Logging Plans by Maxxam/PL Draw Full House : Indybay

Eureka, CA - A jam-packed audience attended a public workshop that aired concerns surrounding controversial logging plans by Maxxam/Pacific Lumber and the flooded-out residents who oppose them. In front of a standing room only crowd that spilled into the lobby, opposing sides gave their best to convince the North Coast Regional Water Board that they should – or shouldn’t – approve permits for waste discharge for logging in two impaired Humboldt County valleys.

Maxxam/PL president Robert Manne said the timber company was in financial “crisis,” and that “California will be a lot worse off” if the permits associated with the logging plans are not granted. PL scientist Jeff Barrett tried to demonstrate that logging would help rather than further harm the heavily-logged area, saying “elimination of all harvest effects would do almost nothing to reduce flood frequency.”

“That’s tobacco science,” said McKinleyville resident Dr. Ken Miller. “Really, smoking is good for you.”

A fiery presentation by Humboldt Watershed Council president Mark Lovelace used PL’s own documents to show it knew increased logging would cause flooding and lay-offs after the boom-and-bust timber cutting that followed Maxxam’s hostile take-over of PL. Lovelace also said he was “frustrated” that PL lobbyists had met for several days with the water board in Santa Rosa without any input from affected downstream residents. “It’s like putting a smiley face on a pigs butt,” he said. “Any way you look at it, its dirty, its ugly and it stinks.”

Lovelace also questioned how a corporation that has earned $3.6 billion dollars in the last twenty years could be on the verge of bankruptcy. “Where did the money go,” he asked.

Elk River resident and farmer Kristi Wrigley said she first brought the flooding issues to the water board eight years ago, and that damage from over-logging is annually getting worse. Wrigley is the first downstream landowner on a farm that’s been in her family for over a hundred years. “I’m the best empirical science you have available,” she said. “It is extremely offensive that you have spent 4 days talking to the polluter.”

Long time Elk River resident Jim Holdner said he didn’t see the damage the other residents described, and that water quality in that valley has always been bad. But another long-timer, Phillip Nicholous, said a person would have to be “brain dead” not to see the damage Maxxam/PL has cause Elk River.

“We’re here because of one man’s greed,” said attorney William Bertain, who has represented former shareholders, PL retirees and local residents in lawsuits against Maxxam, a Texas corporation which treats Freshwater Creek and Elk River as “ditches for their industrial waste.”

During the rebuttal period of the workshop, PL general counsel Jared Carter said PL’s 1990 Pacific Meridian Report cited by Lovelace to show decline in both timber and jobs pre-dated the Maxxam take-over, and had nothing to do with how the company is run today. Lovelace easily put the lie to the corporate attorney by producing a copy of the Report, which cites the option of returning “to the 1985 harvest level”. 1985 was the year Maxxam took over the company and doubled the rate of cut.

Other PL lawyers have publicly stated the company has “free speech” rights when negotiating with the state, otherwise known as the famous “right-to-lie” defense for the alleged fraud committed by the company during the Headwaters Forest negotiations.

At the conclusion of the meeting, Water Board Executive Officer Katherine Kuhlman said she would make her decision on Thursday, February 24, 2005. PL’s financial situation will not play a role in her final decision, she said.

Logging Plans by Maxxam/PL Draw Full House

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