Cooperation with other Landowners better than Land Exchanges
11/27/98
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RELAYED TEXT STARTS HERE:
Title: Cooperation with other Landowners better than Land Exchanges
Source: The Thoreau Institute
Status: Distribute freely with proper credit to source
Date: 11/27/98
S U B S I D I E S A N O N Y M O U S # 3 6
COOPERATION WITH OTHER LANDOWNERS BETTER THAN LAND EXCHANGES
Many national forests consist of a checkerboard ownership pattern, with
alternate sections (square miles) in the checkerboard owned by states or
private timber companies. Other forests, particularly those in the East,
include large amounts of private land within their boarders.
The Forest Service has long complained that such ownership patterns create
severe management problems and it has made a major ongoing effort of
consolidation. This may take the form of land purchases or, more commonly
in recent years, land exchanges.
Recent scandals and controversies over land purchases and exchanges in
Arizona, Nevada, and Washington highlight problems with this strategy. In
Nevada, for example, a forest supervisor has been accused of accepting
gifts to smooth the way for a land purchase that proved profitable for the
non-profit organization selling the land to the federal government.
Land exchanges can be equally controversial, since the Forest Service
often trades uncut forestland for cutover private land. While the
National Forest System ends up with more land, environmentalists accuse
appraisers of undervaluing the timber and worry that trading away old
growth threatens biodiversity goals.
A review of the North Maine Woods, a collection of two dozen ownerships
totaling nearly three million acres, casts doubt on the claim that land
consolidation should be a major goal of the Forest Service. While
purchases of inholdings in Wilderness and other special areas may be
needed, North Maine Woods demonstrates that landowner cooperation can be
as or more effective than consolidation in achieving national forest
goals.
Northern Maine has been managed for timber for 150 years. Lands have
traditionally been bought and sold as entire townships-blocks of thirty-
six square miles, or about 23,040 acres. Two dozen families and timber
companies own the 120-plus townships of land in what is known as the North
Maine Woods.
While some companies own as much as two million acres of land in northern
Maine, more than half of the townships in the North Maine Woods have
multiple undivided owners. A typical township may have six or more owners,
each of whom own anywhere from 1 to 80 percent of the township. The
township is managed as a unit, and the owners share any costs or revenues
according to their share of the township. In many cases this ownership
pattern has prevailed for over a century.
Managing an undivided ownership requires close communication and
cooperation between the various owners. This experience at cooperation may
have helped the owners find other ways of cooperating as well.
For example, road construction across multiple ownerships does not require
complicated negotiations for legal contracts and easements. Instead,
agreements are made with a handshake. An owner who constructs a road
across another owner's land pays for the timber removed. Any landowners
who use the road--including the owner of the land the road crosses--pays
the road owner a fixed fee for maintenance. Such fees are based on
the volume or weight of timber removed and the charge is negotiated by the
landowners each year.
The 2.8 million acres of land known as the North Maine Woods contain most
of the Allagash State Scenic Waterway, the St. Johns River, numerous
lakes, and many other popular recreation areas. These lands have been open
to hunters, anglers, and other recreationists since before Maine first
became a state. All of the owners remain committed to public access, but
to minimize liability and control certain types of recreation they have
charged user fees since the early 1970s.
The landowners jointly created a non-profit corporation known as North
Maine Woods which collects the fees and monitors recreation usage. The
landowners encourage hunting, fishing, camping, hiking, and many other
forms of recreation. They refuse to allow off-road vehicles (except
snowmobiles) because of their potential for damage soils and other
resources. They also refuse to allow bicycles because of the danger of
being hit by log trucks.
North Maine Woods, Inc., has four full-time staff members and 70 seasonal
employees who monitor access and collect fees. Recreation fees did not
cover costs for the first decade or so of its existence, and the
landowners made up the difference. Since 1986, North Maine Woods, Inc.,
has been completely self-sufficient.
The area's boundaries were drawn with the aim of controlling access: Only
a handful of roads enter or leave the area. Many large parcels of land
excluded from the area are owned by the same landowners, but since they
border state or county highways access control is difficult. North Maine
Woods, Inc., may still contract out to manage campgrounds or other special
recreation areas, including one parcel of several hundred thousand acres,
outside of its borders.
