The City and Borough of Juneau will soon be considering whether to pull out of the Tongass Futures Roundtable.
Deputy mayor Merrill Sanford called for the Assembly to revoke its resolution of support for the group at its meeting on Monday. The Assembly is expected to hear at its next meeting the background on why it joined five years ago, and why Sanford feels it is time for the city to get out. Sanford said it’s a mess he wants to try and clean up before he leaves. He is terming-out on the Assembly this fall.
Sanford said in that resolution, passed several years ago, many of the “Whereas’s” focused on an integrated timber resource plan and related infrastructure.
“About 5-6 of the ‘Whereas’s’ have never been able to be met,” Sanford said. “Some of it is because of the personalities that are on it, or were on it. Some of the statements that were never worked on. I just wanted to clean that up before I left, to make sure we weren’t supporting an organization I feel is hurting Southeast Alaska.”
Those conditions in the resolution that Sanford feels aren’t making progress included terms that call for timber lands to be managed to provide “steady, reliable and predictable supply or timber to the industry,” and related manufacturing industries in an environmentally sustainable manner.
“So I asked the law department how do we do that, how do we decertify a resolution?” Sanford said.
The Assembly can take a vote to rescind it.
Sanford said this doesn’t exclude support from the organization entirely.
“If they wanted to do something, if they wanted a plan or wanted to do some type of project and if they thought they needed Juneau’s support, they would have to come back and present that to the Assembly,” Sanford suggested. “Let the Assembly decide on that particular plan or path of action so they could say yes or no.”
But he also feels the group is currently heading and been in a direction that the Assembly doesn’t support.
“If you read their charter and their goals, it definitely does not fall in line with my beliefs and other people on the Assembly’s beliefs to where we should be going with the Tongass and employment for our communities,” he said.
Support for the roundtable has been waning as more and more communities and stakeholders are dropping out.
In the last six months, at least nine members have dropped. It currently has 22 members seated, according to its website, and was once capped at 35.
Sanford said that of the communities that have dropped, he would say that they’re in support of “trying to find an economically supportive timber industry and not just locking it up.”
“Everybody has finally stood up and taken their position on it and don’t feel that it’s necessarily a good use of your productive time anymore,” he said. “That’s the reason people have been dropping out these past six months.”
Mayor Bruce Botelho will recuse himself from all discussion on the matter, as he is currently the mediator for the roundtable. Botelho is serving in that capacity independent of the Assembly, so any action the Assembly takes would not inherently affect his role with the roundtable.
Botelho declined to discuss the issues at this time.
A staff member for the roundtable, Norm Cohen, could not be reached for comment on Friday.
For more information on the Tongass Futures Roundtable, go to www.tongass
futures.net.
To review the Assembly resolution, go to http://bit.ly/p7s1FX.
• Contact reporter Sarah Day at 523-2279 or at sarah.day@juneauempire.com.
Comments (6)
Add commentIf the assembly starts
If the assembly starts evaluating groups based on performance, they would certainly all be out of a job.
Pull Out Now
The TTR is nothing more than a dysfunctional "chat room" that hasn't gotten much done. And while we are at it, Juneau should bail out of the Southeast Conference, another chat room that has been captured by a bunch of Post-Enlightenment ideologues. The Southeast Conference and the TTR do not add value to genuine civic discussion. Stop wasting time, energy and money on these goofball forums and concentrate on what really matters.
The Tongass National Forest
The Tongass National Forest keeps Alaskas billion dollar fisheries, our wildlife and our way of life alive. This forest is also the last one of its kind in the world.
It is time for everyone (especially the Forest Service) to recognize the real value of the Tongass Forest and stop trying to cut it down.
If loggers in Southeast Alaska communities want to cut trees down for a living then they should all do the hard work and start their own tree plantations instead of sitting back and benefiting from a heavily subsidized Federal Government Timber Sales Program at the Tax Payers expense.
The cost of the Tongass Timber Sales Program to US taxpayers is in the hundreds of millions annually not to mention the price all Southeast Alaskans pay for the negative ecological impacts of this program as well. It would be far more advantageous to all Alaskans and for job creation to use this money for restoration and steward projects.
Merrill Sanford I listened to you during some of the Round Table meetings and I sure hope you have come to see the light on this
right on Tallon
The Roundtable is just another added layer of expensive bureaucracy for the federal timber sale program as well as a forum for folks who want to privatize public lands for clearcuts.
None of the TFR members are elected or publicly accountable under Alaska's open meetings act or other public disclosure laws yet they make public policy recommendations. This is just not right. Thanks, Juneau, for considering the rescission of the past resolution of support.
The roundtable is a scam close it down
Sanford is right but only scratches the surface. Outside leftist foundations form these pseudo colaborative ventures for their own entertainment. Playing with monoploy ideas and kicking around little peoples lives. On paper no one that sits on the roundtable actually represents an interest. They technically sit as a private individual. Yet if somebody does media or some other action that distinction is not made and it appears to the public that all these interests are represented.
It's a process that was designed to jump around public disclosure laws and allow abuse through illusions of regional representation. Those that sit at the table are carefully selected to exclude interests that might go too counter to the back room agendas - or represent interests that are considered expendible to the folks with their hand on the steering wheel.
Tongass Is Better Off w/o USFS
The best 'future' of the Tongass is to be a salmon & bear preserve, managed by the USF&WS. These are the premier habitat and spawning rivers left in North America, and they should never be divvied up for moderate cutting by Senators, bureaucrats or roundtables.