and thus, in many cases what we talk about is how we can restore an ecosystem or a forest to a practical level where it is responsive to management over time and can respond well from devastation. You hear mixed views about the health of the forests in Alaska, particularly when you see an infestation like the beetle.... TAPE 96-82, SIDE A Number 001 MR. CAPLAN: ...jump up and run a marathon today although a few folks here look that way. And I guess the story to be told there is that we have to decide, collectively, as national forest - as Alaska's national forest and it's community forests of what state of health we want for these forests. The Forest Service frequently practices various kinds of removal of trees and recreation areas, for instance, in order to maintain public health and safety in those recreation areas. Our campgrounds and so forth regularly get silvicultural treatment to remove dead trees or beetle affected trees. This is because we are managing them for a state of health that respects the public and its need to be safe while it recreates. When we get into a broader applications, frequently we find that people in the state of Alaska, national organizations and even some community leaders oppose large scale treatment of forests to remove the beetle and beetle kill timber. You certainly find this all across the United States, so it's not peculiar to Alaska, but it's certainly a part of the condition of managing forests here. And failing a lot of agreement in our communities and among the many professions that now are involved in the management of national forests and the ecologists, various kinds of forest managers, silviculturists, entomologists and others, but failing the ability to bring a consensus to how that should be managed at the community level, we find it very difficult to proceed with large scale applications. Many people are concerned about what they see as a penetration of wild lands by roads and by various kinds of ground disturbing activities. I don't expect that to abate unless we see leadership coming from many sectors of our society in trying to deal with this problem. On the Chugach National Forest, which is where a majority of our management occurs that's connected with the beetle, we've offered several timber sales in the last year and some of that work has been done. Other sale offerings were withdrawn when they were appealed and then when we realized that national direction had been put forth by the secretary of Agriculture, which limited our options at least until the first of the year. We intend, as an agency, to reoffer some if not all of that timber volume after the first of the year, but frankly we too are confounded to some degree by a lack of a receptive market for that product should it be offered, we'll see. In the past we've offered and had it not sold, since that's been our method for gaining removal of the trees were, you know, kind of stuck if we don't have somebody who shows up and bids on it. One of our success stories, and I think it's a notable one, is the area around Cooper Landing and that was a joint effort between state and private forestry in the national forest system folks -- and they gained a great deal of community support for treatment in that area, worked closely with the community to get what they wanted out of the local forest and, in fact, I think did a very fine job of treating that area. That model I think is one that we should study for the possibilities that it might offer elsewhere. Those are my remarks today, Mr. Chairman, thank you. Number 406 CO-CHAIRMAN GREEN: Thank you Jim, appreciate that very much. We also have from the Alaska Cooperative Extension Mike Fastabent. Would you care to make some comments? Number 419 MIKE FASTABENT, UNIVERSITY OF ALASKA, FAIRBANKS - ALASKA COOPERATIVE EXTENSION SERVICE: Sure. This spelling really isn't close. CO-CHAIRMAN GREEN: Oh it isn't. Is the pronunciation even close? MR. FASTABENT: The pronunciation is right. CO-CHAIRMAN GREEN: How do you spell it? MR. FASTABENT: F a s t a b e n t - Fastabent. Again, it's a real honor to be here. It's a really unique experience for me as I have never been involved in something like this before. I work for the Alaska Cooperative Extension which is the educational outreach branch, University of Alaska, Fairbanks. Number 457 CO-CHAIRMAN GREEN: Excuse me just one moment. You speak rather softly. Can the teleconference sites hear. Number 503 SENATOR ROBIN TAYLOR: Mr. Chairman, this is Senator Taylor down in Sitka and he's really hard to hear down here. He's breaking up pretty badly. If you could, when this witness is done I'd like to make a comment or two as I'm gonna have to leave. Number 417 CO-CHAIRMAN GREEN: If you could be brief sir. SENATOR TAYLOR: Just after the witness will be fine. Number 520 MR. FASTABENT: I'll try to be brief, I know we're running a little late. My position is educational outreach. It was created - is funded by State and Private Forestry and what I do is just that - educational outreach to private landowners on how to manage for spruce beetle. Whether or not it's mitigated a disturbance that's actually occurring on their property to try and protect - increase the health of their trees keeps beetles from coming into their property. There has been a huge public response to this educational outreach service. Over the past 15 months we've gotten over 3,000 phone calls at the extension office. We had dozens of classes. There is a huge educational need of the public who is very well aware of the spruce beetle activity that's going on. I also do site visits. I work with landowners a lot and I guess what I can bring to the table today that is different than what you've heard is just the concerns that I'm hearing from the public. Admittedly, the public that is contacting me is biased in that they're proactive and that they want to be doing something, but I'm working with an awful lot of people that are spending an awful lot of time, an awful lot of energy, in some cases an awful lot of money, because to the private landowner it doesn't matter whether this is a natural disturbance, it doesn't matter whether or not any of this other stuff -- they see it come on their property, it has definite negative effects. Losing large spruce trees on private property can affect everything from real estate values. It becomes hazard trees, not to mention that many people have great emotional attachments to the larger trees. A lot of people have built their houses, designed their property around existing large spruce trees. They see this as nothing less than disaster that's coming. And the concerns that I'm getting is these folks are spending their own time, their own money, their own energy, to deal with this and yet they look around and they see the spruce bark beetle sort of walking unhindered across public lands right on to their private properties. They realize that these beetles did not start on private land, they started on public land and marched across any number of overlapping land ownerships. They're wondering why if they recognize it on their property as a disturbance why there has been no activity against it especially in the more urban rural interface where all of the different types of concerns that are raised about putting in access into roadless areas or go into pristine areas really don't apply at all. We have access in the Anchorage bowl. There is no place here that we could not get to and treat that would cause a large disturbance to get to. They realize that. Still they see no action. And I guess if anything that is what I would hope to bring to the table today - just the concern that the private citizens have or what they see as whether or not it's a natural predictable occurrence, is really a moot point. They see it as something that's coming in and destroying their property, they're seeing it destroying the aesthetics of their park plans, they're seeing all the large trees at Kincade die, they're seeing all the trees along the hillside die. I'm on site telling them that they're are lots of things that you can do from chemical insecticides to any number of good argiculture(ph.) types of things. They have this information that there are techniques, they want to (indisc.). Number 948 CO-CHAIRMAN GREEN: Thank you. That's probably a common question to you, I can understand that. That brings us then to Jack Phelps the Executive Director of Alaska Forest Association. Number 1001 SENATOR TAYLOR: Representative Green. CO-CHAIRMAN GREEN: Yes. SENATOR TAYLOR: Might I make a comment or two, I'm gonna have to leave here. I have to leave here, I have another appointment I have to go to. CO-CHAIRMAN GREEN: I apologize Senator Taylor. Please go ahead. Number 1009 SENATOR TAYLOR: No problem. I wanted first to thank you, Mr. Chairman, and the Resource Committee members for bringing this matter to our attention again. I was making speeches on the floor of the House on this subject seven years ago. Terry Martin started joining me in that effort when Cooper Landing became very obviously hit back over six years ago. I think that this entire educational process that you have going on today is to be applauded and especially I applaud those professionals who have come forward today and told us very clearly and very candidly where the problem lies and that this is not something that's untreatable. It doesn't take rocket scientists to handle this thing. It's merely a matter of going out and allowing our professionals to have the budgets they need to do the work that is necessary to be done, but this entire process is strong evidence, in my opinion Mr. Chairman, of a gross failure of stewardship and an indictment upon all of the public agencies that are responsible for the health of these forests. It seems as though anymore we're much more concerned about doing polls and listening to some group of people who are not experts in the field who merely have some emotionalism to expound, And in the process we have allowed a great and vast forest resource to decay, rot and be destroyed. I applaud you for bringing this, again, to our attention and I hope that I can