Judge tosses timber lawsuit

The Daily Inter Lake

A Helena judge has ruled against a lawsuit that has held up one of the largest Swan Valley timber sales in recent memory.

District Judge Jeffrey Sherlock concluded that the environmental group, Friends of the Wild Swan, did not prove claims in a lawsuit filed last year to halt the Goat Squeezer timber sale.

The group claimed the Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation had failed to adequately account for costs associated with the timber sale.

But Sherlock found that state officials did not break the law by not determining whether the sale's revenues would exceed its costs.

He also rejected the group's claims that the state failed to consider cumulative impacts caused by the Goat Squeezer project and other logging nearby.

The Goat Squeezer project entailed three sales totaling 10.2 million board feet. Logging was about half finished on the first of those sales when the lawsuit was filed last year. The state had approved a second sale and the third has yet to be sold.

"There have been timber sales down there (in the Swan Valley), just not one of this size in the last 10 or maybe 15 years," said Bob Sandman, a state forester who led development of the project, which was rolled out for public review in 2001.

Friends of the Wild Swan sued last year and twice requested injunctions to block the timber sales. Sherlock rejected both requests.

"We're very pleased," Sandman said of the ruling. "We felt like we had worked very hard to obtain the public's involvement in that timber sale, that we tried to follow the requirements [of the Montana Environmental Policy Act] and come to a logical decision."

Sherlock said no law or constitutional provision requires the state to track the costs and income from individual timber sales. In fact, he said, the last two legislatures rejected just such proposals.

He agreed that the tree cutting would do some damage to the winter range of whitetail deer, but said that "does not mean this project is inappropriate, nor does it mean that the state is not managing these state lands with multiple uses in mind."

Speaking for Friends of the Wild Swan, Arlene Montgomery said, "We're very disappointed."

She said the lawsuit contended that the state has an obligation to demonstrate that a timber sale is a money-maker because the stated purpose of the sales is to generate money for school trust funds.

The lawsuit also charged that the state had failed to adequately account for cumulative impacts on winter range for deer and elk from Goat Squeezer and other nearby logging projects.

Those projects essentially convert closed-canopy forests to open-canopy forests, resulting in a loss of thermal cover for big game, she said.

That is one of the main thrusts in another lawsuit being pursued by Friends of the Wild Swan against the Flathead National Forest's nearby Meadow-Smith timber project. That lawsuit is pending before a federal judge in Missoula.

The Associated Press contributed to this story.