The proposed University of Alaska timber sale is so big, so far-reaching and so sudden, a person can’t help but wonder where it came from and why.
For about 70 years, the university has held 13,000 acres of forest in the Chilkat Valley, property it received around the time of Alaska statehood to develop or exploit as a source of funding. To date, the university has harvested just a tiny percentage of that. The most recent sales came in the early 1990s as a result of a spruce bark beetle infestation that foresters said necessitated removal of trees.
Now the university is apparently proposing to log all of it – 100 million board feet on acreage that’s equal to one quarter of all its timber interests statewide – in 10 years.
According to state press release, the university sale would be just part of a larger cut that would include the state Division of Forestry and the Mental Health Lands Trust and harvest 150 million board feet of timber in the next decade or more.
Let’s put those numbers into perspective. The allowable, sustainable cut in the Haines State Forest is 58 million board feet every 10 years, or roughly 5.8 million board feet per year. But the actual amount logged on the forest in the past 15 years has been between 500,000 and 1 million board feet per year.
So depending on your perspective, you might say there’s a “backlog” of trees in the valley that need to be logged, or that logging here stands to increase on a scale 15 to 30 times greater than anything seen in recent memory.
The University of Alaska is a private landowner in our valley. It’s not bound to state forest standards for multiple use and sustainability. It can sell its trees directly to a company or individual without a public bid. It can log all its forested land in one fell swoop, even lands in the planned sale that fall within the boundaries of the Alaska Chilkat Bald Eagle Preserve. The trees the university sells can be shipped overseas whole, without generating any manufacturing jobs in Haines or the Lower 48.
But why would the university do that? What happened that so radically changed the university’s outlook toward its trees in the Chilkat Valley?
Recent news stories say the Alaska Legislature has cut its contribution to the university’s budget $60 million since 2014, to $317 million last June. A university plan to respond to the cuts by reducing or eliminating degree programs and other offerings amounts to a “gutting” of higher education in Alaska, according to professors and staff. The proposed Haines timber sale would bring in about $10 million, according to a recent Chilkat Valley News story.
That’s not much relief, but it’s some.
Why is this happening now?
Local foresters say timber sales are market-driven. In other words, the university has found a buyer who wants a lot of timber from the Chilkat Valley. That’s something of a surprise due to a “high rate of defect” in timber around our town compared to the healthier and bigger spruce and hemlock trees that grow in the Tongass National Forest. Basically, our wood’s not that good. That and low market demand have limited logging in Haines for two decades or more.
What can add profitability to the logging of marginal timber like ours is the sale of wood chips ground up from trees not worth milling. Foresters say the market for chips in Asia may be on the upswing and that might explain the apparent increase in interest in our forest. Use of chips apparently figured into the state’s Baby Brown sale attracting a single bidder on a section of forest on the upper Klehini River. Does a rebound in the chip market portend a long-term increase in logging in the Chilkat Valley?
There are many other questions that the proposed university sale raises, including, but not nearly limited to: How would a logger access trees in remote places like Glacier Point, Pyramid Harbor, Murphy Flats and the Kicking Horse valley? Does the university plan to cut timber on all the parcels it has identified to date, including the Mount Ripinsky hillside above Highlands Estates and at Taiya Point? What kind of logging – clearcut or selective logging – is likely to be used at which sites? Would buffers be left where Mount Ripinsky hiking trails cross lands to be logged? What protections would be made for waterways, particularly the salmon-bearing Kicking Horse, Takhin and Klehini rivers, which run smack dab in the middle of some of the university’s forested plots?
The university plans to visit Haines at the end of the month to answer questions. In the meantime, the Haines Borough Assembly should start its own process, and begin to identify values of concern in the areas that might be logged, including potential impacts to residential property values, tourism and wildlife.
For example, the Mount Ripinsky acreage downtown sits above the Skyline and Highlands Estates subdivisions on a hillside that engineers hired by the municipality said needs addressing for drainage and flooding issues, at an estimated cost of $1.6 million. It’s not a stretch to fear that more cutting at the top of the mountain would produce even more flooding of homes below.
(My wife owns one of the “homes below.” It sits on Lutak Road near Young Road and was flooded twice in the past winter, apparently due to Young Road culverts plugged with snow.)
The university has proposed something very big for our town. It will require a lot of discussion. If you have concerns, you might start with letters to Alaska Gov. Bill Walker and state legislators supporting funding of the University of Alaska.