[Dialogue] Big landowner gets closed-door deal

[Harry Wainwright]

  MSNBC.com

  _____  

Big landowner gets closed-door deal 

New Forest Service rules could let largest private owner convert land

By Karl Vick 

The Washington Post

updated 12:48 a.m. ET, Sat., July. 5, 2008

MISSOULA, Mont. - The Bush administration is preparing to ease the way for
the nation's largest private landowner to convert hundreds of thousands of
acres of mountain forestland to residential subdivisions.

The deal was struck behind closed doors between Mark E. Rey, the former
timber lobbyist who oversees the U.S.
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/USDA+Forest+Service?tid=inf
ormline>  Forest Service, and Plum Creek Timber Co., a former logging
company turned real estate investment trust that is building homes. Plum
Creek owns more than 8 million acres nationwide, including 1.2 million acres
in the mountains of western Montana, where local officials were stunned and
outraged at the deal.

"We have 40 years of Forest Service history that has been reversed in the
last three months," said Pat O'Herren, an official in Missoula
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Missoula+County?tid=informl
ine>  County, which is threatening to sue the Forest Service for forgoing
environmental assessments and other procedures that would have given the
public a voice in the matter.

The deal, which Rey said he expects to formalize next month, threatens to
dramatically accelerate trends already transforming the region. Plum Creek's
shift from logging to real estate reflects a broader shift in the Western
economy, from one long grounded in the industrial-scale extraction of
natural resources to one based on accommodating the new residents who have
made the region the fastest-growing in the nation.

Environmentalists, to their surprise, found that timber and mining were
easier on the countryside.

"Now that Plum Creek is getting out of the timber business, we're kind of
missing the loggers," said Ray Rasker, executive director of Headwaters
Economics, a nonprofit that studies land management in the West. "A
clear-cut will grow back, but a subdivision of trophy homes, that's going to
be that way forever.

"It's kind of the ugly face of the new economy."

Rey said he, too, laments the ascension of "McMansions" over working forest,
but he insisted that the law obliged him to accommodate Plum Creek's request
for clarification of its rights to cross public land. Rey emphasized that
during the private negotiations, Forest Service lawyers leveraged promises
from Plum Creek to moderate the impact, including mandating "fire-wise"
measures to reduce the danger from summer wildfires.

Under the new agreement, logging roads running into areas controlled by Plum
Creek could be paved - and would thrum with the traffic of eight to 12
vehicle trips per day to and from each home, according to O'Herren. Critics
say that will further imperil grizzly bears, lynxes and other endangered
species in the Crown of the Continent ecosystem, a region of rugged peaks,
glacier-carved valleys, and sparkling rivers and lakes that straddles the
border between Montana and Canada - and that in parts remains as Lewis and
Clark found it.

"For us, this is kind of an arterial bleed, and we're either going to get a
handle on it or not," said Melanie Parker, executive director of Northwest
Connections, an environmental group in the Swan Valley, 60 miles northeast
of Missoula.

Parker recently eased an SUV through Glacier Ridge, a nascent subdivision
marked by freshly scraped lots and sumptuous views of the Mission Range on
one side, the Swan Range on the other and the still-sparsely populated
valley in between. The spring-fed bottomland is prime bear habitat where her
husband, Tom, a hunting guide, saw his first grizzly.

"Look at that, Tom!" Parker yelped, after a climb up a knoll revealed a
three-story log home, still wrapped in Tyvek Home Wrap insulation. "They're
like mushrooms. You get a few sunny days and they pop right up."

Most are the second, third or even fourth homes of wealthy newcomers who
have transformed the local economy - 40 percent of income in Missoula County
is now "unearned," from, say, dividends - and typically visit only in the
summer. In Antler Ridge, across Highway 93, Web cameras installed over bird
nests and a bear den beam photos to a hedge fund partner who visits his 200
acres just a few times a year.

"He was actually in France when the bear left the den," said "remote
wildlife viewing" contractor Ryan Alter, on his way to install a camera at
an owl's nest. "So I sent him pictures on his BlackBerry
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/BlackBerry+Mobile+Devices?t
id=informline> ."

"I wanted to own land out there because I was always very interested in the
concept of restoration, conservation," Paul Gurinas, the hedge fund partner,
said by phone from Chicago. "The fact that it's almost become kind of a
housing subdivision, that isn't what I was looking for. I guess I wish I had
bought the whole thing up, and then I wouldn't have to worry about it."

That same impulse drives a different kind of land deal in the area: The
buyers are the Nature
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Nature+Conservancy?tid=info
rmline>  Conservancy and other organizations that purchase desirable private
land to preserve it. Since 2000, the groups have paid Plum Creek market
rates to secure 280,000 sensitive acres in Montana alone.

Another 320,000 acres are being preserved under a provision that Sen. Max
<http://projects.washingtonpost.com/congress/members/b000243/>  Baucus
(D-Mont.) forced into the farm bill, which survived President
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/George+W.+Bush?tid=informli
ne>  Bush's veto. The measure includes $250 million to back bonds to buy
Plum Creek lands that otherwise might be developed.

"This is like the last big, wild, intact landscape in the Lower 48," said
Eric Love of the Trust for Public Land, a conservation group that with the
Nature Conservancy announced the $510 million purchase on Monday. "If these
lands are going to be sold, someone is going to buy them. The question is,
who?"

Plum Creek said it has sold only 3,000 of its Montana acres to developers in
the past five years, and it expects to sell even less in the next five, the
company's president, Rick Holley, wrote in a recent op-ed in the Missoulian
newspaper. But critics point out that its calculations may shift with the
real estate market.

A decade ago, while repairing an image as the "Darth
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Darth+Vader?tid=informline>
Vader of the timber industry," as one congressman put it, the company
showcased good-forestry practices on a hillside above Flathead Lake.

That parcel is now Eagle's Crest, a gated subdivision with its own airstrip
and lots on offer for $100,000 an acre. Remote corners of Swan Valley are
selling for $11,000 an acre, with broker inquiries arriving from Europe. By
comparison, the "net present value per acre of forest" runs at most $500,
said Larry Swanson, director of the O'Connor Center for the Rocky Mountain
West at the University of Montana.

"It's a pretty straightforward proposition: The region's economy is moving
from extraction to amenities, and you would expect the same thing to happen
with its largest landowner," Swanson said.

"It's a tough deal. Change is hard, and this is pretty fundamental change.
But what's happening here is perfectly understandable."

Missoula County officials say their objection is not to change, which
traditionally rural jurisdictions have struggled to manage, but to being
blindsided by Rey's announcement of a far-reaching change negotiated in
secret.

Plum Creek owns 57 percent of Missoula County's private land, a posture that
under state law gives it veto power over any zoning. Over the decades that
the Forest Service enforced limits on logging roads, the county came to
regard federal policy as a firebreak against development.

"All these years, we've been told those roads are not for residential use,"
said Jean Curtiss, who chairs the county commission. "These are logging
roads. They're for timber management."

If the deal goes into effect, the county stands to lose money in providing
services such as snow plowing and ambulances to remote new developments.
"You're looking at a real nightmare scenario in managing wildfires," Rasker
said. "And you're going to have access issues: If these now become gated
subdivisions, it's going to be harder for people to go hunt and fish, and
that's pretty important to people in Montana."

C 2008 The Washington Post Company

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25537068/

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