Department of Natural Resources: The Management of Washington’s Public Lands

Llyn Doremus works locally as a hydrologist on water resource characterization and management in Whatcom County and Western Washington. She also serves as the chairperson for the Mt. Baker Group of the Sierra Club and represents the Sierra Club on the conservation caucus of DNR’s Forest Practices Board and Forest and Fish Policy Group.

Did you know that the state of Washington owns and manages over 5.6 million acres of public land that, in addition to the state parks, makes 8 percent of Washington’s publicly owned land? State lands outside the park system are managed by the Washington Department of Natural Resources (DNR), which is overseen by the Commissioner of Public Lands (an elected office with a four-year term).

About three million acres of that land are uplands and 2.6 million acres are the bottomlands underlying the navigable rivers and waterbodies of Washington. Only 105,000 acres of our public lands are managed for the protection and maintenance of their natural resource values as Natural Area Preserves and Natural Resource Conservation Areas.

The vast majority of Washington’s three million acres of uplands is managed by DNR for income generation (these are referred to as “Trust Lands”), which means timber harvest. About 17 percent of the timber harvested in Washington comes from these lands, which also support the DNR operations, facilities and staff. DNR is by law required to manage their “Trust Lands” (which constitute about 2.1 million acres of the state uplands) to generate funding for Washington beneficiaries, in addition to contributing funding for DNR operations.

DNR is tasked both with managing the state lands for the public good and regulating the income generating activities (logging) that produce funds. It turns out that land management with the objective of income generation has tended not to engender management with the highest public good as an outcome.

In fact, management of Washington state’s Trust Lands by DNR for “income generation” (timber harvest) has been fraught with problems. Prioritization of industry interests and profitability over public safety and resource protection has led to complex management practices.

In our own backyard, Blanchard Mountain is a Trust Land managed by DNR toward the purpose of income generation. A wide range of local recreation and conservation groups have worked for over 10 years to convince DNR that management of Blanchard for purposes other than income generation from timber harvest is in the best interest of the community and the environment.

DNR convened a hand-picked set of local stakeholders (termed the Blanchard Strategies Group) that agreed to a management plan that allows two-thirds of the 4,800 acre mountain to be harvested, with 1,600 acres managed for recreational purposes. Local groups challenged DNR’s finding that this management plan could proceed without considering the environmental consequences (by completing an environmental impact statement), and won! However, DNR will probably appeal the court’s decision.

In addition, DNR’s land management has consequences that extend far beyond the three million acres of state trust lands under DNR management. Besides the publicly owned uplands, DNR manages timber cuts on private lands. With the listing of chinook salmon as threatened under the Endangered Species Act, Washington developed a Habitat Conservation Plan (HCP) with the federal government. It defined provisions under which timber harvesting in areas of sensitive chinook habitat could continue and still be protective of the habitat needs of the chinook.

This is the largest scale Habitat Conservation Plan ever developed under the Endangered Species Act, and it governs timber harvest on private lands throughout Washington state, not just the state lands under DNR management. The DNR has authority for implementing the provisions of the HCP on privately held timber harvests, under cooperatively developed rules termed “the Forest and Fish Rules.”

Because the scale of the HCP is unprecedented, the protocols for effective implementation, monitoring and adaptive management for protection of chinook salmon (and other species) under the HCP have not been tested or accepted in previously defined standards. In many cases the implementation of the rules is open to the interpretation of the DNR. And this has led to some serious and devastating consequences.

The most recent devastating consequences were the landslides in the Chehalis River watershed in early December. DNR’s own geologists identified the Stillman Creek watershed in the upper Chehalis River basin as unstable, citing evidence of over 80 landslide events in the area proposed for cutting by Weyerhauser.

However, DNR determined that the cut should proceed instead with the timber harvest based on analyses by Weyerhauser geologists. The ensuing damage is estimated in the hundreds of millions of dollars; it constituted a federal disaster and might have been significantly reduced with the use of existing, relevant technical information.

More locally, a timber sale proposed by Crown Pacific on Sumas Mountain was strongly opposed by local residents because of the unstable slopes on which the cut was proposed. Two previously identified active landslides were located in stream drainages surrounding the proposed cut area.

The site was harvested anyway, under new ownership, with landslides, windthrow and runoff damage to adjacent properties following in December 2007. The new owner, Sierra Pacific, blamed the damage on the flawed Forest Practices Application (that had been approved by DNR), which they inherited from the previous owner.

Aquatic lands present a different set of public resource management conflicts. Aquatic lands under DNR management are leased for a variety of public uses (ports and parks among others). However, public aquatic lands can be leased to private owners for commercial uses, and yield private profits. Once public lands are leased to private interests, public access and public harvest on those lands are restricted.

DNR is currently proposing to lease 17 acres of public tidelands throughout Puget Sound for private cultivation and harvest of geoducks, with a goal of 250 acres for geoduck cultivation. These lands will effectively be removed from public access and use. In addition, environmental impacts associated with geoduck cultivation are not well understood since this is a new industry.

Use of public lands for private profits in an environmentally unknown industry is not management for the highest public benefit. Local property owners in the vicinities proposed for leasing have mounted strong opposition to the private leasing of the tidelands. And they are concerned about the environmental consequences to their lands from geoduck aquaculture practices.

Another DNR-managed aquatic land, Maury Island, was designated as a State Aquatic Reserve Area by the previous Commissioner of Public Lands, Jennifer Belcher, in 2000. During this same time period Glacier Northwest, a mining company, via an aquatic lands lease, requested the use of state-owned aquatic lands for the construction and introduction of an industrial dock and barging facility in the heart of this reserve area.

Predecessors had constructed a dock 40 years earlier; however, at the time of application, the site had not been used for decades and, in violation of earlier lease terms, had fallen into disrepair. To create the largest U.S. mine of its kind in the adjacent uplands, a new barging facility needed to be constructed. Recognizing that this proposed industrial operation was incompatible with the intentions of the reserve and would pose significant risk to the fragile habitat, Commissioner Belcher denied Glacier’s request.

Unfortunately, when the next Commissioner of Public Lands, Doug Sutherland, took office he repealed the Maury Island reserve. While he did ultimately, under pressure, restore reserve designation, he did so with the clearly stated intent to allow Glacier’s industrial barging facility.

Public input into public lands management could clearly be improved. In fact, when DNR’s decision on Blanchard Mountain’s environmental assessment was challenged, the DNR defended their decision by asserting that the challengers had no standing, or in other words, no right to bring a challenge to DNR’s decisions on public lands management. A major precedent was set by the judge’s ruling that the public interest and public input (and in particular the groups appealing the decision) do have relevance in how Washington’s public lands are managed.

If you’re interested in giving your input to DNR on improvements to management of public lands in Northwest Washington, an opportunity is coming up. The Forest Practices Board (which provides DNR policy guidance on timber harvest practices) is conducting public hearings in September on new rules for riparian buffers along streams, in an effort to define “Desired Future Conditions” (DFC) for logged forests.

You can attend the public hearing in Mt. Vernon on Sept. 16 at 6 p.m., and tell the board: trees in riparian buffers surrounding streams should not be cut, salmon habitat should be protected by keeping logging and sediment out of the streams, and as soon as the updated new rules on stream buffers are established they should be implemented. §