rely upon you and the members of your good committee and those professionals that have come forward today to provide us with the support and the courage during the next legislative session to systemically begin to address this problem for the first time in Alaska, both as a state and hopefully with the cooperation of the federal government, the University of Alaska, the boroughs and also those private landowners that are impacted within the area. I'm sorry if I've taken longer than I probably should have, Mr. Chairman. And I've been sitting here though throughout the meeting and I really appreciate the good work your doing and the good testimony that we've had and I thank you very much for taking our time to do that. Number 1235 CO-CHAIRMAN GREEN: Yes, thank you. Senator Leman has a response to that sir. Number 1240 CHAIRMAN LEMAN: Thank you, Senator Taylor, for that comment. I don't know if you've heard the, Robin, the introductions in the beginning, but we are also joined by the Senate Resources Committee and Senator Halford and myself are present here today. And I appreciate you consistent approach toward the spruce bark beetle challenge. I recall those speeches on the floor of the House and they were extensive. I appreciate your interest. Number 1305 SENATOR TAYLOR: Yes, thank you too Senator Leman. It was mere oversight on my part and I did hear the introduction and I didn't know if you and Rick were still there or not, but thank you so much for taking your time today to do this. I really appreciate it. Number 1318 CO-CHAIRMAN GREEN: Thank you. Jack. Number 1320 JACK PHELPS, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, ALASKA FOREST ASSOCIATION: Thank you Mr. Chairman. For the record, my name is Jack Phelps, the Executive Director of the Alaska Forest Association, also a member of the Society of American Foresters. I've worked in the forest products industry on and off since 1969. The association represents the timber industry throughout Alaska. To that end, we support efforts that enhance economic opportunities by making the forest resources of Alaska available for sustained harvest. We believe that timber harvests are an appropriate management tool for public land managers both to maintain forest health and provide public benefits from publicly held land. Today I will be discussing with you the market situation with respect to Alaska timber generally, and beetle killed and beetle damaged timber in particular. I also want to talk about the constraints that complicate the problem of marketing beetle killed timber from public lands in Alaska, and offer some thoughts on what you might be able to do about those constraints. As you have heard from the various experts today, the spruce beetle problem in Alaska is widespread and crosses all ownership boundaries. As you might expect, the private landowners have been the most responsive to this forest health situation. Regional and village Native corporations own large tracts of beetle infested land. Those firms have been logging and reforesting their beetle invested land for the last six to eight years. They have been able to sell into the general market and several niche for both round logs and chips. Alaska white spruce has some qualities that make it very desirable commodity in some markets. For example, the principle purchaser of white spruce on the Kenai Peninsula today is Anchorage based Circle DE Pacific which has a chip handling facility on Homer Spit. The company sells wood chips to two Japanese paper companies for use in newsprint and high quality bond paper. Since 1993, the company has progressively increased its shipments from 100,000 bone dry units in that year, to 135,000 bone dry units this year. It expects to increase shipments yet again in 1997, to 150,000 bone dry units. The port facility is capable of handling twice that volume. Circle DE Pacific's customers find the Alaska chips particularly desirable because of their white color. There are economic and environmental advantages to using chips that do not have to be bleached. Alaska has an advantage in this market, in that the year-round ice free port of Homer is 2.5 days closer to Japan than is the United States West Coast. A potential competitor for this market is Russia, and it behooves Alaska to develop the market as much as possible, so that we can maintain a competitive edge. One factor important to that purpose is timely timber sales and to be best suited, the spruce must be harvested soon after its demise if it is from a beetle infested stand, which in the case of our Southcentral timbers is most of it. The Alaska Forest Association has recently released a study of the Pacific Rim market demand for Alaska timber which I have provided for you today along with my written comments. Now while that report focused primarily on Tongass timber as being well positioned to satisfy market demand in the Pacific Rim, the findings of that study have implications for other timber coming from Alaska. The study shows that countries of the Pacific Rim are are expected to increase imports of timber and lumber over the next several decades. It shows that the traditional sources of supply for this market, particularly the Pacific Northwest, are not in a good position to respond to the growing market. For instance, production from federal lands in the five state region of the Pacific Northwest has decreased in the last six years by 82 percent. Private production of timber in the same five state area has declined by 19 percent, and that on state lands have declined by about 35 percent. The study also shows that the often predicted increase in supply from the American Southeast is unlikely to develop, leaving a significant opportunity for another American region, such as Alaska, to step to the plate. Our geographic position is a decided advantage. Direct competition from countries like New Zealand and Chile who are increasing their harvest, is likely to be minimal, since the type of timber available from them differs considerably from that grown here. Now Scandinavia and Russia, however, are direct competitors. Given our geographic advantage over the former we should be able to compete effectively, if other constraints do not hamper our efforts. Now all is not rosy on the market side as you might know. As you are aware I'm sure the current market is in a serous slump. Pulp prices, especially, have been extremely low in recent months. Those companies, such as Circle DE Pacific, who have long term agreements with purchasers can weather such a slump. It is tougher on others. Nor is the price of chips the only problem. Low quality sawlogs have experienced as much as two-thirds drop in market value since last year. But remember the market is cyclical, and to whatever degree we can avoid it, we ought to not allow short term problems to dissuade us from working to develop long term markets for Alaska's timber. Artificial constraints, that is non-market constraints, placed on developing timber resources on public lands in Alaska remain a concern to the industry. Most people believe that higher logging costs in Alaska are at least partly to blame for our inability to take full advantage of the market opportunities that are out there. Part of the problem is that beetle-caused deterioration in the wood reduces its value, but it is also true that environmental protections are greater in Alaska and those protections cost money and right now the entire cost of the protections is absorbed by the owners of the tree whether it be private or public. Due to changes in state law made in 1990, state timber sales are subject to incredibility burdensome and expensive public processes. The state estimates that it has one public meeting and produces about 50 pages of new documentation for every million board feet of timber it offers. Can you imagine that in the Tongass, Mr. Caplan? Now bear in mind that this often isn't Tongass National Forest old growth, so what we have done is add huge extra costs to what is often extremely marginal timber. The Nineteenth Legislature took some steps in the last two years with HB 121 and HB 212 to provide some relief to this problem, and we appreciate especially the work your respective committees and the work that you did on those bills, but the problem remains. And I would suggest a couple of things that you folks could do about this in the near future. One of them is you simply have got to look very carefully at how you cut the budget. If you look at what you've done to the Department of Natural Resources relative to what you've done to some other agencies, I think they've suffered a disproportionate amount of the reductions in recent years and I think it's very very important that if you want to do something about this spruce bark beetle problem, you have absolutely got to start protecting the foresters in our Division of Forestry in the Department of Natural Resources. We can't afford to lose any more foresters and those foresters are good guys. I know them, they're professionals, they're hard working. We need to make sure that we have professionals in our Division of Forestry to put up timber sales. So I urge you to take very very careful look at those issues when you start cutting the budget, because frankly, for the last couple of years I think if you look at the facts you'll see that our timber program has returned a positive return for us and in addition to helping us with our forest health problem, I think it's very very important that you take good care of the Division of Forestry foresters so that we can have timber sale program in the future. The other thing that you could do is simply put some more money into the capital budget like we did a couple of years ago to put up some of these salvage sales. But in doing that, you're also going to have to include some directives that tell both the Division of Forestry and the Department of Fish and Game to cooperate to make those timber sales put up in a way that we can afford to harvest them. The Thunder Creek sale in Haines is a good example. They just put a bridge across the Kelsall River instead of having to helicopter