Litigation looms over latest round of Washington state timber sales

Conservation advocates are prepared to sue over more than half of the timber sales Washington’s Board of Natural Resources approved on Tuesday, the latest flare-up in the fight over whether older trees on state-owned forestland should be spared from logging.

The board approved a package of nine sales that would involve cutting roughly 1,200 acres of trees across western Washington, with minimum revenue expected to be around $13.8 million. Staff at the Department of Natural Resources put together plans for the sales and money generated would go largely to schools, counties, and public universities.

Tacoma-based Legacy Forest Defense Coalition opposed five of the nine sales. The group’s founder, Stephen Kropp, said in an interview on Tuesday that it would likely file lawsuits in state court to stop some or all of the five approvals. “We’re probably going to appeal every single one,” he said.

Legacy Forest Defense Coalition and others have been pressing with litigation and through administrative processes to prevent logging on state land of older forests that are short of qualifying as protected old-growth. These forests, they say, are some of the last patches of their kind in western Washington, containing trees that are around a century old in some cases.

https://washingtonstatestandard.com/2024/10/01/litigation-looms-over-latest-round-of-washington-state-timber-sales/