[Congressional Record Volume 142, Number 30 (Thursday, March 7, 1996)]
[Senate]
[Pages S1613-S1614]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                           THE MAYR BROTHERS

  Mr. GORTON. Mr. President, last weekend 170 employees of the Mayr 
Bros. sawmill in Hoquim, WA, were notified that they were about to be 
laid off. One-hundred and seventy individual workers is not a 
particularly large number in connection with all of the layoffs that 
have taken place across the Nation during the course of the last year. 
But this is almost the last 170 workers for this particular mill. They 
are in addition to several thousand others in the area who have lost 
their jobs during the course of the last 4 or 5 years.
  Hoquim, WA, the location of the mill, is a small city of about 9,000 
people. The Mayr Bros. mill is one of the few that remain in that city. 
It has been a mainstay of this community for 63 years at this point in 
its history. Hoquim, Mr. President, to put it mildly, is not a 
destination tourist resort by any stretch of the imagination. It is a 
working-class community that has provided wood and fiber and paper 
products for the people of the United States for the entire length and 
breadth of the 20th century.
  These layoffs, however, are from a different cause than simply the 
dynamics of a constantly changing economy. They are taking place 
because of deliberate policies imposed by the Congress and by the 
administration with respect to the harvest of timber in our national 
forests and on the lands managed by the Bureau of Land Management of 
the United States.
  It is particularly ironic in the light of these layoffs that the 
junior Senator from the State of Washington the day before yesterday 
introduced a bill that would effectively cancel all of the harvest on 
Federal lands all across the country that were authorized by a 
rescissions bill signed as recently as last July by the President of 
the United States, after extensive negotiations involving his office, 
my office, and that of the distinguished Senator from Oregon [Mr. 
Hatfield].
  The owner and operator of Mayr Bros. mill, Tom Mayr, has left four 
Federal timber sales. They are commonly referred to as section 318 
sales, named after that section of the fiscal year 1990 Interior 
Appropriations Act sponsored by then Senator Adams and Senator Hatfield 
to provide some interim relief while we determined the future 
management of our national forests. But even those sales specifically 
authorized by a fairly recent statute here have been held up for more 
than 5 years just while a study respecting the marbled murrelet has 
gone on in the timber area.
  Now, Tom Mayr is not the only person who is affected by those 
provisions or by the Rescission Act provisions. Roughly 600 million 
board feet of Federal timber contracts have been held up by the 
Government. In each case they have one feature in common. They 
represent contracts which were signed by the Federal Government 
authorizing the harvest about which the Federal Government had second 
thoughts at some later period of time. As a consequence, if they are 
not carried out, the Federal Government will have very considerable 
contractual liabilities, at least $100 million--perhaps more than that.
  Included in the Rescissions Act was language directing that the 
administration release these timber sales unless one of these marbled 
murrelets was known actually to be nested in the area. So they are 
sales in which there is no known nesting habitat for that particular 
species.
  When President Clinton signed the bill, sale owners began to see some 
light at the end of a very long tunnel but then the administration 
changed its mind. Despite the fact that the language in the provision 
was very clear and was discussed with representatives of the White 
House before it was passed and signed, it has literally taken court 
orders to get the Clinton administration to implement the provision. As 
a consequence, fewer than one-half of the sales covered by the 
provision have been released and only those as a result of a court 
order.
  Much has been made of these so-called salvage timber provisions in 
the rescissions bill, so an outline of precisely what they contain 
should be included in the Record at this point. First, the only one of 
the three areas covered by the rescissions bill language on timber 
harvesting contracts is section 2001(k). Two other provisions, one on 
timber salvage and one on the administration's own option 9 provisions, 
were designed simply to help the administration carry out its own 
promises. They required the administration to do nothing at all. If it 
wished to repudiate its promises with respect to salvage timber or with 
respect to the option 9 commitments of the President of the United 
States to the people of the Pacific Northwest, it is entirely free to 
do so unaffected by the provisions of the rescissions bill.

  The areas that are covered by the bill on a mandatory basis involve 
less than 10,000 acres out of the 30 million acres of Federal 
forestland in Oregon and Washington, fewer than 1 acre out of 3,000. 
Let us put it in a slightly different fashion. If this provision were a 
permanent provision ordering this amount of harvest every year rather 
than a one-time provision to honor past contracts, in 1,000 years fewer 
than half of the acres in the national forests in these two States 
would have been harvested once. In 1,000 years, fewer than half of the 
acres would have been harvested one time. The 600 million board feet 
represents one-tenth of the historic harvest level in the forests of 
the Pacific Northwest and far, far less than the natural regeneration 
rate of those forests. We are talking about a tiny degree of relief, a 
very modest degree of relief both for the people of timber country and 
for that matter in connection with the demand of the people of the 
United States for forest products for paper production, for fiber 
production, for wood for the building of houses, and the like.
  Even so, when the administration began to have second thoughts about 
this provision, Senator Hatfield and I listened quite carefully to its 
views, and in the bill passed by the Appropriations Committee yesterday 
to gather together all of the remaining appropriations bills in one 
omnibus proposal we have proposed two changes. We have made it much 
easier for the administration to exchange particular sale areas that it 
thinks are especially sensitive for others that are less sensitive 
assuming that the contractor goes along. We have also made it possible 
for the administration to buy out certain sales if it can gain the 
consent of the contracting party, and it can. We know of areas, 
including Mr. Mayr's areas, in which it can do so. But it is required 
to use the money already appropriated to it and not simply to do as the 
administration wishes, to come up with another $100 million unaccounted 
for, to be added to the deficit to be sent as a bill to our children 
and grandchildren. If it can find other ways in which to come up with 
presently appropriated money to purchase these sales or can find other 
areas in which to

[[Page S1614]]

make exchanges of such sales, it can do so.
  I think it would be especially ironic if the legislation to repeal 
the rescissions bill were to pass in the immediate aftermath of this 
most recent set of layoffs. It shows a tremendous indifference to the 
faith of hard-working people who have paid their taxes and built their 
communities over the better part of this century.
  There are those who claim to be offended by this law, so offended 
that they call for its repeal. I am offended; I am offended by their 
complete and total lack of compassion that this proposal shows to these 
hard-working people and to the American economy and to the countless 
others before them who have lost their timber-related jobs as a result 
of similar policies.
  I am offended by the total indifference to the cost of the 
repudiation of legal contracts entered into by the Government, 
shrugging them off on the proposition that someone else can pay for 
them sometime in the future and that we will simply add another bill to 
the taxpayers of the United States.
  Mr. President, we will be debating this issue during the course of 
the next several days. I will have some charts demonstrating 
graphically the statistics I have outlined, that we are talking about 
an extremely modest proposal. We are speaking of far less harvest than 
the President's own promises as recently as 2 years ago to the people 
of the Pacific Northwest. We are simply enabling the President to keep 
the promises that he made, that he now, in an election year, desires to 
ignore.

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