Skyline Forest offers unique opportunity

A Bend Bulletin editorial on Skyline Forest.

Look west from Bend, and there’s a 30,000-acre carpet of privately owned forest between Bend and Sisters. Central Oregon has a unique opportunity to preserve the Skyline Forest for jobs, wildlife and recreation.

It can turn Skyline Forest into Oregon’s first community forest. That’s been the goal for years of the Deschutes Basin Land Trust. It wants to buy the land and manage it as a nonprofit for conservation, public access and timber jobs.

Just how important that could be was made more clear this week with the release of a new study by the U.S. Forest Service. The Pacific Northwest Research Station looked at what would happen to the forest if it continued to develop under private ownership. Over time, it’s likely to lose its integrity. It’s likely to be sold and broken up into individual plots with homes.

That isn’t the best way to reduce wildfire danger or keep large areas intact for wildlife. And it virtually guarantees that the local community will lose access to the land for recreation.

There are a lot of ifs and maybes in the study. It’s still difficult to argue with the general conclusion that continued private ownership wouldn’t have the best outcome for Central Oregon.

In this past legislative session, supporters of Skyline won an important victory in the Legislature. The deal enables the owner of the land, Fidelity National Timber Resources, to concentrate its development rights in a small corner of the property. Fidelity would get to build 282 units on 1,200 acres.

In return, it must sell about 30,000 acres in Skyline to the land trust and another similarly sized chunk along the Little Deschutes River to the land trust or another public agency. According to the legislation, the land must be sold at the value of the timber on the land, which lowers the cost. The legislation gives Fidelity five years to complete the deal.

Such a deal could be a magnet for quarrels. For some, a deal that allows homes to be built on a swatch of the forest is just wrong. But what made this legislation happen was Fidelity and the environmental group, Central Oregon Landwatch, sitting down and working out a compromise they both could live with. And Central Oregon Landwatch doesn’t just roll over.

Turning the Skyline Forest into a community forest doesn’t get everyone everything they want. It does keep something special for Central Oregon.