48 



Mr. Riley. No, but helicopter logging in this case cost more than 

 did the logging under the other proposal, so they received less reve- 

 nue. 



Mr. Francis. Well, Jim, you have to look at all aspects of what 

 you are going to do with a timber sale, and if you are going to 

 achieve other goals that you need to achieve, you might want to 

 sustain some additional costs. If you are saying that somebody 

 wasn't going to pay as much for that timber sale, maybe another 

 alternative was not to have the timber sale. If you listen to ecolo- 

 gists now, talking about the impacts of natural disturbances on for- 

 ests, a logging operation sometimes isn't the answer to forest 

 health. If you look at the problems that are developing in eastern 

 Oregon and eastern Washington, management has caused a lot of 

 the problems with the elimination of fire from the ecosystem. So 

 maybe sale isn't the answer to the question. 



Mr. Riley. There was agreement among those involved, includ- 

 ing your people, that this was one sale that ought to go forward in 

 Idaho. The question was whether we should do it with a helicopter 

 that would make it below cost, or without a helicopter that would 

 have been above cost. 



Mr. Francis. Well, I'd want to see the figures, because building a 

 road is not a cheap operation in the State of Idaho, particularly in 

 the back country areas, and I think you'd have to compare the cost 

 on that. 



There are reasons for doing timber sales, for wildlife and for 

 other reasons, and those timber sales should be done for those rea- 

 sons, and we should not charge something like that off to the com- 

 mercial timber program. If there is a real wildlife reason or there 

 is a forest health reason to do a timber sale, then we ought to do it 

 for those reasons. We ought not make it part of the commercial 

 timber program. We ought to do it for that reason. 



We think salvage sales in some cases are things that we need to 

 do. Maybe they should not be charged to the commercial timber 

 program, but we also should put constraints on them when we do 

 them — that particularly in salvage sales, only dead trees are taken 

 out and not live trees, as in the present case. A significant portion 

 of salvage operations are now green trees, and it is done to promote 

 the economics of commercial timber harvesters who will harvest 

 those sales. That is another one of these peverse incentives that I 

 think the system has to address and get rid of. 



In the particular case of salvage, maybe salvage should not be 

 counted as part of the commercial timber program, and the Con- 

 gress should fund and address salvage as a separate issue of forest 

 health and provide the funding, and we don't use it as a below-cost 

 sale, and we don't use it as a commercial timber sale. 



Senator Daschle. Mr. Hessel, did you have a comment? 



Mr. Hessel. I was going to comment about a couple things in this 

 regard. First, the analysis that TSPIRS provides has a number of 

 components that I think are important. One part of the timber sale 

 program is really for personal use; it isn't really commercial at all, 

 but the cost of that is going into the accounting system. So that 

 component really is one that I look at as a public service. It is such 

 things as Christmas trees, firewood, a whole host of things that are 

 for the public benefit. 



