Four staff members from the Oregon Department of Forestry updated Tillamook’s county commissioners on the changes that the habitat conservation plan recently adopted by the Board of Forestry will cause in the county on March 27.
The foresters said that after several years of lower harvests because of market conditions, they expect activity to be high in the immediate future before returning to a slightly lower level than in recent years.
Tillamook District Forester Kate Skinner was joined by State Forests Division Chief Mike Wilson, Asset Manager for State Forests Kevin Boyd and Forest Grove District Forester Mike Caferata at the board meeting.
Wilson started the presentation by giving a brief overview of the recently passed habitat conservation plan (HCP) and its impacts on harvestable lands in Tillamook County. With the new habitat and riparian conservation areas created by the plan, just over 150,000 acres in Tillamook County will be protected, with 114,000 available for harvest.
Boyd then gave a short-term overview of the timber sales in Tillamook County for the remainder of this year and the next three years in comparison to recent years. Boyd said that over the last five years, 75.7 million board feet (mmbf) have been harvested on average in Tillamook County, but that the last two years have been significantly slower with 46.8 mmbf harvested in fiscal year 2022 and 65.6 mmbf harvested in rascal year 2023.
Boyd said that these lower harvest levels had been caused by increased activity on private forest lands and in salvage efforts following the 2020 wildfires, leading to decreased activity on state forest lands.
However, the volume of sales of state forest timber has remained steady, and with a three-year contract to complete harvests, Tillamook is poised to see increased activity in the coming years as 101 mmbf in contracts come due. Boyd shared figures that showed that these harvests would push total sales for 2024 to 76.7 mmbf, while that number would grow to 84.1 mmbf in 2025, 85.1 mmbf in 2026 and 94.58 mmbf in 2027.
After the backlog has been cleared in that timeframe, Boyd said that the county could expect to see an average harvest level of 67.9 mmbf, yielding around $18.2 million in revenue for the county. That would mark a roughly $1 million increase in revenue over the average achieved over the past ten years, although Boyd acknowledged that the revenue figures would depend on market conditions.
County Commissioner Erin Skaar asked if the new plan would decrease the variability in harvest levels and discrepancies between projected and actual revenues, which complicate budgeting for the county.
Boyd said that he expected revenues to be steadier and projections more accurate with the new HCP. Skaar asked if the department could share more granular detail about the harvest projections and Wilson said that they could.
Wilson also gave a brief overview of challenges complicating operations in the Tillamook State Forest. The biggest of those is Swiss Needle Cast, a disease that hinders the growth of Douglas Fir and is widely present in the Tillamook State Forest. Another challenge is diseased “zombie” Alder, which are also in abundance in Tillamook. Wilson also said that the use of off-site seeds during the massive reforestation effort undertaken following the Tillamook Burn led to suboptimal tree yield across the landscape.
However, Wilson said that the HCP and resulting modeling had been developed to account for those issues as much as possible and that he believed the harvest targets could be met.
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