Why Obama leads in Montana: Bush junta back-room deal converts thousands of acres of forest into MacMansion subdivisions
- From: "Kickin' Ass and Takin' Names" <PopUlist349@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 6 Jul 2008 02:52:01 -0700 (PDT)
Closed-Door Deal Could Open Land In Montana
Forest Service Angers Locals With Move That May Speed Building
By Karl Vick
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, July 5, 2008; A01
MISSOULA, Mont. -- The Bush administration is preparing to ease the
way for the nation's largest private landowner to convert hundreds of
thousands of acres of mountain forestland to residential subdivisions.
The deal was struck behind closed doors between Mark E. Rey, the
former timber lobbyist who oversees the U.S. Forest Service, and Plum
Creek Timber Co., a former logging company turned real estate
investment trust that is building homes. Plum Creek owns more than 8
million acres nationwide, including 1.2 million acres in the mountains
of western Montana, where local officials were stunned and outraged at
the deal.
"We have 40 years of Forest Service history that has been reversed in
the last three months," said Pat O'Herren, an official in Missoula
County, which is threatening to sue the Forest Service for forgoing
environmental assessments and other procedures that would have given
the public a voice in the matter.
The deal, which Rey said he expects to formalize next month, threatens
to dramatically accelerate trends already transforming the region.
Plum Creek's shift from logging to real estate reflects a broader
shift in the Western economy, from one long grounded in the industrial-
scale extraction of natural resources to one based on accommodating
the new residents who have made the region the fastest-growing in the
nation.
Environmentalists, to their surprise, found that timber and mining
were easier on the countryside.
"Now that Plum Creek is getting out of the timber business, we're kind
of missing the loggers," said Ray Rasker, executive director of
Headwaters Economics, a nonprofit that studies land management in the
West. "A clear-cut will grow back, but a subdivision of trophy homes,
that's going to be that way forever.
"It's kind of the ugly face of the new economy."
Rey said he, too, laments the ascension of "McMansions" over working
forest, but he insisted that the law obliged him to accommodate Plum
Creek's request for clarification of its rights to cross public land.
Rey emphasized that during the private negotiations, Forest Service
lawyers leveraged promises from Plum Creek to moderate the impact,
including mandating "fire-wise" measures to reduce the danger from
summer wildfires.
Under the new agreement, logging roads running into areas controlled
by Plum Creek could be paved -- and would thrum with the traffic of
eight to 12 vehicle trips per day to and from each home, according to
O'Herren. Critics say that will further imperil grizzly bears, lynxes
and other endangered species in the Crown of the Continent ecosystem,
a region of rugged peaks, glacier-carved valleys, and sparkling rivers
and lakes that straddles the border between Montana and Canada -- and
that in parts remains as Lewis and Clark found it.
"For us, this is kind of an arterial bleed, and we're either going to
get a handle on it or not," said Melanie Parker, executive director of
Northwest Connections, an environmental group in the Swan Valley, 60
miles northeast of Missoula.
Parker recently eased an SUV through Glacier Ridge, a nascent
subdivision marked by freshly scraped lots and sumptuous views of the
Mission Range on one side, the Swan Range on the other and the still-
sparsely populated valley in between. The spring-fed bottomland is
prime bear habitat where her husband, Tom, a hunting guide, saw his
first grizzly.
"Look at that, Tom!" Parker yelped, after a climb up a knoll revealed
a three-story log home, still wrapped in Tyvek HomeWrap insulation.
"They're like mushrooms. You get a few sunny days and they pop right
up."
Most are the second, third or even fourth homes of wealthy newcomers
who have transformed the local economy -- 40 percent of income in
Missoula County is now "unearned," from, say, dividends -- and
typically visit only in the summer. In Antler Ridge, across Highway
93, Web cameras installed over bird nests and a bear den beam photos
to a hedge fund partner who visits his 200 acres just a few times a
year.
"He was actually in France when the bear left the den," said "remote
wildlife viewing" contractor Ryan Alter, on his way to install a
camera at an owl's nest. "So I sent him pictures on his BlackBerry."
"I wanted to own land out there because I was always very interested
in the concept of restoration, conservation," Paul Gurinas, the hedge
fund partner, said by phone from Chicago. "The fact that it's almost
become kind of a housing subdivision, that isn't what I was looking
for. I guess I wish I had bought the whole thing up, and then I
wouldn't have to worry about it."
That same impulse drives a different kind of land deal in the area:
The buyers are the Nature Conservancy and other organizations that
purchase desirable private land to preserve it. Since 2000, the groups
have paid Plum Creek market rates to secure 280,000 sensitive acres in
Montana alone.
Another 320,000 acres are being preserved under a provision that Sen.
Max Baucus (D-Mont.) forced into the farm bill, which survived
President Bush's veto. The measure includes $250 million to back bonds
to buy Plum Creek lands that otherwise might be developed.
"This is like the last big, wild, intact landscape in the Lower 48,"
said Eric Love of the Trust for Public Land, a conservation group that
with the Nature Conservancy announced the $510 million purchase on
Monday. "If these lands are going to be sold, someone is going to buy
them. The question is, who?"
Plum Creek said it has sold only 3,000 of its Montana acres to
developers in the past five years, and it expects to sell even less in
the next five, the company's president, Rick Holley, wrote in a recent
op-ed in the Missoulian newspaper. But critics point out that its
calculations may shift with the real estate market.
A decade ago, while repairing an image as the "Darth Vader of the
timber industry," as one congressman put it, the company showcased
good-forestry practices on a hillside above Flathead Lake.
That parcel is now Eagle's Crest, a gated subdivision with its own
airstrip and lots on offer for $100,000 an acre. Remote corners of
Swan Valley are selling for $11,000 an acre, with broker inquiries
arriving from Europe. By comparison, the "net present value per acre
of forest" runs at most $500, said Larry Swanson, director of the
O'Connor Center for the Rocky Mountain West at the University of
Montana.
"It's a pretty straightforward proposition: The region's economy is
moving from extraction to amenities, and you would expect the same
thing to happen with its largest landowner," Swanson said.
"It's a tough deal. Change is hard, and this is pretty fundamental
change. But what's happening here is perfectly understandable."
Missoula County officials say their objection is not to change, which
traditionally rural jurisdictions have struggled to manage, but to
being blindsided by Rey's announcement of a far-reaching change
negotiated in secret.
Plum Creek owns 57 percent of Missoula County's private land, a
posture that under state law gives it veto power over any zoning. Over
the decades that the Forest Service enforced limits on logging roads,
the county came to regard federal policy as a firebreak against
development.
"All these years, we've been told those roads are not for residential
use," said Jean Curtiss, who chairs the county commission. "These are
logging roads. They're for timber management."
If the deal goes into effect, the county stands to lose money in
providing services such as snow plowing and ambulances to remote new
developments. "You're looking at a real nightmare scenario in managing
wildfires," Rasker said. "And you're going to have access issues: If
these now become gated subdivisions, it's going to be harder for
people to go hunt and fish, and that's pretty important to people in
Montana."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/04/AR2008070402772.html
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