Craig's council asked Washington to keep the Tongass roadless rule

Craig's City Council voted 4-1 Thursday to urge the federal government to keep limits on road building and logging across the Tongass National Forest. The resolution came from a former timber cutter, and the argument he made was about deer.

He arrived in Craig in 1980 at 21 and cut timber for years. Old-growth stands worth logging run 300 to 400 years, he told the council, while the Forest Service rotates harvest at 80 to 100. Even-aged young growth starts shading out the understory that deer feed on at 35 to 40 years. In places he named on Prince of Wales Island, he said, there is "as much food for a deer on the forest floor as on this rug."

He is not against logging. He said he supports keeping the island's small mills running under the current five-million-board-foot annual protocol, but that the timber program runs at a significant deficit on taxpayer money.

The industry he came up in has shrunk. Manufacturing wages tied to timber made up nearly a third of all island wages as recently as 1994. Tongass harvest is down about 75 percent since 1990, and timber employment is at its lowest in 30 years, according to state labor figures.

The federal proposal he is objecting to would rescind the 2001 Roadless Rule nationwide. The Agriculture Department, which announced it Aug. 20, argues that returning these decisions to individual forest plans restores flexibility to local managers, and that the current restrictions limit mechanical thinning and some fire suppression options along with commercial logging. Nationally, about 18.2 million acres are places where forest plans already permit permanent roads and the rule does not. Comment closes Oct. 6, extended from Sept. 21.

The lone no vote was about process. That member said he would rather the Prince of Wales Community Advisory Council take it up, that nobody had been pushing him on it, and that he considers it a political topic.

The rule has changed hands on the Tongass repeatedly: exempted in 2003, reinstated in 2011, exempted again in 2020, and restored by the Agriculture Department in January 2023.

The Central Council of the Tlingit and Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska, which represents more than 38,000 tribal citizens, adopted a resolution unanimously in January opposing rescission, citing subsistence resources, cultural areas and the need for government-to-government consultation.