By Russ Lawrence, President, Bitterrooters for Planning
The recently-released report by UM’s Bureau of Business and Economic Research on “The Impact of Timber Harvest Declines on the Ravalli County Economy” is flawed from start to finish, both in its concept and in its execution. It should embarrass both the County Commissioners and the BBER, and the nearly $17,000 of taxpayer dollars expended on it should infuriate taxpayers.
The overpriced report is a backwards-looking study that sheds little or no useful light on the road ahead, given the radically-changed circumstances we now face, compared to 1988.
The authors used an economic model to generate the predictable conclusion that harvesting an additional 24 million board feet per year over the last 30 years would have resulted in more jobs, more income, and more population in Ravalli County.
Their methodology is cloudy at best, and given the assumptions and arbitrary inputs that were fed into the model, the conclusion was inevitable. A similar result could have been achieved by any reasonably competent analyst using publicly available data, at much lower cost.
Meanwhile:
• The authors acknowledge that not all the jobs and income from that higher harvest level would accrue to Ravalli County, but their analysis suggests that all those jobs and income were “lost” to the local economy.
• They blame the decreased harvest on federal land management decisions, environmental laws, and litigation, while omitting consideration of external market forces such as the staggering amount of private timber that was harvested in the 1990’s; industry mechanization and automation; and the precipitous decline in demand during the recession of 2008-2013. Other issues, such as the catastrophic mismanagement of Darby Lumber, are only mentioned tangentially.
• They ignore the fact that while many of the economic benefits of higher harvest levels leave the county, all of the environmental consequences remain here.
The BBER’s conclusion that “the overall economy would have more jobs, income and population today” goes far beyond the scope of the study, failing to take into account the full range of economic drivers over the last 30 years in Ravalli County. Readers of the report are therefore cautioned that the report’s “conclusions” are based on speculation, omissions, and conjecture: artful sophistry disguised as fact.
In fact, the Ravalli County economy may have grown faster and diversified more in the last 30 years due to the declining federal harvests – a possibility this report never addresses.
Bitterrooters for Planning believes that “more” of what this commission appears to want is not necessarily “better,” particularly in a county with
• no comprehensive land use planning;
• a shift toward knowledge- and recreation-based jobs where a healthy environment is an economic benefit; and
• chronically insufficient public resources to deal with the issues associated with more logging/higher population – public safety, public health, human services, etc.
The one conclusion from the BBER “study” that we can embrace is this: “Since the majority of timber currently harvested in Ravalli County is processed outside the county, efforts to increase the volume of timber harvested by the BNF would not be likely to return the full economic benefits generated by the industry of the past. Furthermore, it is unlikely that significant investments to replace the milling infrastructure that existed in the 1980s will be made.”
In other words: you can’t turn back the clock.
Still, the commissioners retroactively attempted to justify the expense by suggesting that this work of speculative fiction be used to bolster the “Customs & Culture” section of their Natural Resource Policy, presumably to rationalize higher harvest levels. However, the original contract with BBER never mentioned this purpose, and the authors themselves clearly never contemplated such a use, as the words “custom” and “culture” don’t appear anywhere in the report, not even once.
We point out that it was once the local “custom” to sell orchard tracts to rich easterners, until the realities of climate and geography ended the “Apple Boom.” It was once the “culture” of the Bitterroot National Forest to “get the cut out,” far beyond the capacity of the forest to sustain, until the nation enacted environmental laws to curb those excesses. It was once common for nearly every retail establishment in the Bitterroot to have videocassette rentals as a sideline.
We’ve moved on.
Bitterrooters for Planning suggests that the greater narrative, and the more relevant one going forward, is Ravalli County’s continuing ability to adapt, diversify, and even prosper in the face of changing circumstances – and even in the face of resistance from its political “leadership.” We need our county commissioners to tear their gaze away from the rear-view mirror, and instead to look ahead – and perhaps even to plan for? – the future that is rapidly evolving, with or without them.