Conferees OK Timber, Spotted Owl Compromise

A House-Senate conference committee Friday approved a compromise designed to protect the spotted owl while permitting logging in the old-growth forests of the Pacific Northwest.

The compromise was reached after a tense day of negotiations and approved in a closed-door meeting.

“I would say environmentalists came out with a pretty good deal as well as the workers in the timber community,” said Sen. Mark Hatfield (R-Ore.)

The compromise provides that:

- Federal timber sales in the region would be set at 9.6 billion board feet over the next 12 months, about one billion board feet below current levels.

- The Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management would be required to “minimize fragmentation of significant old-growth forest stands” and no sales would be allowed in areas already identified as spotted owl habitat.

- Court challenges to individual timber sales would be allowed, but they would have to be filed within 15 days of the sale offering and the courts would have to decide within 45 days.

- Roughly half of the two billion board feet in sales currently enjoined by federal courts would be released.

Both the House and Senate could act next week on the broader legislation that embodies it, the $11-billion appropriations bill for the Interior Department and related agencies.

Lawmakers have been searching for a way to ensure Northwest mills of a steady supply of timber from the region’s old-growth forests while the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service decides whether to declare the northern spotted owl--which lives in old-growth forests--an endangered species.