BY PEPPER FISHER
PORT ANGELES — The Clallam County Revenue Advisory Committee (RAC) on Monday released a formal letter to Governor Bob Ferguson and legislative leaders calling for renewed oversight of how the Commissioner of Public Lands, Dave Upthegrove, is handling County Forest Board Transfer Lands, and they’re asking for a reaffirmation of what the trustee duties are to counties and junior taxing districts.
Since 1936, Clallam County has deeded just under 95,000 acres of tax-foreclosed timberlands to the State to be managed in trust for the benefit of schools, fire districts, and other junior taxing districts and the services they provide.
The letter drafted by the RAC raises concerns about recent actions that have reduced trust revenue that should have been available for local services. Among the examples cited, they say the DNR withheld 8 timber sales with an appraised value of somewhere between $8 million and $12 million in Clallam County.
The Chair of the Advisory Committee is Connie Beauvais, who called us from Olympia Tuesday, where she addressed the Board of Natural Resources (BNR) and distributed copies of the letter to the offices of some legislators and the Governor.
“I did provide complimentary copies to the Board of Natural Resources this morning as I made my comments to them. And several of the board members appeared to be quite concerned and a little surprised. I did not speak to legislators, but I gave copies of the letter to their aides, as a heads up, because there is another hard copy coming via US mail. So, this is to give them an early edition of the letter since this is such a short legislative session. And so, I was trying to get it into their hands as fast as possible.”
Beauvais and the members of the Revenue Advisory Committee are making the case that the 8 timber sales that were set aside in our county were supposed to have been harvested years and even decades ago.
“All of the trees that are on our county trust lands, and on any of the trust lands, all of the trees have been harvested no less than one time. Most of them two and three times. So we are not cutting old-growth. Those trees are set aside, and rightly so, those ones that were growing at the time of statehood. All of those have been set aside. All the others are harvested. And we want to manage them in a sustainable and healthy way. We want healthy forests and healthy communities.”
The RAC asks legislative leaders to review trust administration practices and consider steps including requesting historical and projected revenue information from the DNR. They want increased monitoring of fiduciary performance by state appointees, and they want to convene a legislative committee meeting with local taxing district officials.
We asked Beauvais if she had a sense of how the letter will be received by legislators and the Governor’s office.
“It will be interesting to see. But I know that former representative Jim Buck was at our RAC meeting, and after this letter was unanimously approved by RAC, with Commissioner Johnson abstaining because of his position on the Board of Natural Resources, because someone had said, “What if we don’t hear from the state?” And Representative Buck, in his public comments said, “No response is a response.” And so then, taxing districts are going to have to decide among themselves what, if anything, they want to do next.”