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Posted 8/6/03

Judge overturns Jackson Forest environmental report
He reprimands Department of Forestry for ignoring legal guidelines

The Mendocino County Superior Court Tuesday overturned an environmental report for Jackson Demonstration State Forest, saying the state forestry department failed to follow clear legal guidelines when it created the document.

In response to a lawsuit brought by Forests Forever Foundation and the Campaign to Restore Jackson State Redwood Forest, Judge Richard Henderson ruled that the California Department of Forestry (CDF) failed to comply with the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) in writing the Environmental Impact Report (EIR) for the forest’s management plan. The EIR, Henderson said in his ruling, was deficient in three key areas:

• The state Board of Forestry, not CDF, should have been the agency to certify the EIR.
• The EIR did not contain an adequate consideration of the environmental setting of the forest, as required by CEQA. And most significantly,
• The EIR did not adequately evaluate the cumulative environmental impacts of the management plan’s outlined timber operations.


"We are very happy that Judge Henderson has recognized that CDF cannot ignore the law and get away with it," said Forests Forever Foundation Executive Director Paul Hughes. "By upholding CEQA the court has affirmed the public’s right to weigh in on a major taxpayer-funded extraction activity that can damage soil, wildlife habitat, and water quality."

The ruling means that new timber harvests in the forest cannot proceed until the EIR is rewritten and goes through a public hearing process. In issuing his ruling, Henderson placed the blame for the timber companies’ potential loss of income from the ruling squarely with CDF.

"…(T)he failure of CDF to prepare an EIR that complies with the minimal statutory standards leaves me with no alternative but to direct CDF and the Board (of Forestry) to rescind the approval of the EIR," Henderson wrote in the ruling. "CDF and the Board had every reason to believe that their approval of the updated Management Plan would be subjected to close judicial scrutiny. With that in mind, CDF and the Board should have scrupulously followed the procedures adopted by the legislature to minimize the risk of an inevitable court challenge and the potential economic hardship on the management of the JDSF and on the local timber industry."

Before logging can resume, at a minimum the deficiencies in the EIR must be corrected, the revised report submitted for public comment, the comments responded to, and the revised final EIR approved by the Board of Forestry. That process is likely to take at least six months.

Located between the towns of Ft. Bragg and Mendocino, 50,000-acre Jackson provides one of the only unprotected large sanctuaries in Mendocino County for salmon and other endangered redwood-related species.
On June 18 the California First District Court of Appeals in San Francisco ordered CDF to immediately stop all logging in Jackson until it could review Henderson’s decision to allow logging to proceed during the lawsuit. Forests Forever Foundation and the Jackson Campaign had asked Henderson for a preliminary injunction to halt the cutting until the EIR lawsuit was resolved.

"This decision adds yet another piece of evidence to the record that CDF is ill-suited to regulate timber operations in the public interest," Hughes said of this week’s ruling. "A better guardian of this henhouse might be the water quality boards."

For more information on the effort to save Jackson Forest, please visit:
www.forestsforever.org/jacksonpage.html.