By Frank Young

West Virginia Forestry Division Steeped in Cronyism

The West Virginia Division of Forestry (WVDOF) is a state government agency nominally charged with both promoting and regulating the growing and harvesting of trees.

The agency makes no secret of the consulting services it provides. The agency offers advice on forest management, including tree harvesting frequency, logging techniques, layout of logging roads and assessments of the market worth of stands of trees. These services are "free" to landowners, loggers and others.

The agency also is charged with the promulgation of the rules of logging, usually called "Best Management Practices" (BMPs). The BMPs are designed to reduce stream siltation and encourage responsible logging practices.

Nominally, then, the WVDOF is an "enforcement" agency. It is charged with "enforcement" of BMPs. In actual practice, enforcement is mostly a farce.

Under current law and practice, a timber operator can move onto a logging site, cut and remove vast amounts of trees, cause enormous erosion and siltation, then move onto another site without ever having been inspected even once by WVDOF personnel.

Yes, the law says that operators are to give notice to WVDOF of intent to log a particular site. But WVDOF interprets current law to mean that the notice need not be given until as much as 3 days after the logging begins. And the agency is not even required to visit logging sites – neither large nor small, neither before, during nor after logging has taken place.

And even if WVDOF does inspect a logging site and finds BMP violations, it does not usually issue a Notice of Violation. Its agents can merely tell the operator to do what’s required.

The result of this is that logging operators can and do begin and finish logging operations with no WVDOF oversight whatsoever. Operators can and do run logging roads through streams. They can and do abandon logging sites without performing reclamation. They can and do leave haul and skid roads as bare waterways which do little or nothing to slow the runoff of rainwater, too often contributing to the severity of flooding.

The WVDOF is a virtual government arm of the logging industry. The Director of WVDOF always has a background of experience with a large forest products corporation.

The West Virginia University (WVU) School of Forestry is openly associated with forest product corporations and their representatives promoting corporate oriented policies and practices.

The West Virginia legislature's Forest Management Review Commission (FMRC) is laden with political apologists for a "hands off" forest management policy. The FMRC advocates for broad exemptions from licensing and training requirements and for little or no actual enforcement of BMPs. FMRC is noted for its blanket support for whatever the gigantic forest product industry wants, under the guise of helping small farm owners who "just need to cut a few trees."

In short, "cronyism" rather accurately describes the close association between the logging industry, state government, the WVU School of Forestry and the lack of enforcement of timber and logging laws.

This cronyism shows in the way logging is conducted and permitted to be conducted around the state. New laws actually requiring state agencies to enforce logging laws will allow a significant change in what actually happens out in the woods.

Until then, we can expect more soil erosion from logging sites, fewer native game fish living and reproducing in silted streams, and we can expect more floods and bigger floods from unnecessarily increased rapid runoff of rainwater into creeks and rivers choked with more and more logging silt and debris.