‘Are they doing a good job managing the lands?’

Published 1:30 am Thursday, September 18, 2025

When Public Lands Commissioner Dave Upthegrove signed an order in August protecting 77,000 acres of state trust lands from logging, environmental activists and county officials had hoped two Clark County areas scheduled for harvest would be included in those protections. While the order does apply to about 4,800 acres of forest lands here, the two auction sites were not included.

Last week, the Clark County Council toured some of these rural forest lands with staff from the Department of Natural Resources to get a better understanding of how the lands are managed, selected for logging or left as is.

“The question is: Are they doing a good job managing the lands? I think they are,” council Chair Sue Marshall said.

There are 460,000 acres of state trust lands in the Pacific Cascade region, which includes Clark, Skamania, Lewis, Wahkiakum and Cowlitz counties, as well as southeast Grays Harbor County. Within the region, DNR manages programs for recreation, timber sales, silviculture (growing trees), conservation and road engineering.

These lands haven’t always been managed by the state. Sarah Ogden, trust outreach specialist for DNR, said starting in the 1920s, private timberland owners stopped paying their taxes. Eventually, those lands went into foreclosure and were later deeded over to the state. The state now manages these so-called transfer lands, about 28,000 acres of which are in Clark County.

“The county directly benefits from those lands. When we do a timber sale, the county gets 75 percent of the revenue from those timber sales,” Ogden said. “It’s very specific to the place that the harvest happens.”

That revenue is then distributed to junior taxing districts, such as school districts, fire districts, cemeteries and water districts.

The most recent auction — 156 acres of timber listed as the Dabbler lands — was held in February. Ogden said Battle Ground Public Schools received about $700,000 from the sale with additional proceeds going to FVRLibraries and EMS services.

“If we set aside a sale somewhere, maybe that means (the) Battle Ground school district might not get the proceeds from that sale. We really have to be careful when we’re thinking about those lands,” Ogden said.

DNR also owns about 4,000 acres of forestland it has purchased.

“That is land that DNR has bought over time and then has rehabilitated and brought back into timber production,” Ogden said.

For forest purchase lands, the county receives 26 percent of the revenue when the timber is sold. The remaining revenue goes back to either the state’s general fund or DNR’s management fund.

DNR develops forest management and habitat conservation plans to guide its decisions on which parcels to auction for logging. Allen Estep, assistant division manager, said just like private owners, DNR has to follow the state’s Forest Practices Act.

“A lot of what we apply directly from the forest practices rules are things around forest road construction, regeneration, replanting, unstable slopes, etc.,” Estep said.

The conservation plan includes managing habitat for endangered species, including the northern spotted owl, salmon and marbled murrelet. The conservation plan was developed in collaboration with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries, and includes protections for riparian habitats, stream buffers, cliffs, talus slopes and other special habitat conditions, Estep said.

“Riparian protection, it varies but it’s pretty much on all of our lands,” he said. “Spotted owls, I would say is — other than riparian — a very large component of our habitat conservation plan.”

Estep said the goal for spotted owl management units is to have 50 percent of that land with some level of spotted owl habitat for nesting, roosting and foraging. Within older growth forest lands, the goal is 10 to 15 percent.

Environmental activist Tonya Enger, who filed suit against DNR to block the Dabbler auction, said the state is a long way from meeting that goal. She said only 2 percent of older growth lands meet spotted owl habitat requirements. She said variable retention methods, a term used by DNR for tree thinning that leaves a minimum of eight trees per acre, may provide revenue but destroy owl habitat.

“We don’t have any idea of how much revenue is going to be provided and at what intervals in the future or how rural communities or trust beneficiaries are going to be benefited when all the naturally regenerated high-value forests are all cut down,” Enger said.

Enger said there are other issues with DNR’s conservation plans.

“They are operating on an outdated sustainable harvest calculation, which does not reflect the ever-evolving circumstances of climate change,” she said. “The habitat conservation plan dates back to 1998 and the Forest Policy Act dates to 2006. There was not any mention or metrics relating to how climate change will affect the habitat needs.”

The state already has two areas in Clark County scheduled for timber auctions. The first, which is four parcels totaling 158 acres and is named the Turnover sale, is scheduled for November. The second, the Dendrophobia sale, which totals 38 acres and is 6 miles east of Battle Ground, is scheduled for January.