10 



the Job Council, which I have included, shows the program has six 

 people entering employment with a cost of $6,308 per person in 

 1995 and 14— actually, it is 13 now— in the 1996 program at $6,857 

 per participant. We should continue this program as one small 

 component of training for the Job Council programs that give pref- 

 erence for dislocated timber workers. I do not support characteriz- 

 ing this program as having a major impact on displaced timber 

 workers. We have hundreds of them in Jackson County and it only 

 serves 13 in this program. 



To that end, I emphatically support maintaining a timber sale 

 program from Federal lands. I also support transfer of the O&C 

 lands to the State of Oregon, where we are leaders in combining 

 good forestry, good science, and a strong social and economic sys- 

 tem. 



The President's forest plan and the record of decision require cre- 

 ating a condition that has never historically existed in the forest. 

 One example under the standards and guidelines for the plan, 

 there is a requirement for coarse woody debris of 120 linear feet 

 16 inches in diameter that has to exist on every single acre for the 

 matrix lands. One sale observed by the implementation monitoring 

 team in the Butte Falls district, which was marked and sold but 

 not logged, the natural condition was that the stand had never 

 been entered, the 90-year-old product of a stand replacement fire 

 in its natural condition. 



The ground did not meet the requirement for coarse woody debris 

 required by the record of decision and it must be met now by artifi- 

 cially cutting trees and leaving them to meet this artificial stand- 

 ard. The stand should be managed and thinned to release the 

 stand and promote late successional characteristics, which would, 

 in time, provide for coarse woody debris on its own. The conditions 

 in the forest are not uniformly the same, thus, defy this prescrip- 

 tive approach. We cannot assume and create a scenario where 

 every acre of the forest has the same prescription. 



The AMAs are bound by the same administrative minutiae pre- 

 scriptions and the one that, of course, we have in our area is the 

 Applegate partnership. They also have to deal with concerns of elk 

 thermal cover, big game winter range, visuals, archeological sites, 

 ephemeral streams, wildlife connectivity corridors, and sensitive 

 plants that are neither threatened nor endangered. The Squaw-El- 

 liot timber sale is in the Applegate, where the stand has been iden- 

 tified as a high fire hazard and risk. 



Under guidelines in both the Rogue long-range management plan 

 and the Northwest Forest Plan, there are all the concerns men- 

 tioned above. Even in the AMA, we cannot accomplish a common 

 sense goal of reducing fire hazard because of regulation and cost 

 escalation. It is recommended that we helicopter logs. 



Another example of the application of the record of decision for 

 the President's forest plan is the snowdown/blowdown timber in 

 Jackson and Douglas Counties, and I want to give credit to the 

 Rogue River National Forest, which has jumped on this with rapid 

 attention. The Jackson County Natural Resources Committee and 

 Headwaters, the environmental group, have been meeting with the 

 team to look at this. 



