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failed to bring the contracts Into compliance since passage of NFMA, despite 

 the fact that in 1983 a Forest Service contract review team stated that 

 portions of the contracts "severely restrict the agency from properly managing 

 the forest covered by the contract allotments." 



Unique to the National Forest System, the two 50-year contracts 

 are the primary Impediment to modern forest management on the Tongass. 

 Throwbacks to the dark ages of forestry, the 50-year contracts were formulated 

 in an effort to promote large-scale Industrial forestry in Southeast Alaska to 

 convert the priceless old-growth timber stands of the Tongass Into pulp 

 plantations. As many as four pulp mills were envisioned by the Forest 

 Service's empire builders, utilizing virtually all of the commercial timber in 

 the forest. As much as 98% of the old-growth, commercial forest was targeted 

 for "liquidation", to use the actual phrase from an old forest plan. These 

 contracts have outlived their usefulness. 



In 1981, one year after passage of ANILCA, the Reid Brothers 

 Logging Company won a judgement against both APC and KPC for conspiracy in 

 restraint of trade and commerce and for monopolization of trade In the federal 

 District Court for the Western District of Washington. The Ninth Circuit 

 Court of Appeals and the U.S. Supreme Court supported the District Courts 

 findings . The Court found that from their inception up until the day the 

 Reids filed their suit in 1975 (a period of 16 years!), the two mills had 

 acted as a monopoly -- and that the 50-year contracts were the basis of that 

 monopoly. SEACC believes that if this guilty verdict had been handed down 

 prior to NFMA and ANILCA, the contracts would have been canceled then, and 

 ANILCA Section 705(a) would never have become law. 



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