Invest in the forest for Oregon’s future

Bend Bulletin editorial comments on plans for local forests owned by Fidelity National Financial--owners of Skyline Forest.

With the sagging economy expected to reduce the state budget by $1 billion, it might seem absurd for the state of Oregon to be thinking about making big purchases. But the Oregon Department of Forestry has a multimillion-dollar purchase in the works that won’t cost the state’s general fund a penny. And it could create timber jobs, protect wildlife habitat and ensure public access to forest lands.

The department has made a request to buy maybe as much as 95,000 acres of privately owned forest outside of Gilchrist, south of La Pine. The acreage was part of the hundreds of thousands of acres bought up by Fidelity National Timber Resources after Crown Pacific Partners went broke.

The department would need legislative approval to sell about $30 million in bonds to finance the purchase. Money to pay off the bonds would come over time with the revenue from timber harvested on the land. State Forester Marvin Brown said the property could be managed within the department’s existing budget.

Nobody knows what would happen to the property if the state doesn’t buy it. It could be logged, but with so many young trees and timber prices what they are, there isn’t much value in that. It seems likely that the land could go from a working forest to being divided up into smaller parcels for homes.

More than 50 years have passed since the state got any new forestlands. The forests that the state holds are mostly closer to the coast. The nearest state forest is the 27,000-acre Sun Pass State Forest in Klamath County.

Those forests make money for the state and for the counties they are in. Klamath County gets 65 percent of the revenue from Sun Pass, some $1 million a year. Brown told us it would probably be 15 years before the Gilchrist timber would mature to a point that it would produce a steady stream of revenue.

There are some who don’t love the idea of more land being assimilated under state control. In this case, the state purchase seems like the best way to capture economic potential; avoid forest fragmentation; and give hunters, hikers and others access. Think of it as an investment for Oregon’s future.