John Driscoll
Eureka Times-Standard

The rule-making arm of the California Department of Forestry is considering today whether to impose stricter logging rules immediately, which conservation groups and the federal government say are critical to protecting already threatened coho salmon.

The Board of Forestry is responding to an emergency petition from California Trout, the Sierra Club and the Environmental Protection Information Center. If the measures they are requesting including improved road work and reduced logging along streams are approved, they would likely go into effect within two months.

The National Marine Fisheries Service has supported the emergency petition, and information from surveys along the Oregon coast show that coho salmon populations in 2007 and 2008 were down 70 percent. A status review of coho salmon along the Central California coast found coho there were at high risk of extinction.

The groups asking for the change acknowledge that the protection measures may impose additional costs to forest landowners, but say the costs would be minor compared to the costs the commercial and sport fishing industries have suffered from sharp cutbacks in fishing opportunity.

�I think what we want to do is uniformly raise the bar,� said Jeff Shellito with California Trout.

The emergency petition would enact the rules quickly, since the board's unique operation puts whatever rules it adopts in any given year into effect on Jan. 1, Shellito said.

The board should reopen the rule package it passed last year, Shellito said, in light of the salmon season closures and new information about the coho salmon decline.

Emergency rules must clear a higher threshold under the Administrative Procedures Act, said George Gentry, executive officer for the board of forestry. Gentry said the board can adopt or reject, in whole or in part, the petition.

Since large industrial landowners like Green Diamond Resource Co., the new Humboldt Redwood Co. and the Mendocino Redwood Co. have habitat conservation plans that address many of the measures in the petition already, new rules would likely affect smaller landowners more.

Gentry said new rules would not address the key causes of the recent salmon declines like poor ocean conditions, water diversions in the Central Valley or the conversion of timberland to vineyards.

�Our impact on those things are somewhat minimized,� Gentry said.

The fisheries service, in an Aug. 4 letter, wrote to the board to say that the majority of coho salmon use Northern and Central California timberlands and that threats from logging and conversion of timberland under current rules have harmed coho salmon.

�The current status of coho salmon populations ... is critically low and additional protections should be considered during timber harvest reviews and (board of forestry) rule making,� wrote fisheries service Regional Administrator Rodney McInnis.