Post Register editorial board members are Roger Plothow, publisher; J. Robb Brady; Marty Trillhaase; and Dean Miller.
Jim Gerber, a member of the Post Register's Readers Advisory Board and a retired Forest Service specialist from St. Anthony, recently challenged this newspaper's view that logging on federal lands costs the taxpayer a whopping $ 1 billion over a decade - including $188 million logging trees on Idaho's national forests alone.
Gerber claims that from 1989 to 1997, the Forest Service logging program covered its costs and still earned $2.7 billion. Gerber bases his contentions on the Timber Sale Program Information Reporting System, which was supposed to address decades of accounting failures.
But TSPIRS failed to do that and has been abandoned.
Gerber also cited the auxiliary values of jobs as a benefit from logging public lands. In l996, he claims logging resulted in total nongovernment employment income of $2.2 billion.
Nice try, Jim.
But here are the facts:
* The General Accounting Office - the investigative arm of Congress - has documented Forest Service logging losses of $2 billion from l992 through 1997.
* Likewise, the Congressional Research Service earlier identified a loss of $1.2 billion for the 10-year period from 1992 to 2001. Add to that number timber sale receipts to the counties, and the total rises to $2.7 billion.
* The Office of the Inspector General has found that the Forest Service failed standards compliance audits for its entire program for eight of the 10 years in the l990s.
* And Taxpayers for Common Sense reports the agency cost taxpayers millions more through a policy of making "additional price reductions" after logging appraisals were finished.
The truth is that huge logging losses on national forests for the past 15 years have been the rule, not the exception. Just two years ago, the GAO again scolded the Forest Service for "serious accounting and financial reporting deficiencies." As a result, GAO says it could not determine how much recent logging operations cost the American taxpayer. The Forest Service now promises to produce a workable system by 2004 - but for now, the agency is no longer reporting timber sale balances.
Timber jobs indeed are important to communities in forested areas. But the GAO says that the Forest Service's accounting for logging-related jobs is inaccurate. It doesn't count the time a logger spends on the job, only the amount of money budgeted for this work.
And the logging roads that Gerber underscores as an important public asset have an accumulated maintenance backlog of $8 billion - $647 million in Idaho alone.
Bottom line: The national forests use a complicated system that keeps hidden from the public what it actually loses by logging those public lands. Indeed, outside public interest groups may have to hire their own experts to get to the truth.
So why would the Bush administration pick this time to invent a shadowy new kind of forest management - for both the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management - in which it hires private industry to perform services ranging from logging to managing campgrounds and pays them with trees?
Since we can't say with certainty how much the government loses cutting down trees, how will we ever know if the taxpayer is getting fleeced again?
This new policy did not come from open and vigorous debate. It's the product of a last-minute rider buried in a congressional appropriation bill.
Yes, the Forest Service is still in charge. And yes, the agency still must follow environmental standards. But for how long - and how well? Even now, the Bush administration is working to overhaul environmental laws, weakening the ability of ordinary people to challenge management of the public lands. Because of accounting changes under this new management arrangement, how well the Forest Service manages its trees-for-services transactions may not get enough scrutiny at the congressional level.
All of which may serve the pro-timber interests of the Bush administration - but it only delays the kind of true reform that will reverse huge logging losses on the national forests.
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