By Frank Young

Timber Bills About More Than Logging

The Coalition For Responsible Logging (CORL), of which the West Virginia Highlands Conservancy is a part, proposes to strengthen the West Virginia Logging Sediment Control Act (LSCA). State Senate Bill 658 will mandate better soil erosion, stream sedimentation and property rights protections. State Senate Bill 659 will provide for expanded enforcement opportunities.

But while amending the LSCA would improve how logging is conducted out in the woods, it would have other good and valuable residual effects.

For example, the bill to amend the LSCA would provide for notification of adjoining landowners before logging is conducted . Nominally, the purpose of this notification is to deter timber theft, an apparently prevalent practice in West Virginia. But this provision has the added benefit, once the notification requirement becomes known, of letting folks realize that if a logging operation sprouts up on an adjoining property, and notification hasn’t been made, that the logging operation is an illegal one.

This should usually, then, set into motion a chain reaction of reporting the illegal operation, inspection by Forestry or enforcement officers and DEP officers, and either shut down of the operation, enforcement actions, or proper registration of the operation, or some combination of all these.

Timber sites that are not registered are not contacted by the State Tax Department for severance tax payments. Better collection of timber severance taxes, then, would be one result of better logging registration procedures and timber theft prevention laws. It is believed by the Division of Forestry, by some legislators, and by the public at large that significant amounts of timber are harvested and marketed without permits and without the payment of timber severance taxes.

This denies needed funding for education, logging regulation and other environmental services, libraries, law enforcement, and other services of state government. Some legislators, especially those from border counties, are acutely aware of this loss of revenue.

So the Coalition for Responsible Logging’s two timber bills would improve water quality by preventing erosion and sedimentation, deter tree theft, focus on improved logger safety, and have the added benefit of reducing lost severance tax revenues. Who could ask for more?