KETCHIKAN — Alaska should rethink its relationship with environmentalists and its approach to long-term timber policy, said Lt. Gov. Byron Mallott on Wednesday.
Mallott, Gov. Bill Walker’s lead on timber issues in Southeast Alaska, was in Ketchikan after a two-day visit to Prince of Wales Island. It was his first visit to Alaska’s second-largest island since he was elected.
He was on Prince of Wales to speak at the Organized Village of Kasaan’s sixth mining symposium. Included in the trip were meetings with officials, teachers and students in Klawock, Hydaburg and Thorne Bay.
The lieutenant governor, a former CEO and board member of Sealaska, discussed timber policy, the state budget and where he disagrees with Walker.
Talking timber, Mallott found fault with all sides of the debate — environmental groups for over-litigating, the state for goading environmentalists and the U.S. Forest Service for letting the supply of timber dry up.
The U.S. Forest Service manages the vast majority of Southeast Alaska forests. State government is the second-largest owner, with Alaska Native corporations the next largest.
Mallott knocked environmentalists for what he sees as “a strategy to essentially remove people from the equation of making public policy in the Tongass National Forest.”
Its latest manifestation is calling the Tongass a “salmon forest,” Mallott said.
Salmon are “hugely important, but in my judgment, the emphasis on calling the Tongass and everything related to it a ‘salmon place’ is to avoid having to deal with the reality that people live here,” he said.
It was “unconscionable” to attempt to prevent all development in the Tongass on the part of its residents, Mallott said.
He noted he supports Senate Bill 32, which cleared the Legislature this month and which speeds the state’s timber sale process.
At the same time, he said the state should be less confrontational when interacting with environmentalists.
For years, both the state and Alaska’s congressional delegation have pursued a transfer of national forest land to state hands. The latest proposal — a transfer of 2 million acres of the Tongass to the state — came from the administration of former Gov. Sean Parnell.
Mallott said the state shouldn’t push the issue while it remains out of bounds in Washington, D.C.
“I think that to pursue that avenue would require a real sense … that that was even possible,” he said. “Otherwise we’re baying at the moon, and we do enough baying at the moon in the Tongass National Forest.”
Instead, Alaska should work to convince environmentalists and federal managers to cooperate with the state and what remains of the timber industry in Southeast.
‘Whistling past
the graveyard’
Echoing the governor, Mallott called on the Alaska Legislature to approve a plan to close the state’s $4 billion annual deficit.
“We have to close the fiscal gap this year,” Mallott said, adding that “anything else is crippling” for the state.
At the start of the session in January, Walker proposed a suite of bills that would raise numerous taxes, including reinstating the income tax, and restructure how Alaska Permanent Fund earnings are used.
Lawmakers have pursued changes to the permanent fund, but looked coldly at Walker’s income tax pitch.
The state is facing a “historical moment,” Mallott said, and running more deficits would amount to “whistling past the graveyard.”
Tribes
Mallott and Walker disagreed about how the state would handle tribal requests for additional subsistence rights on state land, but the lieutenant governor said he doesn’t “lose sleep over” it.
“We both want to get to the same place. (Walker) has said very clearly, ‘I want to recognize tribes,’” Mallott said, noting he would have “more aggressively” responded to tribal requests of the state.
“We aren’t talking about anything other than under the federal constitution, there is a formal, legal and structured relationship with tribal interests across the nation,” Mallott said.
He said Alaska tribes have “appropriately” been aggressive in seeking to fulfill the guarantees of the federal government.
“To the degree the state opposes them … it creates conflict, but it is the same kind of conflict that exists when a municipal government, for example, gets crosswise with the state government,” Mallott said.
