For
immediate release:
Wednesday, August 6, 2003
Contacts: Paul Hughes, executive director (415) 974-4201 direct,
(415) 298-2223 cell
Andria Strickley, communications manager (415) 974-4202
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:
o The state Board of Forestry, not CDF, should have been the agency
to certify the EIR.
o The EIR did not contain an adequate consideration of the environmental
setting of the forest, as required by CEQA. And most significantly,
o 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
see to:
www.forestsforever.org/archives_resources/action-alerts/index.html
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