Banner year for Skyline Forest

Central Oregonians could someday look back on 2009 as a pivotal year in the history of the Skyline Forest. If all goes well, this could be the year that both the state of Oregon and the federal government approved legislation paving the way for saving roughly 30,000 acres that link us to our past.

It was in 2009 that the Oregon Legislature approved a law giving the current owners of the former Bull Springs Tree Farm, now the Skyline Forest, the right to develop as many as 282 homesites on the northern portion of the forest if they sell the remainder to a non-profit agency. Fidelity National Timber has worked with the Deschutes Land Trust for several years to find a way to allow the latter to purchase the bulk of the tree farm, and the state legislation makes a deal much more likely.

Were the land trust to buy the land, it would become Oregon’s first community forest, owned by the land trust and managed, in part, to provide a stable timber harvest. The community forest also would provide recreation, protect wildlife and prevent further development of a chunk of property larger than the city of Bend.

If all goes well, 2009 also will be the year in which Congress approves legislation allowing nonprofit agencies like the land trust to sell tax-exempt bonds to raise money. That could be critical to the future of the Skyline Forest, for it would cut the amount of money the land trust must raise to purchase the land from Fidelity. Tax-exempt bonds pay lower interest rates to their buyers, who get a tax break in exchange.

The legislation, sponsored in the U.S. Senate by a bipartisan group of Northwesterners, would be a boon not only to the land trust but to nonprofits hoping to protect a total of more than 2 million acres around the United States. Purchasers, including the land trust, could then pay off the bonds through the sustainable sale of timber on the land they acquire. In exchange for the right to sell bonds, purchasers would have to agree to keep the land as working forests.

The Skyline Forest offers this region the best chance it’s likely to get to have both the beauty of undeveloped land and a forest managed in part for timber harvest, the very thing that brought serious development to the region in the first place. Oregon’s lawmakers must get on board and do what they can to assure the measure passes.