QUINCY, Calif.-Here in the Sierra Nevada, timber company executives and environmental activists spent years cobbling together an agreement to cover timber cutting in nearby federal forests. The plan was to become-or so it was hoped-a model for national collaboration.
Those hopes were misplaced. Earlier this month, as Congress officially put the essence of the timbering plan on the lawbooks, each side involved in the talks seemed ready to pick up an ax and swing away-at the other side.
The unhappy saga started nearly six years ago, when the Quincy Library Group (so named because it met in the local library, where participants couldn't shout) was formed after the area's slumping timber industry invited local environmental activists to join them in an effort to find a balance between jobs and trees. Eventually the group, which boasted about 30 members, settled upon a plan for managing 2.5 million acres of national forestland in the Sierra Nevada.
They decided the most sensible approach would be to leave some tracts of forest intact while allowing selective logging in others. But national environmental groups later turned against the proposal, saying it was too pro-timber.
The legislation Congress approved this month does not require the U.S. Forest Service to implement the controversial land-use plan. It does, however, compel the agency-for the first time-to consider the plan, and it bars officials from considering any alternative proposal that would impose tighter restrictions on timber cutting than the Library Group did.
"The passage of this legislation is a victory, first of all for the national forests and the environment, but also for our communities," Ron Shinn, a spokesman for Rep. Wally Herger, R-Calif., said in a mid-October interview. Herger represents the Quincy area and shepherded the original bill through the House. "It demonstrates that local consensus can work. It will be an entirely new approach to managing federal forests," Shinn noted.
National environmental leaders vigorously disagree. "You could have groups in any community where there are national forests saying, 'This is the deal we want,'" said Louis Blumberg, the San Francisco-based assistant regional director of the Wilderness Society. "If they have the muscle to get it through, then Congress could micromanage every national forest. All this is being promoted falsely under the notion that it's a collaborative effort of former adversaries, when it's really a deal cooked up by three guys."
Whoever is right, the fight has left collaborative policy-making with a black eye. The Clinton administration rolled into office encouraging collaboration as an alternative to protracted litigation. Asserting that the Quincy effort was a fine example of Americans resolving their differences outside a courtroom, senior Clinton administration figures initially offered rhetorical and occasionally technical support.
Last year, the House passed a version of the Quincy plan, 429-1. At the time, even leading congressional environmentalists pledged support in exchange for legislative modifications. But many national environmental groups weren't happy. The Wilderness Society and dozens of its allies mobilized, and persuaded Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., to stall the bill in the Senate. There the measure languished, seemingly comatose, for months.
Then, in the closing days of the 105th Congress, conservative lawmakers-with backing from a growing chorus of property-rights groups-managed to slip the legislation into the enormous spending bill, which they knew would be difficult for President Clinton to veto.
While the Clinton administration cannot point to Quincy as collaborative policy-making at its best, officials can direct attention to northern New Mexico, where a cooperative Forest Service program has won accolades for ending years of bitter bickering.
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