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Environmentalists are calling it the midnight massacre. As the final moments of the U.S. Forest Service tree-selling season ticked away on Sept. 30, the agency once again proved to be a better timber broker than environmental steward. That day marked the end of the grace period given by the 1994 Northwest Forest Plan, which came out of President Clinton's historic timber summit. As part of the plan, beginning Oct. 1 the Forest Service is now required to perform complicated and exhaustive species surveys before any timber sale can be considered or approved. The surveys will almost certainly delay sales, which, in turn, will slow the cash flow to the industry-dependent agency. Environmental groups went on red alert when they saw the flurry of sale approvals coming through at the last minute. The Forest Service approved two-thirds of its sales for fiscal 1998 in the three months before the deadline. Oregon activists are particularly alarmed. More than 80 percent of the timber approved for sale this year is to be taken from our state--including a large chunk from the Willamette National Forest. Agency officials say they always wait until after summer to sign off on sales. But their numbers tell a different story. In the last five years, the fourth quarter accounted for an average of 45 percent of annual timber-sale approvals. This year the figure is 65 percent. In fact, there haven't been such heavy fall timber sales since 1995, the year of the salvage rider, which gave timber companies a temporary exemption from environmental protections while prohibiting legal challenges to sales. As with the salvage rider, the flurry of fourth-quarter sale approvals isn't illegal, but it has all the appearances of a roguish federal agency scrambling to avoid environmental regulations that will hurt its cash flow.
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