The Morgan Nesbit Forest Resiliency Project comprises more than 80,000 acres about 20 miles southeast of Joseph.

ENTERPRISE — The Wallowa County Board of Commissioners is pushing back on the Morgan Nesbit Forest Resiliency Project.

After District Ranger Brian Anderson of the Wallowa-Whitman National Forest explained plans for the project at the board’s meeting on Dec. 4, Board Chair Todd Nash said the Forest Service should start over on its environmental assessment, which said there would be no significant impact on the 86,500-acre project 20 miles southeast of Joseph in the Eagle Cap Wilderness.

“We appreciate that the landscape needs to be treated,” Nash said. “It’s a piece of property that I operated on with cattle for a long time, and we saw understory consistently taking over year after year, losing that to our rangeland.”

But he said he believes the Forest Service’s adherence to the “21-inch rule,” which prohibits the removal of most trees larger than 21 inches in diameter at breast height (4.5 feet above the ground) is unhealthy for the forest and damaging to the local economy that depends on the timber industry.

“I’m really disappointed in that the 21-inch rule continues to loom over us,” Nash said. “Maybe with the change of (presidential) administration, we can get that knocked back, but we need to be able to get commercial timber off of here to support our community.”

He also questioned the feasibility of prescribed burning in the area.

“The component that I think that falls far short in the plan here is you have, you know, optimistically burning off 78,000 of the 86,000 acres represented, and it’s aspirational to do that,” Nash said. “But in Wallowa County, we’ve seen year in and year out, we have about two days every other year that it’s really good burning conditions, and to be able to torch off that much, I don’t know.”

Anderson told the commissioners that forests in the area are at high risk for wildfire, disease and infestation by a variety of insects. He and fellow Forest Service personnel held an open house Nov. 19 at the Cloverleaf Hall in Enterprise in preparation for the 30-day public comment period that began the next day.

He said a draft decision on the project is expected in February with a final decision in May. Work on the ground is expected to start in June 2025.

Up to a half-dozen timber sales are expected to be held for the project so contract loggers can cut logs that are of commercial value. The logs of noncommercial value would be piled for burning or masticated, he said.

The assessment Anderson presented to the commissioners proposed about 22,000 acres of commercial and noncommercial thinning and treatment. He said there are some tree species the Forest Service wishes to reduce.

The ranger said he and his team identified five different purposes for the project:

• Alter the forest composition and structure to make it more resilient to drought, fire and insects.

• Reduce fire risk by reducing tree density and ladder fuels and adding prescribed fire back onto the landscape.

• Enhance watershed function through addressing legacy road systems.

• Provide forest products and economic outputs to support the local community.

• Address climate change vulnerability.

Road work, tooAnderson said there also is road work to be done.

“We also have quite a lot of road maintenance, excuse me, culvert replacements, culvert removals and some amount of road decommissioning,” he said.

Commissioner John Hillock and Nash both expressed concern about road closures.

“I’m just completely opposed to that,” Nash said.

Hillock agreed.

“I do have concerns about the additional road closures and whether those are really necessary,” he said. “The public spoke out and at our long-range planning, and in our overall plan, they don’t want any more roads closed. It gives us access to firewood and hunting and other things.”

Update from 1990Anderson said the current effort is an attempt to update a plan that was implemented in 1990.

Nash said after the meeting the Forest Service should go back to the drawing board.

“I think this needs to be scrapped, and they need to reevaluate how they do this project,” he said. “Hopefully the new administration will allow its change.”

He also said he doesn’t want forest planners to have to redouble their efforts.

“I don’t want them to do planning under this rule and restrict themselves to the 21-inch rule,” Nash said. “We had a time window where we could have cut 21-inch trees plus. And we didn’t do it because all the planning was done.”