ELGIN – A busload of Grant County residents traveled to Elgin last week to press the Forest Service to increase timber harvests – before it’s too late for the communities of Northeastern Oregon.

They made their case in an Oct. 22 timber roundtable called by U.S. Rep. Greg Walden that drew more than 100 people.

The upshot: People in the Iron Triangle – the eight counties affected by the Wallowa-Whitman, Umatilla and Malheur national forests – want to see changes in forest management to save timber jobs and their communities.

“We’re born and raised, growing up in this area, we’ve seen mill after mill after mill go away. Our industry is definitely shrinking,” said Tom Insko, the Inland Region manager for Boise Wood Products. “We are on the edge right now, quite candidly.”

The meeting, a standing-room-only session in the Elgin community center, drew timber workers, county officials and Forest Service supervisors. Don Bodewig, Eastern Oregon operations manager for D.R. Johnson Company, and King Williams, a member of the Grant Resource Enhancement Action Team, arranged for a school bus to take more than 40 Grant County residents to the meeting.

The discussion ranged from the need for timber-based jobs in places like Union and Grant counties to how to prepare for the expiration of county payments in four years.

Walden described the recently renewed county timber payments program as a lifeline for a sinking ship, but noted that it was an emergency measure to save local governments and schools.

“It’s also a little like rescuing the captain and crew but not the passengers who unfortunately are still struggling to survive the icy waters,” Walden said. “You see, the passengers are those men and women whose jobs have been lost and those who fear their jobs are next.”

Insko noted the importance of mill jobs with their ripple effect in the local economy.

Boise Inland employs about 700 people in Union County, but Insko said each of those jobs creates 2.81 jobs elsewhere in the county.

“So 700 jobs creates almost 2,000 jobs,” he said. “The demise of the forest products industry in this county will be huge, given the economic pace it provides for this community.”

The problem is worsened by the downturn in the national economy and the housing market, which have stalled sales of lumber and wood products.

“The forest products industry is currently in the worst market conditions in history, bar none,” Insko said. “Dealing with those dynamics are difficult enough. The reality is when you’re struggling for a resource and fighting for logs it’s that much harder to compete in that environment.”

Grant County Judge Mark Webb drew a link between communities and forest health.

“You cannot have forest health unless you have economic health,” he said. “Those two things are coupled together. If you separate them, everything’s gone.”

To attain the forest health, Webb said the U.S. Forest Service has to prioritize forest projects with economic components to provide income on a consistent basis.

“We are an ecology,” he said. “There’s the environment, the economy, the society. We’re as integrated as any natural system you can think of.”

Union County Commissioner Colleen MacLeod also advocated a relationship between timber harvest and forest health – basically saying that if the forests aren’t managed, they will burn.

“The Wallowa mill closed last year for want of 50 million board feet,” she said. “The Egley complex alone burned 500 million. That is criminal.”

“This is fairly significant for us,” Webb said. “Grant County’s perspective is not positive, it’s critical.”

MacLeod noted that eight counties in the region took to calling themselves “Enough is Enough” to underscore what she called “a time of critical mass in our communities.”

“We decided the time had come to rise up together and demand changes in federal forest policy,” she said.

MacLeod said three recent mill closures in Wallowa, Grant and Harney counties resulted in a total loss of 198 jobs. She also said the area has lost about 3,000 jobs since 1991 as the timber industry declined.

“That’s critical mass,” she said. “It’s time to take action and I hope it’s not too late.”

MacLeod noted that the loss of 198 jobs “might not seem like much in an urban setting,” but it’s a matter of scale.

“By Oregon Employment Department calculations, those 100 jobs compare to 24,600 jobs in the Portland Metro area,” she said. “Those numbers would be the top-of-the-hour lead on every Portland TV station.”

Walden made a similar comparison, noting that recent mill closures in Grant County have reduced direct manufacturing and natural resource workers there by 36 percent.

“Imagine shutting down Intel and Nike and what kind of an effect that would have on the Portland economy,” he said.

MacLeod also said the counties have been unsuccessful in getting the national forests in the region to include in their plans any realistic economic and social impacts of non-management. She also cited a “skepticism on the part of the Region 6 office to trust a cooperative partnership with the counties.”

Several of the speakers, including Walden, asked the 100 people in the room to get involved and stand up for these ideals in forest practices.

“It’s time … to start taking action if we need logs for our mills,” Insko said. “But the reality is it’s a mutually beneficial thing.”

He showed a slide of two photos: one a tree-filled forest and another of a forest on fire with its gray, ashy aftermath.

“We can manage our land and create forests to look something like this on the landscape,” he said, pointing to the green forest, “or we can have forest fires such as the School Fire, which is not good for water quality, it’s not good for wildlife, it’s not good for the economy and obviously it’s not good for the taxpayers because of the cost of fighting fires.”

Several speakers noted the way spending on forest fires has eclipsed forest management budgets.

“Far too much is being spent on fire control and litigation and too little on the actual production of usable sawlogs for our mills,” said MacLeod.

Walden said that when it comes to preventing fires, the law should be changed to give the Forest Service the same authority to reduce fuel loads on a landscape basis in Condition Class Two and Three areas “as it has to reduce fuel loads around our communities.”

Walden has proposed the Healthy Forest Restoration Act II, expanding on a law adopted in 2003, to address that discrepancy.

“We need to clean up after these fires, harvest before the value is gone and get a new forest replanted. In the next Congress, I will aggressively renew my efforts change the law,” he said.

Scotta Callister is the editor of the Blue Mountain Eagle, and Samantha Bates is a reporter for the East Oregonian.