The Alaska Forest Association today filed a lawsuit in the U. S. District Court for Alaska over the revised Tongass Land Management Plan (TLMP). “TLMP put so much commercial forest land off limits and placed so many restrictions on harvest activities that the Forest Service simply could not sell enough timber to satisfy the market demand even if it wanted to,” said AFA executive director, Jack Phelps. “If not fixed, TLMP will irreparably harm what’s left of the Southeast Alaska timber industry.”

“We have already lost two-thirds of the jobs we had when the Tongass Timber Reform Act was passed,” Phelps stated. “TTRA was supposed to have adjusted the balance between timber interests and preservationist goals. TLMP completely destroys that balance by placing every other use of the forest ahead of timber management. Under TLMP, the Tongass will no longer be a multiple use forest in the historic sense of that term, and the people of Southeast Alaska, especially in the timber dependent communities, will suffer.”

The industry’s complaint cites 6 federal laws the Forest Service violated in preparing its new forest plan, said Phelps. “The Forest Service failed to follow the law and its own planning regulations when it developed the new Tongass Land Management Plan. These violations and omissions caused the Forest Service to remove so much commercial forest land from the timber base that it is no longer able to follow the clear intent of Congress to sell enough timber to satisfy market demand and meet the needs of Alaska’s timber industry.”

The meager timber offerings since TLMP was released (less than 30 mmbf) and the proliferation of appeals and lawsuits on timber sales this year are evidences of TLMP’s failure, according to Phelps. “All you have to do is look at the Forest Service performance this year to see that something is amiss,” Phelps stated. “With a month and a half to go, the Forest Service has offered less than 15 percent of the volume it promised to release this fiscal year, and some of what has been offered is so uneconomic no one can afford to buy it. Meanwhile SEACC and other anti-development groups, including several from outside Alaska, are appealing every single timber sale in the Tongass, even those that are so small they don’t require an environmental assessment. Then, when these appeals go to court we lose yet more timber.”

AFA’s lawsuit asks the court to declare TLMP illegal and invalid and to order the Forest Service to redraft the plan according to law. “What we are asking for,” said Phelps, “is a plan that can actually do what the Forest Service said TLMP would do — deliver a genuine allowable cut of 267 million board feet of timber. The industry, the Governor’s Task Force and several market analysts have recognized that 300 mmbf is a more reasonable target, but this Plan can’t even deliver 150 million, despite the government’s official line. We have attempted to work with the Forest Service to fix the problems with TLMP, but they have not been willing to correct the deficiencies. Therefore, we have no choice but to ask the courts for relief.”

The suit would require the Forest Service to operate under the old TLMP until a new draft plan and Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement have been prepared. In the alternative, the complaint requests that a legal TLMP revision, developed in 1992, be substituted for the current plan.