beetle killed timber, they'd probably find a buyer. I know some of my companies would be interested in harvesting that timber if they didn't have chop or log it, and all it takes is a bridge across the Kelsall River. So I would suggest that the state look at very carefully. I have spoken to Commissioner Rue about it and he willing to discuss it with us. Let me point out something else about scale here. Legislators deliberated about whether the Forest Land Use Plan exemption in HB 212 should be 10 acres or 20 acres. There is little doubt in my mind that an exemption of 20 acre timber sales or an exemption for salvage sales from forest land use plans would have brought a veto in that legislation. But at the same time, some people who want more treatment of the spruce bark beetle epidemic talk about logging hundreds of thousands or even millions of acres. Now while from an industry perspective that might be nice, I think public support for an increase of that magnitude is probably going to be tough to generate. But even if you could get public support, I believe there will be strong resistance from the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. I think we all need to work together to try to figure out what we can do with respect to increasing our level of harvest. Then again, I think you'll have to look at fundamental changes in the law because it's the law that gives direction to managers of public land and it's the law that gives public land managers a place to hide from decisions, which sometimes I think that's what they want to do, both on state and federal level. Now on the federal side we have a bigger problem. The Chugach National Forest suffers from the same inertia that has paralyzed timber sale programs in national forests all across the country. Congress provided an opportunity to change that recently when it passed the salvage law last year. Instead of responding and addressing a widespread forest health problem, the Clinton Administration chose to find a legal way to avoid obeying the law. The result here in Alaska was the Forest Service got a lot of people excited about sales that never happened. Some of us wonder if any of them were intended to happen. The problem on federal lands is complicated by the fact that much of the spruce beetle infestation on federal lands occurs on lands that are not managed for timber resources. That is they're not under the jurisdiction of the Forest Service. They're in park lands, wildlife refuges or other BLM lands. One action I think that Alaska needs to take is for the legislature to work together with Governor Knowles to press the federal government to take action on its lands that will aid in restoration of forest health while creating some economic opportunities for Alaskans. It's time for Alaskans to speak up with a loud and consolidated voice. My association stands ready to assist you, even as we are currently working with the Governor to get a better recognition by the national administration of the needs of Alaska's forests and her people. Recent actions by the White House have been less than encouraging, but we are not yet ready to give up. Thank you for the opportunity you've given me to speak today and I'm certainly willing to answer any questions the committee members might have. Number 2455 CO-CHAIRMAN GREEN: Thank you Jack. We have two more people to be heard and we are running a little late, so I would like to give them a chance to be heard and then we'll it up for questions. So with that, Cliff Eames of the Alaska Center for the Environment please make your comments, then we have Catherine Thomas of the Chamber of Commerce. Number 2522 CLIFF EAMES, ALASKA CENTER FOR THE ENVIRONMENT: Representative Green, Senator Leman, members of the committee, my name is Cliff Eames, I'm with the Alaska Center for the Environment. We're a private conservation organization with over 3,000 members. I want to thank the committees and in particular Senator Leman and his staff for allowing me to speak to you today. I was also delighted to learn this morning that the Department of Fish and Game had been added to the agenda. A major point that I want to make in just a minute is that I think we need to hear from the broadest possible variety of both specialists and forest users. A little background, I too as many other members here around the table have been dealing with this spruce bark beetle issue for many years, for longer than a decade. I was the conservation community representative on the U.S. Forest Service's working group, that's their advisory group for their Cooper Landing planning project and more recently I played the same role on the Forest Service's Moose Pass working group. I was also the conservation community representative on the state of Alaska's forest health task force. So although I certainly don't have the answers I'd like to have, I think I know the questions and a lot of the issues tolerably well. A couple of things quickly, we don't dispute, I don't think anybody would, that there are a lot of dead and dying white and Sitka spruce trees in Southcentral Alaska and other parts of the state. We have eyes, you know we drive the highway, we get out into the forests, there is a significant infestation. The question has always been not is there an infestation, but what's the appropriate response to the infestation? I also want to make it very clear that I am addressing my remarks to the public plans, not private plans. In that regard though I would point out as we've learned today that in fact a great deal of timber is coming off the private lands in Southcentral Alaska. It's not as if we're not logging in response to the beetle, but it's happening on private lands. Yesterday in Kenai there seemed to be some surprise at the fact that this was occurring on private lands and wasn't occurring at the same rate on public lands. To me it was very obvious why that's happening. On private lands a primary purpose, often the primary purpose of those lands is to generate direct revenue, often in a timely fashion as possible. Most of our public lands are the ones that we're addressing today are multiple use public lands. Commercial logging is one of the possibilities for those lands, but there are awful lot of other resources and uses which deserve equal consideration and the public advocates for those other resources and uses. I wanted to start off getting into a little bit more of the meat of it by keying in a press release released by the Senate and House majorities about this meeting which I think can be very illuminating. There is a statement in here which reads, "We've all seen the red trees and we must recognize the impact of this devastation on wildlife, water quality, anesthetics. We need scientific information from professional foresters and I believe this hearing is a good start." Well I think we need to go beyond professional foresters with all due respect. If I were to purchase a home - if I wanted to purchase a home I'd go to a realtor and not a car salesman. Some what analogously, if I wanted advise on how to grow commercial timber I'd go to a forester. But again referring back to the press release, if I wanted advise on how to manage wildlife I'd to to a wildlife biologist; fisheries, fisheries biologist; water quality or water supply, a pollution expert, a chemist, a hydrologist; aesthetics, the Forest Service has viewshed experts and I guess landscape architects, I'd go to a specialist in aesthetics and scenic beauty and not a forester. And I think it's really really important that all of our public decision makers including, of course, the legislature seek out as many pieces of advice, information, opinion, facts and so on as they possibly can. I know that in my experience over a decade I hear very different recommendations from foresters than the ones I hear from other specialists and similarly users of the forest. Now the lawsuit that the Center for the Environment is involved in regarding the state's 5 Year Schedule for the Kenai/Kodiak area is frequently described as "The Trustees Lawsuit" or the "Conservationists Lawsuit" or recently here "The Alaska Center for the Environment Lawsuit," and that's only partly true. Certainly there are conservationists who are involved in that lawsuit, but other plaintiffs who have a very serious concern about proposed logging on state lands on the Kenai Peninsula include the Alaska Sportfishing Association, Trout Unlimited, and on the peninsula several commercial fishing organizations who cater to sportfishing interests. Similarly, we have an association of tourism interests, the Alaska Wilderness Recreation and Tourism Association. This is a bunch of mostly business people with Alaska owned and operated tourism business who have had tremendous concern about some of the logging that was being proposed on the Tongass and they expressed their concern very forcefully as well. So I don't think it's fair to say that it's just the Alaska Center for the Environment or the Sierra Club who are perhaps obstacles to large scale logging and road building in response to the beetle. And I don't think Jim mentioned it today, perhaps he did - Larry did yesterday. What do some other members of the public feel about large scale logging and road building in response to the beetle. Larry Hudson said yesterday on Kenai Peninsula that there was a great deal of public opposition to the Forest Service's recent proposals to log on Turnagain Arm and along the Resurrection Pass Trail and Six Mile Creek, and there was a lot of public opposition and it was all types of users. It wasn't, again, just the Center for the Environment or conservation groups. I think you need to recognize that this still is a very controversial issue and that there is substantial public opposition to large scale logging and road building. I would also quarrel with some of the conclusions that were drawn yesterday regarding the icier study that attempted to assess public opinions about how we respond to the beetle. As I recollect that study, it was far from a mandate for large scale logging and road building, especially in the back