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If the Forest Service truly wants to meet its charge of maintaining community stability, they 

 certainly have found ways not to succeed. Is Pope & Talbot, Inc. at fault for buying out so many 

 mills? No! The blame lies with the Forest Service for weakening these mills to the point that 

 they could no longer compete for federal timber. 



The Forest Service's pricing and sale policies have been directly responsible for the demise of 

 eight mills. The agency has already reduced competition for its future sales by over 75% over 

 the last six years. Now the agency is suggesting it will reduce the saw timber ASQ in the next 

 forest plan down to 80 MMBF. That could very well drive the remaining two small business 

 mills, which still have the where-with-all to participate in Forest Service sales, out of business. 

 At that point, one large business mill will remain and dictate prices the Forest Service receives 

 for its timber. The Black Hills will become a defacto federal sustained yield unit for Pope & 

 Talbot, Inc., not because Pope & Talbot, Inc. conspired to drive everyone else out of business, 

 but because the Forest Service, through its misguided management strategies, weakened the small 

 business purchasers to the point they could not survive. 



The losers in this process are the small communities of Custer, Pringle, Hill City, Keystone, 

 Sturgis, Spearfish, Hulett, Deadwood, Piedmount, Sun Dance, Belle Fouche and Whitewood to 

 name a few, and the employees and families that depended on the small sawmills for their living. 



The irony is that the Forest Service has more employees in the Black Hills than almost any other 

 time in history, and they have high paying secure jobs. Most of these employees have little or 

 no feelings of remorse for the demise of the small business mills in the Black Hills. They would 

 just as-soon sell timber to one company as six or eight, or forty, like those that existed around 

 1960. And most feel it is terribly important that seven district rangers offices are maintained 

 because: as Barrel Kenops put it when he first told the industry that the next forest plan would 

 reduce the ASQ by fifteen to twenty percent, "our district offices are key to the community 

 stability of the small town in which they exist, and our salaries are important to the economic 

 stability of these towns". 



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