DEER LODGE – The Obama administration could support the logging mandate proposed in U.S. Sen. Jon Tester’s forest bill as a pilot project, U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said.
Speaking Saturday in Deer Lodge, Vilsack said the agency would consider Tester’s bill as a trial run to see if it’s effective in improving forest health and helping rural economies.
“We’re going to continue to work with Sen. Tester to accomplish what the bill is supposed to do,” Vilsack said. “There’s a tremendous opportunity here.”
Tester, a Democrat, is pitching the Forest Jobs and Recreation Act as a consensus-driven balance between preserving the environment and creating new jobs with a steady source of timber.
Tester’s bill would create more than 600,000 acres of wilderness, mostly in southwestern Montana’s Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest, and open 70,000 acres in the Beaverhead-Deerlodge to logging over the next decade.
Vilsack said the plan’s goal of protecting watersheds, clearing overgrown areas near homes, and restoring damaged landscapes matches key goals of the Obama administration for national forests.
He also said keeping timber mills in business is important because rural areas are suffering from unemployment, low wages, and the loss of young people.
“This is also about the future of rural America, not just rural Montana,” Vilsack said. “What’s at stake here is the area of the country that provides the food, the water, the clean air and now the fuel for the country.”
Vilsack’s statements appear to be a softening of the Obama administration’s view of Tester’s bill. In December, Agriculture Undersecretary Harris Sherman said the administration had concerns the plan required logging levels that were not reasonable, and could create a harmful precedent for other national forests.