Craig City Council votes 4-1 to back Tongass roadless rule

Craig's City Council voted 4-1 Thursday to urge the federal government to keep limits on new road construction and timber harvest across the Tongass National Forest, as a federal proposal to lift those limits nationwide takes public comment.

It was proposed by a former timber cutter who told colleagues that four decades of harvest around Prince of Wales Island have left less food on the forest floor for deer, not more.

The 2001 Roadless Rule has been reversed several times on the Tongass: a 2003 exemption, a 2011 reinstatement, a 2020 exemption eliminating its roadless areas, and a January 2023 restoration by the USDA. The USDA's latest proposal, announced Aug. 20, would rescind the rule nationwide, affecting roughly 18.2 million acres where road construction is currently prohibited. USDA extended the deadline from Sept. 21 to Oct. 6; comments go to regulations.gov, docket FS-2025-0001.

The sponsor, who said he arrived in Craig in 1980 at 21 and cut timber for years, argued from growth cycles. "The median age of an old-growth stand of trees, it's a commercial kind of, you know, where you would log, is somewhere in the 300 to 400 year range. And yet the Forest Service's plan for long-term harvest is to rotate harvest at 80 to 100 years," he said. Even-aged young growth, all the same age, begins shading out the understory, the plants deer eat, at 35 to 40 years, he said, and in places he named on Prince of Wales, "there's about as much food for a deer on the forest floor as there is on this rug." He supports keeping small local mills running under the current five-million-board-foot annual protocol, he said, but "we're running our timber program at a significant deficit and that's taxpayer money."

Manufacturing wages tied to the timber industry made up nearly a third of all island wages as recently as 1994. Tongass timber harvest has declined about 75 percent since 1990, and timber industry employment is now at its lowest point in 30 years, according to Alaska Department of Labor figures.

One council member objected to the process rather than the forest. "I'd like to see Pow Cac take it up. I personally haven't had anybody pushing it. I think it is a political topic," he said, referring to the Prince of Wales Community Advisory Council. "So that's my heartburn."

The Central Council of the Tlingit & Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska, representing more than 38,000 tribal citizens, has formally opposed rescinding the rule, adopting that position unanimously in a January resolution citing subsistence resources, cultural areas, and the need for government-to-government consultation.