Logging Fight Begins Over New Plan

The Associated Press
Albuquerque Journal: Albuquerque, New Mexico

9/23/02

OJO CALIENTE — A U.S. Forest Service plan to allow logging north of here has fueled an old dispute.

Many of the people who argued over a logging project in the Tusas Mountains a decade ago are again concerned.

The Agua/Caballos timber sale, approved by the Carson National Forest, would allow for the logging of old-growth trees. But the plan is being appealed by Wild Watershed, Carson Forest Watch, the Forest Guardians and Vallecitos outfitter Paul Becker.

The Forest Service has until early October to accept or deny the appeal.

The Agua/Caballos logging project was first proposed in 1992. It calls for several thinning and prescribed-fire treatments for the forest over the next several years. It also calls for the logging of 6.4 million board feet of timber.

Santa Fe environmentalist Sam Hitt objects to the plan because he says the Tusas Mountains hold some of the last remaining stands of old-growth forest in the Southwest.

"It's not a coincidence that they started pushing this project as soon as the Bush Administration came into office," Hitt of Wild Watershed said. "Up until then it was a backburner project because there was no pressing need."

Hitt and the Forest Guardians held up a similar project called the La Manga Timber Sale with a lawsuit in the 90s. They eventually lost the case and the project is almost complete.

The planned timber sale would take place within an area called the Vallecitos Sustained Yield Unit — 73,000 acres in the Carson National Forest that was set aside by Congress more than 50 years ago to benefit the local economy through the cutting and sale of timber products.

El Rito District Ranger Kurt Winchester did not immediately return a call seeking comment.

Antonio DeVargas, former operator of La Compania de Ocho that logged La Manga, said the company ran out of money while fighting environmentalists in three different courts.

Environmentalists are "responsible for a (conservative) backlash because they have abused the Endangered Species Act," he said. "It's not about endangered species. It's about denying locals access to the natural resources that are in our backyards."

DeVargas has retired from logging due to health reasons, but he wants other local millers and loggers to benefit from the Agua/Caballos sale.

La Compania de Ocho is operating again and is being run by a cooperative of locals who would have rights to 80 percent of the timber from Agua/Caballos.

Another local cooperative, called Las Communidades, would claim the remaining 20 percent.

Becker lives in the small northern New Mexico community of Vallecitos and leads horseback trips in the surrounding forest. He is concerned the Agua/Caballos project is too close to Vallecitos and its acequias, and that the Forest Service's projection of the job base it would create is untrue.

"If I believed this would benefit the people of Vallecitos I would not be opposed to it," Becker said. "It, in fact, isn't going to employ the people they say it's going to and it's going to ruin our watershed."