country, where when the question was asked about the back country, the public was split almost evenly on whether logging and road building was an appropriate response in the back country. So there is clearly no mandate. I would also suggest that if we asked the public the direct question, "Do you support road building and large scale logging in head waters of some of our most valuable salmon and steelhead streams like the Kenai River or the Anchor River or Deep Creek or the Ninilchik?" You'd probably get a lot fewer than the approximately 50 percent who might have supported it when the open- ended question was asked. Very important question, which I think is well resolved, but may be not stated frequently enough, "Can we prevent the spread of the bark beetle?" I know of almost no experts who will say that we can prevent the spread of the bark beetle at this stage. I would actually suspect that it will be very difficult to have found somebody ten years ago who would say that we really could prevent the spread of the bark beetle over the landscape as a whole. For that reason, I question somewhat the assumption that public land managers are guilty of negligence in not logging spruce bark beetle killed or at risk trees adjacent to private lands. I just don't think we really could have prevented the bark beetle from infesting private trees regardless of what we did. Fires is a very important issue. I'd like to touch on that briefly. It's a great concern to many people for obvious reasons. And I point out one thing and that is that logging can cause wildfires. The Division of Forestry's fire prevention officer, one of them, just a couple of weeks ago in a newspaper article said that at least nine of the wildfires that occurred on the Kenai Peninsula this season were started by logging operations. We have to recognize that on the peninsula almost all of our fire starts are caused by humans. We have, I think, maybe an average of one or two lightening caused fires each year, so we need to address human fire starts. Logging operations can cause a fire through slash piles and through roads. If you look at our fire starts in the Kenai Peninsula almost of them are clustered around our road system. As we build more and more logging roads, we are very likely creating more opportunities for wildfire starts that we don't want to see started. We may approve of a number of prescribed fires, but some of the wildfires obviously create problems. It's a very complicated issue - the fire start issue and I think we need to be really careful about not talking about holocausts necessarily. One of my colleagues tried working with some agency people to arrive at a statement that describes the effect that the bark beetle might have on fires and the best that she and the agency people could come up with is that whether living or bark beetle killed trees offer the greater risk depends on complex specific changing local conditions. Very very complicated. We can't really make too many generalizations about the effect that the bark beetle has on wildfires. Our spruce trees are very resinous - our live spruce trees and create in themselves a very serious fire risk if we have dry weather and winds. As far as fires are concerned, there are a couple of things we can do besides a lot of logging and road building in the back country. One, again, is to try to prevent fire starts with public education, fire closures, you know where appropriate, and the agencies are helping do this and I commend them for it, help private citizens create defensible space around their homes and businesses so that if there is a wildfire, the likelihood of losing the homes or business goes down dramatically. A couple more points, I appreciate your time here. I think the question of how much public money it might cost to undertake some of the treatments that are proposed by some of the foresters and our forestry agencies is a very important one as all of us know. Les Reed suggested that we maybe spend $50 to $100 million a year to do this. I think we need to be asking the Alaskan public how they want to spend scarce public monies, and it might be that they don't to spend a great deal of money on logging and road building beetle killed trees on public lands when we hear from departments like Fish and Game that are telling us that they don't believe that the beetle is having a serious impact on some of the resources and values that we care about deeply. I'll stop there and just once again say how much I appreciate the chance to speak to you today though - thank you. Number 3644 CO-CHAIRMAN GREEN: Okay, Cliff thank you and the last speaker we have is Ed Thomas, representing the Alaska Chamber of Commerce. Number 3659 CATHERINE THOMAS, INCOMING CHAIR, ALASKA STATE CHAMBER OF COMMERCE: Thank you, I'm Catherine Thomas. I'm the incoming chair of the Alaska State Chamber of Commerce. I just wanted to let the committees know that we are hearing from our local chambers. They're very concerned about the spruce bark beetle epidemic. We expect this to be one of the top issues in the next legislative session, so when our members come to Juneau I think you'll find them talking about this so you can expect to see us at the table on this issue. We might be the consolidated voice the Alaska Forest Association is looking for. Thank you. Number 3734 CO-CHAIRMAN GREEN: Thank you. UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: Catherine, could I just interject right there what Catherine (indisc.) Catherine, can you stay there? MS. THOMAS: Yes. UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: What specifically might that united voice be saying? Would it be saying things like what these gentlemen were suggesting we need to do some work aggressive expenditures and capital and also in the operating budget for this or it's kind of a combination of a lot of things that we've heard today? What types of things may we do legislatively. Number 3758 MS. THOMAS: I think you'll hear the combination and I think what we'd like to see is a plan. The concern now is their tourism, recreation - if it's effecting the watershed area in fisheries. So the community concern is their local business, the aesthetics of their community, and what we haven't seen is a strong effort and a strong plan. And next week is our annual meeting. There were some requests to bring this up and try to come out with a resolution. I'd like to see us work with the committee and with some of the organizations just until our December meeting and see if we can come out with a resolution that will help the legislature with a plan, and I know that that's probably not the answer you'd like to have had, but I don't have that answer for you yet. Number 3910 UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: Well, we probably can't do a whole lot about it. I guess this is an emergency, but (indisc.) I guess even more life threatening or, you know, than it is. We probably aren't going to do something special session before January anyway, so that gives you the time (indisc.) appropriate, but I just believe that we need to be as directive as possible so it's very clear about what can and should be done. So I just encourage you to spend some time, get focused and (indisc.) Number 3940 MS. THOMAS: I understand and that's our intent. Number 3944 CO-CHAIRMAN GREEN: Well my concern, and then we'll open it up to any other questions, my concern is kind of after listening to all this, it is not completely removed from somebody getting a serious infection of a limb and then turns to gangrene - no relation, and then it comes to a point of do you cut the limb off or do you let the patient die and maybe the person doesn't want to have a limb removed, but the alternative is pretty serious, and we may be in a situation like that. If we want to save our forest, we may be beyond the point of saying I don't like the aesthetics or I don't like this situation. It may be critical enough to - we had to take action. But I think Representative Ogan, you had a question sometime back. Do you still have a question? Number 4022 REPRESENTATIVE SCOTT OGAN: Sure, Mr. Chairman (indisc.). CO-CHAIRMAN GREEN: Excuse me, those people on teleconference, we'll take a few questions here and then we'll come out to you if you have any. REPRESENTATIVE OGAN: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Holsten, I have a question for you. You said that a lot of these lands are turning -- you've studied them for about 20 years they turned into grasslands essentially without active -- I think one of these other gentlemen said without the active reforestation of maybe two-year old trees or something that - and the disturbance of the soil that these lands are taken over primary by grass lands. As a hunter, you know I'm gonna brag here a little bit, I just picked up 60 inch moose a couple of weeks ago and I moose hunt every year. Every time I get a moose, it's in the big timber tree line - my secrete okay, if anybody wants to moose hunt. But that's where they hang out, that's where the big boys are, and I'm a little concerned, you know, we're losing our timber and that I recognize that logging certain areas increases the habitat by new growth coming in and what not, but I'm concerned that we're suffering probably the greatest ecological change in Alaska right before our eyes and I'm kind of dumbfounded that, maybe I'm ignorant, but dumbfounded that Fish and Game doesn't have any concerns about wildlife habitat. And it seems to me that it would have an impact, so I don't know about my question -- I don't know what the question is. I'm just concerned about some of the conflicting things that I hear here in my own experiences of a hunter and fisherman in Alaska. Now logging done properly, and I believe very adamantly in setbacks and I have problems with some of the lack of setbacks from fish streams on private lands - there is more exceptions made. It seems to me that logging and reforestation and reestablishing the forest, as these gentlemen have suggested, is the most appropriate way to go. Do you have a comment on that? Number 4241 DR. HOLSTEN: I'll comment, but