Chronicle: Don't Let (Pacific Lumber's) Hurwitz Off

EDITORIAL - Don't let Hurwitz off

Wednesday, January 24, 2007

MAYBE a bankruptcy judge can finish what government has tried for years: curbing the chain-saw greed of financer Charles Hurwitz.

The Houston moneyman shouldn't be granted his latest demand: an end to special logging controls on 200,000 acres in Humboldt County owned by his company-controlled Pacific Lumber.

The man is unstoppable. In 1986 he used junk bonds to buy the nation's biggest redwood lumber producer. He doubled timber cuts to pay down some $714 million in debt, but even that wasn't enough.

He then jammed out a deal of state and federal agencies that paid him $480 million for some 10,000 acres of primeval redwoods, some of the tallest stands in existence. The Headwaters acreage was turned into a park, and Hurwitz got his money.

But government wisely locked in an important condition. Hurwitz's company had to abide by conservation rules that minimized the damage of his hurry-up timber cuts on the remaining land.

Now he's trying to back out of this promise. The timber-cut restrictions are so onerous that Pacific Lumber is unprofitable and has defaulted on a $27 million bond debt payment, the company contends.

Sorry, Mr. Hurwitz, your financial miscalculations can't be cured by denuding hillsides, clogging streams and harming wildlife. The state and federal purchase of the Headwaters came with an obligation that can't be jettisoned.

Hurwitz wants a bankruptcy court Hail Mary. A federal judge, sitting in a Texas courtroom, may have the power to undo a California logging deal. But this strategy would be a lawless mockery of an important deal.

Bankruptcy court is no place to shred environmental controls. Hurwitz must stick with the deal he made.