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Lakeview Stewardship Group
UPDATED: JULY 2006
"Like many other western rural communities, Lake County has been affected by shrinking timber supplies on federal lands," said former County Commissioner Jane O'Keeffe. "What's different here is the collaborative effort to redefine our land management goals in a way that nurtures and sustains the special relationship this community has with the national forest. I think it could become a successful model for other places that are looking for ways to restore forest health and create local jobs."
Location: Lakeview Federal Stewardship Unit (LFSU) in Fremont Winema National Forest, Lake County Oregon
Objective: To develop new restoration-oriented management goals for the Lakeview Stewardship Unit
Participants: The Collins Companies, Concerned Friends of the Fremont/Winema, Defenders of Wildlife, Fremont/Winema National Forest, Lake County Chamber of Commerce, Lake County Resources Initiative, Lakeview High School, Lakeview Ranger District, Oregon Department of Economic and Community Development, Paisley Ranger District, Sustainable Northwest, The Threshold Foundation, The Wilderness Society, local citizens.
History: The Lakeview Stewardship Group collaboration began in 1998 to develop a strategy for sustainable forest management in 495,000-acre Lakeview Federal Stewardship Unit (LFSU) in the Fremont-Winema National Forest in southern Oregon.
The area was originally established in 1950 as the Lakeview Federal Sustained Yield Unit with the single goal of providing a steady supply of timber for local mills. However, by the late 1990s federal timber sales had plummeted and nearly all the mills had closed. Beginning in the summer of 1998, community leaders brought together conservationists, business interests, scientists, and local residents to develop new restoration-oriented goals for the unit. The goals of the Stewardship Unit are as follows:
- Sustain and restore a healthy, diverse, and resilient forest ecosystem that can accommodate human and natural disturbances.
- Sustain and restore the land's capacity to absorb, store, and distribute high-quality water.
- Provide opportunities for people to realize their material, spiritual, and recreational values and relationships with the forest.
Courtesy of Lake County Resources Initiative
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In 2001, the Forest Service officially adopted the restoration-oriented goals recommended by the collaborative group and designated the Lakeview Federal Stewardship Unit.
Accomplishments: According to participants, hard work, honesty, and respect have been rewarded by tangible achievements
- A non-profit corporation, the Lake County Resources Initiative was formed in 2002 to promote workforce training and sustainable economic development.
- A forest monitoring system has been designed, funded, and implemented on hundreds of acres.
- The Forest Service closed 120 miles of unneeded roads to improve wildlife habitat and water quality and to reduce maintenance costs.
- The Forest Service thinned 5,500 acres and burned 7,700 acres to reduce fuels and restore more natural fire conditions.
- The value of federal contracts awarded to local businesses for restoration-oriented work increased four-fold between 2001 and 2002 to $410,000.
- The Fremont-Winema Resource Advisory Committee allocated more than $850,000 for various restoration projects in the unit.
- The USFS issued their first Stewardship Contract, the Bull Stewardship Contract in the summer of 2005, and it is within the Lakeview Federal Stewardship Unit (LFSU).
- The Jakabe Restoration Project has gone through public process without any appeals due, in large part, to the efforts of the Lakeview Stewardship Group (LSG).
- The LFSU has become host to a pilot for the National Forest Certification Case Study, which compares current land and resource management activities on national forests with the requirements of the two major forest certification programs now operating. The report on the pilot testing results should be available by mid-summer of this year.
- The Governor has made the Lakeview Biomass Project a pilot for his Renewable Energy Policy and labeled it as an Oregon Solutions Project. Over 20 entities finalized a Declaration of Cooperation to make the LBP a success through their continued efforts.
- LCRI is currently working with DG Energy Solutions as a possible owner-developer of the Lakeview Biomass Plant (LBP), although the company has not made a final decision to build the plant. The LBP is a pilot project of the USFS and the BLM for the Coordinated Resource Offering Protocol (CROP) program, which is being carried out by Mater Engineering. CROP is looking into how supply can be coordinated from the federal land dominated landscapes. This effort will help to standardize and coordinate the supply over time, hopefully leading to greater investor confidence when it comes to federal lands.
- The LSG was hoping to offset the cost of the Lakeview Unit through carbon credit purchases. They have found a few companies interested in buying carbon credits, but were told that they must do field tests and prove the model for forest carbon that LSG has been using (from the University of Washington and Yale University). Testing to prove the model began in May 2006.
- LCRI contributed data on the reduction of carbon emissions from displacing fossil fuel energy with biomass energy for the West Coast Global Warming Initiative developed between California, Oregon, and Washington.
Photo by Charles Spencer, University of Oregon
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Challenges/constraints: The Forest Service will need to conduct extensive thinning of small-diameter trees in order to restore the desired stand-maintenance fire regime. The local sawmill can process a variety of log sizes, but under current market conditions cannot profitably process thinning material at the minimum bids that the Forest Service has offered. Potential solutions include: reassessing the timber sale appraisal process, retooling the Fremont Sawmill to be better able to process small-diameter logs, building a specialized small-log mill or post-and-pole business in the area, and building a co-generation facility.
Other challenges include:
- Restoration efforts present increased potential for the spread of invasive weeds.
- Extreme difficulties have arisen in finding a company to build the plant, because investment firms will not give the $30 million needed where the supply is more than 25% of federal lands (Lake County is 75% federal lands).
- There has been, and continues to be, a long-standing controversy over certification of public USFS lands.
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