NCJ - The more things change...

The more things change...
PL and EPIC at odds again

by KEITH EASTHOUSE

Déjà vu.

Some might have had that sensation when news broke last week that the Garberville-based Environmental Protection Information Center had uncovered evidence that the Pacific Lumber Co. was logging illegally.

According to an eight-page report by the group titled "Setting the Record Straight," the company has been slapped with 325 violations since it signed the Headwaters agreement in 1999. About 75 percent of the violations were for the illegal cutting of trees -- some of them old growth giants -- in streamside areas. The remainder had to do with cutting in areas that had been set aside for the marbled murrelet and the northern spotted owl, both protected species.

Most of the noncompliance notices -- 227 -- were issued by the California Department of Fish and Game for failing to comply with provisions of the document that forms the cornerstone of the agreement: the habitat conservation plan, which is supposed to govern logging on the company's 211,000 acres for the next 45 years. The remaining 98 violations were issued by the California Department of Forestry for breaking state forest practice rules.

PL's chief scientist, Jeff Barrett, in a written statement Tuesday, accused EPIC of deliberately distorting the facts. He said that the violations of the conservation plan are actually "noncompliance reports [that] are most often errors with little or no environmental effect." He compared them to actual breaches of state forestry rules, which he said the company considers "significant because they usually involve some impact on the environment."

The familiarity of the situation stems from the fact that, generally speaking, this has all happened before, or something like it. In 1998, the forestry department pulled Palco's timber license after the company had racked up hundreds of violations of state logging regulations from 1994 to 1997. Those violations were not brought to the public's attention by the agency, often criticized for favoring timber interests. Instead, environmentalists uncovered them.

"Once again, it's falling on the shoulders of EPIC to uncover this information and press for action," program director Cynthia Elkins said in a telephone interview last week.

Of course, it's the media's job to reveal such matters, so there has evidently been a lack of aggressiveness on the part of the local press the Journal included. More troubling, perhaps, is Fish and Game's silence on the matter. Even as the number of violations of the conservation plan piled up 82 in 2001, 79 in 2002, 116 last year, according to the EPIC report -- the department apparently did nothing to notify the public. In fact, while it periodically issued press releases about a host of comparatively minor matters -- like penalizing duck hunters -- Fish and Game was publicly giving the impression that Palco was adhering to the conservation plan.

"We think Pacific Lumber is dealing in best faith to comply" with the habitat conservation plan, Michael Valentine, general counsel for Fish and Game, told the San Francisco Chronicle in an article that appeared last year. In that same article, a forestry department spokesman was quoted as saying that Palco's compliance with the conservation plan was improving over time. The reality, it now appears, was just the opposite.

Bill Condon, a senior environmental scientist with Fish and Game, confirmed the number of violations in an interview with the Times-Standard last week. He said that not all of them were serious, but that some were -- including two incidents in which Palco was fined $100,000 for logging trees in restricted areas. Condon could not be reached for comment by the Journal.

Elkins said imposing penalties after the fact is not enough; regulators need to head off violations before they occur.

"The agencies' lack of actions to prevent further violations and damage is just as disturbing as PL's egregious violations," Elkins said.

Forestry department deputy chief John Marshall said Tuesday that most of the state forest practice rules violations were relatively minor "paperwork" violations. He said that since the signing of the Headwaters deal, CDF had imposed financial penalties of "several thousand dollars apiece for two or three violations [for] harvesting in areas where harvesting was not supposed to occur."

Under the terms of the Headwaters agreement, CDF can levy financial penalties of up to $10,000 per day for each violation. Elkins said that the forestry department should be treating some of the violations of the conservation plan as also being violations of state regulations.

For months now PL has conducted a seemingly expensive television and print advertising campaign touting its environmental achievements.

In the view of Elkins -- and others -- the EPIC report completely undermines that effort.

"PL believes that if they tell the big lie often enough, people will start to believe it," Elkins said. "But that theory is running up against another maxim -- you can't fool all of the people all of the time."

Someone else, someone with plenty of hands-on experience trying to regulate the company's logging operations who asked to remain unidentified, put it more succinctly.

"I think their PR campaign is total bullshit."