Massive land deal in works

By JIM MANN

The Daily Inter Lake

Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., announced "the most significant land conservation project in the state's history" on Monday, a sweeping purchase of 320,000 acres of Plum Creek Timber Co. land.

The deal includes all of the company's remaining property in the Swan Valley.

The Montana Legacy Project will cost $510 million, half of it coming from a federal bonding program established under the recently approved Farm Bill, with land acquisitions in three phases over the next three years, Baucus and project partners said at a press conference at Lone Pine State Park west of Kalispell.

The remainder of the money is expected to come from state and private sources.

"This project is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to protect these lands for our families and future generations," Baucus said. "It will keep jobs in Montana, help maintain our communities and our working forests and preserve public access for hunting and fishing. This will be the most significant land conservation project in the state's history, by far, and I'm proud to be part of it."

Erik Love, Northern Rockies director for the Trust for Public Land, said the deal includes all of Plum Creek's remaining holdings in the Swan Valley, about 67,000 acres checkered throughout the 230,000-acre watershed.

It also includes company lands in the upper Clearwater Valley near Seeley Lake, the Lolo Valley, the Mill Creek area near Missoula, Fish Creek, Petty Creek, the Rock Creek area between Libby and the Yaak Valley, and in the Garnet Mountains between Potomac and U.S. 90.

Lands that are purchased eventually will be conveyed to a mixture of U.S. Forest Service, Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation and private ownership with conservation easements.

Those easements will provide for continued sustainable timber management and public access.

The two main conservation partners in the project - The Trust for Public Land and the Nature Conservancy - will not retain long-term ownership of any lands involved in the deal.

The main purpose of the project is to prevent Plum Creek lands that have long been accessible for hunting and fishing from being subdivided, sold and closed off to the public.

Hank Ricklefs, Plum Creek's vice president of northern resources and manufacturing, said the purchases will involve "fiber supply agreements" to ensure the company continues to get timber for up to 15 years from the lands that are sold.

Plum Creek, the nation's largest owner of private land, has 8 million acres across the country and 1.2 million acres in Montana.

"It is a big reduction in the land area we own," Ricklefs said. "But there will be a fiber supply agreement that will provide a continued flow of timber from these lands to our mills. Fundamentally, this transaction alone will have very minimal impact on our operating levels."

Some of the lands in the sale, particularly near Missoula, were included partly because they are the most distant from the company's manufacturing plants.

Since Plum Creek reorganized as a Real Estate Investment Trust in 1999, the company has been selling land, particularly waterfront properties, for development.

But Ricklefs noted at the press conference that more than 70 percent of the company's land sales have gone toward "conservation outcomes."

The Montana Legacy Project is not a done deal, according to Love.

The Trust and the Nature Conservancy will lead the way in securing half the overall purchase price from grant programs, philanthropists and investors.

"We have a lot of work to do to get to closing," Love said. "We still have a ways to go to get the matching funding."

Love and Jamie Williams, director of the Nature Conservancy's Northern Rockies Initiative, are confident that the complex acquisitions will come to fruition.

"It's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when," Love said.

Williams explained that the Montana Legacy Project came about as an extension of conservation projects that have been under way for years in places such as the Swan and the Blackfoot-Clearwater drainages.

"It really came in response to a lot of community people asking" for a bolder conservation project, Williams said.

Baucus said he and his staff got closely involved with the project about a year ago.

The Farm Bill included a Qualified Conservation Forestry Bond provision that allows federal bonds to be sold to finance the purchase of qualified lands adjacent to Forest Service lands.

The provision, developed by Baucus and his staff, was tailor-made for Plum Creek, with the Montana Legacy Project eligible to receive up to $250 million in federal funding.

The Qualified Conservation Forestry Bond provision had some conservative critics, who branded it as a pork program for Plum Creek. But Baucus dismissed those critics, defending it as a worthwhile conservation program that can be put to use in other parts of the country.

"It's a good model for other parts of the country," Baucus said Monday. "I'm confident that other groups around the country will be looking at this and saying, 'Hey, look at what Montana did.'"

While maintaining public access to Plum Creek lands is a key goal of the project, there will be other benefits, Baucus said, noting that it should curb the potential for rising firefighting costs and demand for county services that come when homes are built in remote, scattered locations.

Besides discouraging "backcountry sprawl," Love stressed that the land sales will continue to provide for sustainable logging.

"It's also about 2-by-4s and 2-by-6s. It's about keeping our working forests working," Love said.

"The reality is this land was going to be sold at some point to someone," Love said, adding that the public now will benefit from the land sales because of the Montana Legacy Project.

Reporter Jim Mann may be reached at 758-4407 or by e-mail at jmann@dailyinterlake.com