I'll let the Fish and Game guys get into the nitty gritty because I'm not fishery specialist, but I'm also part of that infest working group - this interagency working group. We're looking at potential impacts associated to wildlife habitat and there has been enough concern. The point was was up until about year or so there wasn't much concern. There has been concern by wildlife biologists what is actually occurring. There hasn't been much documentation of adverse impacts to many species, mainly because there hasn't been - there has been (indisc.) studies looking specifically at impacts associated with wildlife and spruce beetles. The other point is that the impact that we're having now with the present infestation, the infestation rates are significantly higher than what we have seen in the past. There was a -- I think Lance Trasky talked about a study that was done in Homer and what the results of that study did not show that we had a bark beetle outbreak that took all the spruce out in Homer a hundred years ago and (indisc.). Assuming there was an outbreak 100 years ago, which they don't know, something disturbed that forest. Lets just assume it was the spruce bark beetle. The main point from that study that came out is that a portion of the spruce was removed. Not 90 percent like we're seeing now, but maybe 20 percent was removed. Residual trees that weren't killed are still there now being impacted by the beetle. The most important part coming out of that study, and the person that conducted that study is a biologist in a wildlife refuge, there is one new regeneration that has come into that site that he studied as a result of that disturbance. So these forests are not regenerating. Some of the benefits of logging that could be -- there is a picture back there of right behind Jerry there that the Forest Service harvesting some beetle impacted areas in the Cooper Landing area, also, in many areas removed the dead spruce. They've also did some silvicultural techniques, in other words, filled the aspen which promoted aspen regrowth. So the amount of brow species has responded significantly in certain areas due to logging practices. But I think one of the things that the members of this committee, before I stop here, have to be very very careful with is there has been a lot of information out there. There is a lot of different agendas and I've been involved in this for almost 20 years. There is a lot of information and misinformation going around. So you're gonna have to be charged at very carefully kind of wading thorough what you're hearing today. There is some good information, but there is also some half true information. So I'll just leave it at that. DR. MOORE: Mr. Chairman, I wonder if I might just try and put a sharp point on this particular issue. It kind of flabbergasted me actually to hear Fish and Game and environment people saying they're not concerned about marbled merlots - not concerned about the habitat loss for marbled merlots, songbirds, squirrels and all the other species that belong to the forest biodiversity of the spruce forest. Of course losing all those trees and turning it into moose pasture is gonna be good for moose, just like logging is usually good for moose and good for bears and good for deer and good for all the other species that eat berries and low ground forage. This killing all these trees is gonna make a heck of a good place for.... TAPE 96-82, SIDE B Number 001 REPRESENTATIVE KELLY: ...you got problems with your teeth you need to see a dentist and all that. But I'm concerned about some of the things that the man from the Department of Fish and Game said. He said that if he thought logging or some of the activities of the Department of Forestry would help that they would be the first ones to squawk. But I don't understand exactly what he means - that the first gentleman I heard, which I think was Dr. Holsten, said that there is almost no regeneration happening in the forests where this beetle kill is happening. If there is no regeneration, then there is not habitat coming up for moose and animals like that. And it seems that there is an incredible habitat encroachment happening because of this natural beetle kill. It seems to me that the Department of Fish and Game should be squawking because they can be the first to help by throwing their weight towards the argument of creating new habitat for these animals that are obviously not getting habitat created for them because of the beetle kill and the lack of our willingness to do something about it. Mr. Boutin, if you could comment on that. I won't go the Department of Fish and Game because what he said didn't make sense, but if you could comment on that Mr. Boutin I'd sure appreciate it. Number 122 MR. BOUTIN: Mr. Chairman, through the Chair, Representative Kelly, you know at Department of Natural Resources we have foresters, but we don't have fisheries biologists, we don't have wildlife managers, wildlife biologists. And so I guess it sounds like I'm dodging the question perhaps. I hope it doesn't because I'm not, but we look to the Department of Fish and Game to tell us what's best for habitat, what's bad for habitat and that's why we have them out there with us helping us design our timber sales so that the negative impacts of logging, which Cliff Eames talked about, you know so that we can minimize those negative impacts of logging. You know, if the Department of Fish and Game should come to us and say, "Well we'd like this area logged." By gosh, we'd be getting right out there, but we look to them for the guidance on wildlife and fishery issues because we don't have that expertise whatsoever. And you know no one expects us to have it. We don't have biologists in the DNR. Number 240 CO-CHAIRMAN GREEN: Tom, if I could follow up on that. This is Representative Green from Anchorage. If there could be a case shown that it was adversely affecting the fish population, you would jump in on that and yet I thought earlier you said that the main thing that is guiding your timber sales is an adequate market and that you had had some problems with litigation from the Alaska Trustees. Is that a criteria which would justify additional timber sales because of habitat situation as opposed to just the mere killing of additional forests? Number 325 MR. BOUTIN: I'm not entirely sure I understand the question, but the concept I meant to get across is that we cannot claim in our documentation, we don't claim because we don't have anything to substantiate the claim that the bark beetle is negatively impacting fish habitat, water quality or wildlife habitat, because the wildlife managers, the fishery biologists we know -- and I don't mean to just pick on Fish and Game either because, you know, if there were federal agencies who do have biologists, you know, saying that the bark beetle was negatively impacting fish habitat, water quality, whatever, you know we'd be interested in talking to them but there aren't, you know. So if the discipline of wildlife management, fisheries biology, was telling us, you know, that that's a reason to have timber sales in some places then we'd use that in our documentation. It would be a reason to have sales, but since they don't say that, we can't very well use it as a way to document timber sales because it's not true. That's what I was trying to say. Number 438 REPRESENTATIVE KELLY: Mr. Chairman, could I follow up just on one of the questions I had for Mr. Boutin? Number 442 CO-CHAIRMAN GREEN: Go ahead, Representative Kelly. Number 445 REPRESENTATIVE KELLY: Thank you. I guess the point I was trying to get to is that I don't think I need to go to a fish and game wildlife biologist to ask this question. Mr. Boutin, do moose eat new growth - new little sprouts that are coming up from the ground or do they walk over to a big old spruce tree and take a bit out of it? Number 503 MR. BOUTIN: Boy, except that I like to shoot moose and eat them, I'm not, you know, as Scott Ogan said and I saw his moose rack (indisc.), and it's every big as he said it is. You know, moose need cover and they need brows, but gee you've Lance Trasky there and so it's crazy to, you know, for me to be really telling you what moose need because I'm sure not a wildlife biologist, but moose do need both cover and brows. Maybe I didn't understand the question Representative Kelly, Mr. Chairman. Number 542 CO-CHAIRMAN GREEN: I have another question that, it's a shame that we lost Senator Taylor because of his legal background, but is there in anybody's mind here or on teleconference a concern that the state or the federal government might incur, knowing that we have something killing trees and dead trees are more vulnerable to, if nothing else, blow or breakdown fire - maybe, maybe not, but is there any liability that we're exposing ourselves to by knowing there is a problems and not doing anything about it? Number 621 MR. CAPLAN: Mr. Chairman, this is Jim Caplan with the Forest Service. I can respond at least in part. Where we have a concern with respect to these conditions it's usually when we are attempting prescribed fire for management and then we might be considered liable if we have an escaped fire and it does damage. Otherwise, these are natural processes and at least at the federal level, generally they're - with a few exceptions, generally there has not been held that the federal government is liable for lightening strike type fire and that kind of thing. Equally, as you're probably aware our fire fighting capabilities, not so much in Alaska but certainly in the Lower 48, have been strained to limit in the past few years and even in cases where we've had to make very tough decisions about what to save in terms of structures and people's property and what to let go. Even those circumstances still liability is not a major factor in (indisc.), so one of the resource features and what lives are at stake and that kind of things. We try very very hard to protect structures as you're aware of in fighting fires. Number 730 CO-CHAIRMAN GREEN: Well the reason for the question was a statement that was made earlier that in four hours