North Maine Woods, Inc., manages only the recreation. Each landowner (or,
in the case of the multiple-undivided ownerships, landowners) manages the
timber on their own land. Some timber owners exclusively use clearcutting,
others rely largely on selection cutting. Landowners are tolerant of the
practices used by other owners, but each feels peer pressure to maintain
the quality and public support of their management.
One of the larger landowners in the area is the Pingree family, which has
developed its own unique set of institutions. To manage its million acres
of land, it created a non-profit corporation, the Seven Island Land
Company, whose foresters and ecologists arrange timber harvests and other
practices. The family's goal is to produce high-quality sawtimber and they
emphasize selection cutting.
The Seven Island Land Company is the first major land manager in Maine to
have its forest practices certified, which expands their export markets.
The company owns no processing facilities but hire contract loggers and
sell the wood to local mills. The mills keep Pingree logs separate from
others so that the products can be sold as certified wood. Profits go to
the family with the Seven Islands Company retaining enough funds to pay
its staff.
Before 1940, most of the timber in the area was skidded downhill to rivers
and rafted to mills. The family owned about 5,000 acres of land in a
basin, making it impossible to log using those methods except for a
few very valuable cedar trees. After roads were built into the area,
the family recognized the ecological value of this old-growth timber
and did not log it. Recently, the family donated it to the Nature
Conservancy.
As a non-profit, North Maine Woods' user fees are by definition
insufficient to give the landowners any incentives to change their
management practices. Yet recreation still has an effect on how the owners
manage their lands, partly because the lands are in the public eye. North
Maine Woods has also found that it can reduce vandalism and unwanted
recreation usage by giving outfitters and guides permits to have camps or
other recreation sites in the area.
Government action has created some perverse incentives. Many years ago,
Maine forestland owners voluntarily agreed to leave a 500-foot uncut
buffer strip on each side of the Appalachian Trail. More recently,
when the National Park Service was given jurisdiction over the
Appalachian Trail, the agency condemned this 1000-foot corridor and bought
it from the landowners for prices that owners felt were unfairly low.
The Park Service has also regulated landowners' usage of lands outside the
buffer strip.
As a result, the landowners unanimously oppose any further corridor-based
recreation in northern Maine. They refused to cooperate, for example, with
proponents of a trail from upstate New York to Maine.
Some environmental groups advocate the creation of national forests or a
national park in northern Maine, with many areas set aside as wilderness.
Landowners strenuously resist such proposals, saying that they are already
practicing sound forest management. Proponents of public ownership point
to recent major land sales in the area and say that this could lead to
instability and the possible conversion of large areas to second homes or
other developments. In fact, those land sales have not led to any
significant changes in forest practices.
On the other hand, a recent action by environmentalists is leading to one
of the biggest changes in recreation usage. One of the North Maine Woods
cooperators, Great Northern Paper, has undergone four ownership changes in
the last decade with no discernible changes in its activities. The company
also owns about a million acres of land outside the North Maine Woods,
where it has several dams on a river to generate hydroelectric power for
its pulp mills.
Great Northern's federal license for these dams was recently up for
renewal, and local environmental groups got involved in the relicensing
process to obtain concessions from the company. One of the major
concessions was that the recreation fees that Great Northern charged for
the use of its land outside the North Maine Woods would be waived for
Maine residents.
Suddenly the company's recreation operation, which had previously paid for
itself, was operating at a deficit of $170,000 per year. To help make up
the deficit, the company has built half a dozen cabins on its land that it
rents to the public for a nightly fee. If the experiment is successful, it
will have to build at least another dozen cabins to completely recover its
lost revenue. Thus, thanks to environmental action, the area is being
developed in ways that environmentalists feared.
The North Maine Woods provides many lessons for the Forest Service in
landowner cooperation. For example, the recreation fee demo projects have
allowed the Forest Service to experiment with various types of user
charges and collection techniques. Yet few if any of those projects
include cooperative fee collection with adjacent owners. Some
national forests are charging trailhead-parking fees, yet they have made
little or no effort to recover fees from people parking at state or
private trailheads that access national forests.
The North Maine Woods can also teach policy makers and forest activists
how to encourage, or discourage, recreation usage and conservation-
friendly practices. While regulation and condemnation may seem successful
in the short run, they often have negative unintended consequences in the
long run.
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