Doc Hastings: “When President Clinton, to his credit, tried to come up with a forest plan, the current level at that time of timber…”

“When President Clinton, to his credit, tried to come up with a forest plan, the current level at that time of timber harvest was 4 rac{1}{2} billion board-feet, and the promise was that you could at least harvest 1.1 billion, 25 percent of it. We are not even close to that. We are not even close to that because the interpretation of that law and the ensuing lawsuits have kept any activity in these multipurpose areas. And I should make this point: This is national forestland. National forests were created to be multipurpose, including commercial activity. If you want to lock it up and not have any activity at all, the way to do that is put it in a wilderness area. This is not wilderness. Some de facto policies, unfortunately, in the past have led to sometimes this being treated as wilderness areas but it is not. So as a result of this, as a result of the timber receipts going down, these counties who relied on the Federal receipts from timber because they couldn't tax land now are facing huge, huge cuts. Chelan County in my district, one of the counties that has 80 percent ownership by the Federal Government, will have severe cuts in education, road maintenance, search and rescue, and this is a big tourist area up there, and the forestry education programs. Skamania County, a small county in the southern part of my district, loses 40 percent of its school budget. Forty percent of its school budget.”