if a fire were to start in the Potter Marsh area, in four hours it could go up the hillside and if there were a way, lets say, that we could have done something to prevent the infestation at the base of Potter Marsh and didn't. Does that create a problem with the landowner of the trees, state or federal, between the Potter Marsh area and the infestation, might become liable? Number 802 MR. CAPLAN: From the federal standpoint, not that I'm aware of. REPRESENTATIVE OGAN: Mr. Chairman. CO-CHAIRMAN GREEN: Yes Representative Ogan. Number 809 REPRESENTATIVE OGAN: I'd just like to bring up one other point. I think the state of Alaska, as a whole, and the business community is really missing the boat with value-added industries to beetle kill timber. I've talked to several gentlemen in the valley area that are interested in putting in a CDX plant, possibly. They claim that the white spruce is excellent material for creating plywood, where we're literally importing every sheet of plywood from the Lower 48. The plywood mills in the Lower 48 have shut down and are available for pennies on a dollar and we're really missing the boat with not utilizing this resource. Chips - the chip market is down, but chipping is the absolute lowest value you can add to wood. And I'm a professional woodworker, I've made my living for 20 years. What I learned as a kid I could turn a $1 piece of wood into a $10 bill and it's now about $3 piece of wood into a $10 bill. But still there is -- I think we're missing the boat here. We should seriously look at ways to encourage sustainable, but make this tremendous amount of material and fiber available to industries that would be here for a long time, not just a couple year sale for value-added tailored for a couple of large companies like the last one was. Then people on the local level could utilize this resource. That's a political soapbox. Number 955 CO-CHAIRMAN GREEN: Senator Leman. CHAIRMAN LEMAN: I have a number of what I think to be very quick questions of several (indisc.). When the time is appropriate, I guess we have a few minute, I'd like to ask (indisc.) people from people from being a dissertation, then there be (indisc.). Dr. Holsten in your comment I was particularly concerned about what's happening is the take over by the grasses. And then you say these forests won't regenerate on their own, but if they are planted, you know, reforested, will they grow if done early enough before the grasses take hold? And I assume that's a very expensive proposition if we're losing what this (indisc.) 1.3 million acres. Is that right? - Of new acreage. I mean that's mind-boggling and so to go back in to reforest that is a staggering dollar amount. But it would have to be done early otherwise we're caught up in that cycle. Number 1104 DR. HOLSTEN: The 1.3 million, not all all of that 1.3 million acres are impacted by grass. The grass is more prevalent on the lower Kenai. In the Copper Center area grass is not a problem, but alder is. Many of those stands -- that's one of the concerns in the Copper Center area due to logging without regeneration if they don't back in or just do the beetles along, once those stands open up they're occupied by alder with a real paucity of regeneration (indisc.). The key is to prioritize those areas that need to be treated and the sooner you can get in to (indisc.) before you have a problem with (indisc.), the cheaper it is. Number 1150 CHAIRMAN LEMAN: Greg in your comments, you talked about having a I don't remember what you called it, but either a cone supply or you're working with somebody with cones - are you actively replanting or are you making them available for others to replant when you're harvesting your areas? Number 1209 MR. ENCELEWSKI: We have done some replanting, yes. We're not actively replanting at this time. CHAIRMAN LEMAN: But you're doing things like scarifying so it can naturally replant. MR. ENCELEWSKI: Correct, right. Number 1221 CO-CHAIRMAN GREEN: On that point now if I might, you said that unfortunately leaving the seed trees hasn't been effective because the seed trees get killed too. MR. ENCELEWSKI: Yes, we have noticed that. Some of the seed trees end up dying and trees left behind end up getting killed as well. CO-CHAIRMAN GREEN: Is this on this point? Number 1236 JOAN NININGER, OWNER, SECRETARY/TREASURER, CIRCLE PACIFIC: Yes. CO-CHAIRMAN GREEN: Could you identify yourself so... MS. NININGER: I'm Joan Nininger with Circle DE Pacific. I'm one of the owners and secretary/treasurer. I just wanted to follow-up with Greg that this summer only we have reforested about 750 acres with 480,000 seedlings. We have a gentleman from Arkansas that souped up the John Deer and he has a big metal plow where he digs the ground scarifying it. He does not do it in rows, we're doing it "S" shaped to make it more natural. And then we have a little truck on the back where they literally drop the seedling down through a slot and big metal wheels that seal the ground to hold up the seedling, and then they have a gentleman that follows, like Johnny Appleseed, with a bag - kind of quality control. If they need more trees in the area or if one didn't quite make it up, then he would fix it. We are a private enterprise, but if any of you ever have any questions of what we are doing, please feel free to contract our office in Anchorage. Number 1406 CHAIRMAN LEMAN: What's the approximate cost of doing that like per acre? MS. NININGER: It was I think $115. CHAIRMAN LEMAN: Per acre? MS. NININGER: What we did last year is we went out and collected the cones and then we sent them down to Silviculture in Washington and they did a hybrid with Sitka and we're hoping that the hybrid, deluxe spruce will hopefully (indisc.) be a detriment to the (indisc.). Number 1436 CO-CHAIRMAN GREEN: One of the questions I was gonna to have which is tag (indisc.), you said 750 acres last year? MS. NININGER: No, that's what we're planting this summer. That's what we've got in. CO-CHAIRMAN GREEN: Okay, and how much is that compared to how much you're losing to the beetle? Number 1452 UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: It's a scratch. CO-CHAIRMAN GREEN: Okay, so it's just a drop (indisc.). It's a start, but it's not.... MS. NININGER: The other thing that I would like to say on behalf of our company is that you also have to take with the jauntiest eye with the newspaper rights, and also in that article on the newspaper was the fact it could have been arson that started that fire down there. There are cabins close by. People go in there on four wheelers to play and we also have people in there on snow machines in the winter. And you can do winter logging. You'll have to go in and scarify if you're worried about having roads going to the back country, go in in the winter and get back out. And a lot political stuff goes on with the federal and state agencies. It doesn't have to be this way. We don't have to go right into viewsheds. We don't have to go on the Turnagain Arm to get started, but people need to quit fighting and we need to get together and get educated and get after it. I am embarrassed to leave this forest for my teenager and my grand kids. And I am very concerned about the Homer area. We plan to retire down there. I had my child in Homer, I worked for Dr. Marley down there and we have property in Anchor Point and I plan to go back. And it's embarrassing that we're not doing anything. So I just wanted to make a comment that you're welcome to get a hold of us any time. It's only a perspective of the big picture that we do, but if we can be of any assistance. Number 1624 CO-CHAIRMAN GREEN: That's what we're all about here. We're really trying to get things and figures and concepts and see what we can do. MS. NININGER: Thanks for your time. CHAIRMAN LEMAN: Thank you for coming. Number 1634 MR. BOUTIN: Mr. Chairman. CO-CHAIRMAN GREEN: Yes. MR. BOUTIN: Since Circle DE Pacific is there I guess I'll point out the other firm I was talking about both when I said that one firm has found a market and kind of saved all of us public land managers because absent that market, we'd be getting no bids whatsoever on our timber right now. And two, they're the firm that is reforesting places out of their own profits that they're not required to reforest so they're using their own profits to be good stewards of the land - land that they don't own, reforesting with their own money. Number 1713 CHAIRMAN LEMAN: Well just speaking for myself, and I'm sure for you and other members of the committee, commend you for doing that. MS. NININGER: And we won't go back into logging. It's for our future generations. CHAIRMAN LEMAN: I understand that, but that's going to be the way that we're going to be able to succeed in attacking this is if we get people to come together and approach it in a very positive way. Mr. Chairman, I have a couple of other questions. Jack, you've mentioned the bridge across - I jotted I said Kelsall - is that right? MR. PHELPS: Kelsall River. CHAIRMAN LEMAN: Okay. I think you averted from your prepared script. Is that something that the state did or something that your loggers did - put a logging bridge across and made it less expensive access, therefore, you can go in and do something. What was the point you were making? Number 1807 MR. PHELPS: The reference there, Senator Leman, was to the salvage sale in the Haines state forest that you folks put into the budget. The process was initiated by Representative Williams a couple years ago. And they put up 14.6 million board feet of beetle kill timber, but the sale was designed as a helicopter sale because it's in a roadless area on the opposite side of the Kelsall River. My comment was that had they designed the sale as a road logging sale, as a conventional sale instead of a helicopter sale, it would have required a bridge across the river and some roads put into that part of the forest, but it would have made it an economically viable sale. As a helicopter sale, nobody can touch it. CHAIRMAN LEMAN: And it might have worked. MR. PHELPS: I believe it would still work. It's not beyond solving the problem at this