The forest products industry in Southeast Alaska is heavily dependent upon the purchase of timber from the Tongass National Forest. The Tongass Land Management Plan Revision of 1997 has greatly reduced the land within the Tongass that is available for timber harvest from 1.7 million acres to a mere 676,000 acres, and the maximum average annual allowable sales quantity from 520 million board feet ( mmbf ) to 267 mmbf . This is considerably below the amount the industry needs to sustain the remaining mills in the region. The promises made by Congress in 1990, at the time the Tongass Timber Reform Act was made law, that sufficient volume would be made available to sustain direct timber employment in Southeast Alaska have now proven to be hollow.

        The impact on Southeast Alaska of the reduced harvest of Tongass timber has been drastic. Thousands of jobs have been lost through mill closures, and Federal payments to communities in the form of timber receipts have fallen to a tiny fraction of what they were previously. Recently released data indicate that timber receipts this year will be down by 83 percent compared to last year. This money is used for schools and road maintenance, so the decline hurts all the residents of the region.

        Now comes the Clinton Administration with its proposed roadless moratorium. This policy is being superimposed upon the National Forest System in violation of the national Environmental Policy Act and the National Forest Management Act, both of which require a public process, not unilateral government actions unrelated to sound science and public review. The government’s new roadless policy is top-down management of the worst sort. It subverts public process and asserts a political strategy in place of sound, scientific, professional forest management. It is bad public policy and is aimed only at promoting the radical environmental agenda of stopping all logging on federal land. The much-touted ‘exemption’ for the Tongass and other Western forests is not, in fact, an exemption, but an announcement that the policy will be applied through a different mechanism; that is, through forest plan amendments.

        The recent TLMP revision took more than 10 years to write and cost the taxpayers more than $13 million. It includes protection of some 90 percent of the roadless areas remaining on the Tongass . The Chugach Land Management Plan revision is just beginning, and the Chugach National Forest is more than 98 percent roadless. Application of the new roadless policy to the Chugach amounts to predetermining the plan revision in the direction of no development at all. Among other consequences, this will effectively prevent the Forest Service from addressing the growing spruce bark beetle devastation through active forest management. In the case of both Alaska national forests, the roadless policy is unnecessary and very harmful to Alaska’s economic future.

        The estimated impact on the Tongass timber program is 202.5 mmbf per year over the life of the plan. Given an Allowable Sale Quantity of 267 mmbf , and expected offerings of around 200 mmbf , it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that this would finally spell the end to industrial logging in the Tongass . Furthermore, full implementation of the roadless policy (whether through direct application or through a plan amendment) will immediately result in a further reduction in timber receipts amounting to as much as $2.5 million in FY98 . Alaska simply cannot afford this government boondoggle into anti-development politics.

        In short, the government’s proposed roadless policy is bad for national forests, bad for the American public, and particularly bad for Alaska. The Alaska Forest Association urges the legislature to take immediate action to protest this terrible public policy by quickly passing House Joint Resolution 49. We should send a message to the Clinton Administration on behalf of Alaskans and on behalf of our counterparts in other states, that the Alaska people will not tolerate the Administration’s attempts to force a radical agenda upon the people of this state and of this country.