Customers often change buying patterns and close the doors to purchasing certain species or products for
time periods, often with only a few days’ notice. Precipitation levels or winter temperatures can cause soil
conditions to change in a day and may require operational moves to protect the resource when, especially
while operating harvest sites with potentially sensitive soils. In order to avoid unforeseen downtime, which
would be detrimental to the viability and health of the regional forest products supply chain, and still
comply with the new 30-day prior requirement, large CF owners, like Longyear, would need to submit
intent to harvest notifications for multiple contingent harvest blocks, the majority of which will not be
harvested in the submitted timeline, requiring additional notifications of change to be submitted. This
unintended complication would certainly put an unneeded burden on both the CF landowners, as well as
on the department, and would likely still be inadequate to fully mitigate operational lost flexibility and
negative impact to the supply chain and our forest products business.
As the statute (in 324.5111) only requires notification “to the department prior to cutting, harvesting, or
removal of forest products,” we request that the added 30-day requirement in the draft rules be changed
to 5-day or less, or removed altogether, to provide large scale commercial forest operations the flexibility
needed to adequately protect the forest resource, their economic viability, and the health of the supply
chain.
Comments Specific to R 299.2605b; Rule 5b (1) (2) (3)
We have no issue with and can support the added requirement in Rule 5b (1) (3) to submit a copy of the
plan and its revisions as a change to the current requirement of only having a copy available upon request
by the department. It is only logical that the department maintain a copy of a landowners’ plans if they are
to enforce harvest activities following said plans, and we support this change. We do suggest, however,
that the 30-day requirement be reduced to 5 days.
We have concerns over the removal of the “and published” language from Rule 5b (2). We understand
that the intent is not to remove the online link to the requirements, however we feel is better to keep that
requirement for transparency from the department in the rule.
Comments Specific to R 299.2605; Rule 5 (d) and (g)
We have concerns over the additional requirement to submit a copy of prospective easements “to the
department for review at least 30 days before entering into such an agreement”. We understand the need
for the department to be able to determine if such agreements put a landowner in violation of the
requirements of the act, such as significant impacts to forest management or reduction of forest
productivity, as the department must enforce this compliance per the act. We fail to see the value or benefit
from adding a review time-period which can potentially delay access agreements for adjacent landowners,
subsequently affecting the ability and timing of potential real estate transactions, placing undue burden
and costs onto large CF landowners.
We furthermore are unclear about how the department intends to respond. Requiring a review period
without a coupled mechanism for response creates ambiguity and burdens landowners unduly. The act