stage. CHAIRMAN LEMAN: I remember at one time, it may be a bridge to somewhere now, but there was a bridge in Valdez across Mineral Creek that was a very expensive bridge. This was back when the state had money to do things like this and it went -- nobody was there on the other side. Number 1921 MR. PHELPS: Well if I may, Senator, it doesn't have to be a permanent structure. They could put in a temporary bridge. They could close the roads when they're finished. CHAIRMAN LEMAN: Is Mr. Eames still here? Number 1932 MR. EAMES: Yes Senator. CHAIRMAN LEMAN: No, you can stay there. I was just going to comment that you were talking about the people you go to for certain things and on water quality and things like that what you didn't say, but should have and probably will from now on, is you can go to a civil engineer. (Laughter) No you did say "hydrologist," and that is certainly one of the elements of civil engineering. That's all. Number 2007 CO-CHAIRMAN GREEN: What I would ask of you people that are here representing major landowners, if you could take a few moments - we don't need to do it now because you may not have the figures, but as a member of the Resources Committee I've got three questions I'd like to pose to you and perhaps you could fill me in either by phone or letters. How many actual acres have you completed treatment on for the last two years, if any? And how much land, in numbers of acres, of the land that you are involved in is infested? And we got started here on Circle DE, but what percent of the number of acres on you land do you plan to treat in the next two years? If it's different, if you've got a plan that's gonna be nothing for two years and a great huge plan in three, don't say "nothing." I mean let us know because we're trying to get to the bottom of this and what I would suggest is that what I've heard today in the form of timber sales or development, we're looking only at that area or areas that are economic and I'm concerned that if you have some suggestions that we could use, we may have to take matters beyond just whether or not it's economic. If we truly have a crises and this something that is beyond private industry's economic standards, there may be something else that the state or the federal government has to take action on. And so what I don't want to do is to limit our scope of thinking to only those avenues that lead to some economic return. Break even, even slight losses, I think those things are things we should at least look at and if it's not practical, at the evaluated at that time on it's merit, not necessarily on it's economics. So I would really covet your input, both from the private sector and from the private landowner's areas and also from the Department of Natural Resources. And Tom, I would certainly covet the input from both you and the DF&G whether or not we come to an agreement as to whether dead trees create or don't create a problem for fish habitat or wild critters. I think if we can inequitably prove that, but if it's a question mark I think we ought to go beyond that to what can we do then to prevent this problem. Are there any questions from any of the teleconference sites? Don't be bashful, we've go the experts here. PETER ECKLAND, LEGISLATIVE ADMINISTRATIVE ASSISTANT TO REPRESENTATIVE BILL WILLIAMS: Mr. Chairman, can you hear me? CO-CHAIRMAN GREEN: Yes. Number 2259 MR. ECKLAND: Mr. Chairman, this is Peter Eckland, staff for Representative Bill Williams and Representative Williams apologizes he had to be out working at his other job today so he wasn't able to attend this afternoon. I've got a couple of quick questions, a lot of my questions have already been asked, but I was wondering Mr. Trasky from the Habitat Division talked about how the beetle outbreaks don't seem to have any negative impacts on species that are just - or animal that our particular concern - our interest for Alaskan's. I think that's kind of an interesting comment and in light of our differing battles down here on the Tongass where it seems like we're always concerned about species from a nat all the way up to the grizzly bear and everywhere in between. But I'm wondering if you talked about the beetles and the kill not having a detriment affect on some animals and I'm wondering if when we have these large fires if that has adds sediment to the streams or not? It may be beneficial to streams, I don't know. But I'm wondering if you can answer that please. MR. TRASKY: The question is whether large fires benefit streams? CO-CHAIRMAN GREEN: Excuse me, can you hear Lance alright? MR. ECKLAND: Yeah, and the question is when we have these large buyers, does that add sediment to the steams? And is that detrimental or does have positive impact for streams for habitat for fish? Or is there just no impact? Number 2434 MR. TRASKY: That's a good question. I don't think we have collected information on that particular phenomenon. My intuitive response would be that because of ground cover -- if it is hot fire and burns down the mineral soil, you certainly would get increased runoff and you would get a lot of sediment going into the stream after a large fire. CO-CHAIRMAN GREEN: Peter, you said you had a couple of questions. Number 2501 MR. ECKLAND: Yeah, just one other maybe for Mr. Boutin. I'm just curious, he mentioned that under the Forest Practices Act there is no requirement to reforest on salvage sales. While reforestation, I'm sure, is probably a good idea I'm just wondering who made the decision to require that on salvage sales and when that decision was made. Number 2525 MR. BOUTIN: Yeah, there is no requirement in the Forest Practices Act and it applies to land of all ownership, state, municipal, private, to do reforestation after salvage logging. In the case of the state sale, in going through the public process, it was real clear to DNR and certainly, you know, the decision was made throughout DNR, but I was part of that decision and think it was a good decision - and think it is a good decision, going through the public process we could see that given the rationale that we have for logging these areas and for having created some of the negative impacts of logging, particularly roading, you know that given our goal of bringing back a mosaic of different age classes of timber after the bark beetle that it wouldn't make much sense to go in there and log and not provide for reforestation. So, you know, we are committed to it on state land that after salvage sales just as on other kinds of sales we do reforestation, but it's not a requirement in the law. It's a policy decision that's been made at DNR for state land that DNR manages. MR. ECKLAND: A quick follow-up Mr. Chairman. CO-CHAIRMAN GREEN: Yes, is that you Pete? Number 2552 MR. ECKLAND: Yes, I'm just wondering does that have an effect on the possible bidders and the economics of some of these sales. MR. BOUTIN: It sure does, Pete. We do require the operator to do most of the reforestation - pick up most of the reforestation costs. And so that just about always includes the scarification, but it very very often includes also the planting and we take responsibility - that is the state takes responsibility for providing the seedlings which is not a large part of the reforestation cost. And so you bet, when a bidder is bidding on the timber on a state sale they have to, of course, build all the road. And down on the Kenai we committed to all roads being erased after the logging and reforested. That was too something that is very important to the public and to the various agencies, but the bidder does commit also to doing some material portion of the reforestation - whatever we put in the bid perspectives. And so it does impact the economics of our timber sale program, you bet. Number 2805 MR. ECKLAND: Thank you Mr. Chairman. CO-CHAIRMAN GREEN: We've got a couple of minutes left if anybody has any other questions or comments to make. Can we pick up anything from the satellite stations first. If not, we have a few more comments from here, Representative Ogan. Number 2823 REPRESENTATIVE OGAN: I'd like some, Mr. Chairman thank you, some clarification from a -- there is some inconsistencies in the testimony here today. There was some discussion of the beetle kill in the Homer area and the Kenai Peninsula in the 1900s and I'd like to see how... MR. TRASKY: You can read it yourself right here. It was 80 to 100 percent. You can read the report yourself. I have other copies for everybody here. CHAIRMAN LEMAN: Mr. Chairman, (indisc.) on that point. Senator Halford were wondering earlier in the meeting and maybe it was addressed (indisc.) or somebody. What has happened to that timber that we purchased from Seldovia Native Association across the bay, across Homer? I mean is that fully devastated or largely devastated and is that essentially a worthless stand of timber now? Number 2925 UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: Been following that. The beetles have moved into that area quite heavily in the past few weeks. So probably.... CHAIRMAN LEMAN: (Indisc.)? UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: Well no, into the (indisc.). Three or four years ago, very little beetle activity, but now it seem pretty substantially infested. CO-CHAIRMAN GREEN: Any other comments in closing? Number 2956 MR. BOUGHTON: If I could make a closing comment. Yes, this is Jerry Boughton, again, Chair of the Society of American Foresters. In the opening comments that I made I encouraged the committees to try and overlook some of the what I referred to in the Kenai meeting as chasing hoochies and getting involved in little details and keep a perspective on the big picture of this, and I'm really encouraged to hear the comments from the committee members and I think you're trying to do that. What I heard in the testimony today here is probably what I expected. I heard a number of agency individuals expressing basically normal processes. They described what has taken place. They talked about having a variety of meetings and two year listings of things on sale schedules and this is what has been done kinds of things. I didn't see a lot of urgency expressed in that testimony. Some of the other testimony, I guess that's a human nature to go through denial when you have a arm that needs to be cut off, you go the last minute before you're gonna do that, you know you're gonna deny that you really have that bad of a problem that you gotta do something. I think I heard a lot of that. I heard a lot of "Well we haven't looked into that, well we don't know for sure, well we've done some anecdotal monitoring but we really don't understand these relationships for sure." I think we've got to get past that denial and we've got to say, "We've got a problem that -- lets dig in here and lets figure out what's going on and figure out what the appropriate actions are." I also asked in my opening comments there I say, "You know this gets often characterized as should we log or shouldn't we log. Should we cut a tree or not cut a tree." That needs to be looked at more than that which is what Les Reed tried to indicate. He talked about ecosystem restoration. There is a whole bunch of values out there and there is a lot of things besides getting entrapped with, "Should we log or not log?" Many of the comments came right back down to that, if you noticed that. I didn't hear any discussions about other treatments. We really didn't hear -- a little mention from the Forest Service, but not much about prescribed burning - or should we go out and do some reforestation where we don't cut any trees. Should we do some particular thing for habitat restoration for whatever species. None of that really came up too much. I think that's an area that's really gotta be looked at and not get entrapped into. This is a logging or not logging question. It's an ecosystem restoration issue. In terms of the time, we heard about comments and I think a lot of these discussions are similar to the discussions that have happened for years. Many of your committee members and on the satellites, would you believe we've been talking about this for years? And that's true. We don't have years anymore. You see this spike on the end of this chart. I mean this baby has gone in about three years from a few 100,000 acres to 1.4 million acres. I mean we are in a crisis situation. Normal processes taking many many years. In fact, investing in long term studies to get some of these answers is not gonna be a part of a viable solution. We have a very serious situation that in recorded history with actual data - facts, there may be anecdotal information there that might indicate something different - hard to interpret. But this is actual surveys and measurements. Nothing like this has ever happened in Alaska before. It's a very serious serious situation. I would certainly agree with some of the comments that were made in terms of involving all stakeholders and shareholders and people of expertise. However, as was indicated, when you don't have a lot of data and you'll get a lot of different opinions, you've got to really sort through that and try and figure out based on what you can see and what hard data you have what's really going on and make a decision based upon that. Again, ecosystem restoration has got to be the focus of this and I'm encouraged from the testimony from a number of individuals and from the questions from the committees. And I just offer SAF is another one of those objective sources of input into your committee. If you're considering legislation, we do have a legislative liaison position, Mr. Wayne Nichols, who has worked with a number of your committee members, I think before. And we would certainly offer that service into the next session. Number 3509 CO-CHAIRMAN GREEN: Yes, Jack. MR. PHELPS: Yeah, I just had a final comment on economics. When it was mentioned a few moments ago about Alaska law not requiring reforestation on salvage sales, I agree with Mr. Boutin that it makes good sense, it's good policy to reforest in those areas given the discussion we've had today. It may be critically important. It may be one of the best reasons for having timber sales, but I would point out to you that Alaska law makes a provision for 25 percent of stumpage receipts to go back into reforestation on our state lands. We have not historically funded that, gentlemen, and I think it's very important that when you start designing sales on marginal timber and you build reforestation costs into the stumpage, you may kill the economics on sales. Maybe the state ought to look at on those salvage sales - saying up front, "We're not gonna build that cost. We're not gonna put that cost on the stump, we're not gonna build that cost into the operators expenses." We're gonna say, "We're gonna sell it at a free market value and we're gonna commit to take 25 percent of the stumpage receipt on the state general fund and put it into reforestation." I think you might be able to solve some of you economic problems of selling timber sales if you do it that way. Number 3532 CHAIRMAN LEMAN: We're you looking over my shoulder when I wrote that note to Joan just a few minutes ago. MR. PHELPS: No, just great minds Loren. CO-CHAIRMAN GREEN: I champion that and that's what I had in mind when I was talking about lets look at the possibilities of the full spectrum of possibilities and then we could sort through whether or not the state gets involved, whether it can do it some other way. Maybe we're looking at incentives for other industries. Maybe there's got to be an incentive for logging dead timber, I don't know. But we shouldn't look at only those places that are economically (indisc.). Yes. Number 3700 MR. TRASKY: Just one last comment. Our research into this bark beetle problem - very extensive and Steve just reminded me we wrote 157 letters to all the Canadian provinces, all the universities that have Forestry Departments, the Forest Service and everybody else, asking for them to provide us with the information on the impacts the spruce bark beetle outbreaks on fish and wildlife. We did not get anything back. Nobody had any substantial information, so we really exhausted that. If people have scientific documentation of impacts, we'd like to know about it because we're concerned. If it is having an impact, we're not seeing it in our research or anything else, but we would like to know about it and if there is, we'll press for whatever measures we feel are appropriate and we haven't seen that. And you know I could say there is an information out there... Number 3747 SENATOR LEMAN: My kids could show you a way to get that a lot faster, get on the internet. MR. TRASKY: We did search the internet. DR. MOORE: Mr. Chairman, just again on this issue, I think it was made very clear by the representative from the fish and wildlife that this does have a severe impact on many species such as marbled merlots and songbirds. Obviously, just have to look with your eyes, if the trees are gone there is not a place for the tree living species to be any more. So it definitely has a negative impact on all those species that require the canopies of the trees and the cover of the trees and the seeds of the trees and the nesting sites in the trees, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. There is simply no question about that and just because you write letters to all these people and don't get any answer back doesn't mean that there isn't a real effect in the real world when these trees are dead. Number 3838 CO-CHAIRMAN GREEN: Now is there salvageability to a tree as long as it's standing or does that diminish immediately with death? DR. MOORE: Three years you can make good sawlogs out of it, 8 to 15 years you can still make chips and oriented stand board and other reconstitute type products out of it. Once it falls over on the ground, it starts to rot quite quickly, but even then it's quite often salvageable. CO-CHAIRMAN GREEN: Yes. MR. REED: I was impressed yesterday and again today with Ed Holsten's sense of time. It's time scale we have to keep in mind here. You're not gonna learn very much about impacting wildlife a year after the tree dies, but what he's saying to me is this: "You have subsequent breakup of the stand, and there are pictures here to demonstrate this, you have succession in many areas to grass, you have fire risks which are inordinately high, and you have in this particular case a special scale of disturbance which is unprecedented." I would just say that here is the Copper River drainage and all those blue, now you're gonna take all of the spruce cover out of there and then you, you know, intuitively we don't need an expert to tell us that the moose are gonna be in trouble for winter shelter or for whatever. So I would urge you to keep, as I used to my students say, don't forget to distinguish between the short term and the long term. And the long term in this case may take you 10 - 20 years or more to get to that full impact. So it's gonna be there, may take awhile. Finally, I will undertake to go back to some university researchers and industry people who have had a lot of first hand experience with insect outbreaks, doesn't have to be the spruce bark beetle, it can be the mountain pine beetle, the spruce bud worm, a hundred other kinds of insects and I can tell you I know right now what the answer is. The impacts on wildlife and fish habitat are enormous. I want to thank, on behalf of Patrick and I, you people in the legislative committee for having the kindness to invite us and to let us speak frankly. So before we go, I just wanted to say that on behalf of our (indisc.). Number 4209 CO-CHAIRMAN GREEN: Well thank you for coming. Thank you for actually getting a very good discussion, I believe, starting. I will vow that I can't, on my own, keep it going, but I certainly will not (indisc.) for wanting to keep the fires going because I think it imperative that whatever the answer is, we come up with something. I think you've got the right idea, whether it's a spruce bark beetle kill or some fungus or something else, if the tree dies what happens to the rest of the environment - and there is data on that, then lets certainly have it. I would appreciate that very much. Thank you all for coming.