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identified problems. There is no need for legislation and it is 

 wrong for Congress to legislate in an area dealing with the 

 contract between parties. 



If Section 705 is repealed, it will reduce the timber 

 supply from the Tongass by a third, notwithstanding the increased 

 demand from National Forest timber described above. This will 

 occur because without the direction to manage a timber sales 

 program providing availability of a supply of 4.5 billion per 

 decade and sufficient appropriations to achieve that harvest level, 

 the 1979 Tongass Forest plan shows the Tongass can produce only 

 3.38 billion board feet per decade. Such a drop in the allowable 

 sale quantity will cause a dramatic loss in jobs. 



If a House bill like Mr. Mrazek's (HR 1516) were enacted, 

 which puts the 23 areas of S 346 into wilderness, then the 

 reduction in allowable sale quantity would be even greater. It is 

 estimated that the impact would be approximately 500 million board 

 feet per decade to a total of 2.88 billion board feet per decade. 

 Again, there is no environmental impact resulting from timber 

 harvest which justifies this punitive reduction in the timber base. 



Some people have argued that Section 705 should be 

 repealed because it makes the Tongass different from every other 

 National Forest. Congress made the Tongass different from every 

 other National Forest in 1980 when in Section 703 as part of 

 ANILCA, it designated so much wilderness on the forest that the 

 non-wilderness lands which remained open to timber harvest could 

 not support the then-existing level of jobs on a sustained yield 



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