THURSDAY
Remember Father’s Day Sunday, June 21
JUNE 18, 2015 Opinion ��������������Page 4 Community News ���Page 5
True Color: Chiggers Stokes Page 15
Sports ���������������Page 7 Classifieds ���������� Page 17 Volume 83 No. 41
SERVING THE WEST END SINCE 1931
• WWW.FORKSFORUM.COM •
Timber left standing on Department of Natural Resources trust lands while peninsula mills shut down
Flag Day Ceremony
By Rob Ollikainen Peninsula Daily News
Editor Note: This is an excerpt of a timely article that appeared in the PDN last Friday.
LAPUSH
Clallam County officially forgives $205,710 in Forks pool district loan debt
In a 3-0 vote, Clallam County commissioners agreed to release the QVPRD from its debt of $205,710 which was the remaining balance owed to the Opportunity Fund. In a decision that was previously made Jan. 20, the board agreed to forgive the remainder of a $225,000 no-interest loan to protect the taxpayers of the entire county. The Quillayute Valley Park and Recreation District received in 2004 a $160,000 grant and a $225,000 loan from the county’s Opportunity Fund to buy land, rental homes and equipment to support the community pool and recreation center. The Opportunity Fund is a portion of sales tax that supports public infrastructure projects and personnel in economic development offices. District chairman Nedra Reed, a former Forks mayor, asked commissioners in a Jan. 11 letter to forgive the balance of the loan, citing tough economic conditions. The state attorney general issued an opinion in November 2013 saying the district could not use timber tax revenue to pay back the loan. The district had made three annual payments of $6,430 toward the loan. Peach and Commissioner Jim McEntire had previously said that the money given to the district should not have been a loan in the first place. The district runs the Forks Athletic and Aquatic Club at 91 Maple Ave.
BEAVER
CLALLAM BAY
SEKIU
NEAH BAY
PRSRT STD US Postage Paid Permit No. 6 Forks, WA
FORKS
VFW Post Commander Tom Hughes of Forks explains the 13 steps of folding the American flag on June 14 during the Flag Day Ceremony held at the Forks Rainforest Arts Center. Folding the flag are from left, Hunter Ponton, Riley Ponton and Warner Ponton, all Forks Boy Scouts with Troop 1465. Photo by Lonnie Archibald
ECRWSS - BOXHOLDER
Recent mill closures and Allen Logging Co.’s upcoming stoppage were hastened by the state’s failure to sell logs that were authorized to be sold on North Olympic Peninsula trust lands. A combination of staff shortages, legal challenges and the protection of a threatened seabird prevented millions of board feet of timber from being harvested in Clallam and Jefferson counties, state Department of Natural Resources officials said. The 247 million board feet of Olympic-region timber that was supposed to be sold from 2004-2014 but wasn’t sold — “arrearage” in forestry parlance — would have been enough to keep the shuttered Interfor sawmill in Beaver and planer mill in Forks running for four years and the idled Green Creek mill in Port Angeles running for about 12 years, said Rod Fleck, Forks city attorney and planner. The amount of timber on the region’s trust lands that DNR was authorized to sell but didn’t in the past decade is worth upward of $68 million, Fleck said. Fleck for years has tried to spur DNR to sell all the timber it is authorized to sell. Such sales support trust beneficiaries such as county governments, hospitals and school districts. Fleck said that groups within the environmental community have stalled harvests with lawsuits — but added that DNR has not done enough to meet its sustainable harvest calculation for the past decade. Recently, Fleck has taken DNR to task for arrearage in a series of presentations to local civic organizations and other groups. “It is not surprising to a lot of folks in the industry that we had a set of mills close on the peninsula,” Fleck told North Olympic Timber Action Committee members in April. Bill Peach, one of the three Clallam County commissioners — he lives in Forks — and a former Rayonier forest manager, encouraged the public to keep track of the issue. “I like the work that Rod has done to try to quantify arrearage in dollars and cents to the user, the juniortaxing-district users,” Peach said in a May interview. “That’s important work. That’s your tax dollars.” To read the entire article go to PeninsulaDailyNews. com.