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The industry and the Board of Forestry deceptively promoted the rules as a way to facilitate "watershed analysis" for salmon-bearing streams, labeling the rules the "Interim Watershed Mitigation Addendum," or IWMA. But instead of improving the outlook for salmon, the court found the IWMA rules would "facilitate logging which lessens protection for watersheds with threatened or impaired values." This translates into larger clearcuts, more logging in streamside areas, and other operations that harm listed salmon and steelhead--all without public review.
The court joins a growing number of scientists, "blue-ribbon" panels, agencies, and other courts that have found California's logging regulations do not adequately protect salmon and steelhead. NOAA Fisheries (formerly the National Marine Fisheries Service, or NMFS) has repeatedly urged the Board to improve its regulations for years, saying that logging operations are illegally killing species listed under the Endangered Species Act. The Board adopted changes in 1999 in an attempt to mollify the agency, but these were minimal at best, and NOAA Fisheries found they were far from the true reforms needed. In sworn testimony to support a previous EPIC lawsuit, NOAA's Liason to the State of California, stated:
NMFS concluded that the California Forest Practice Rules with the recently adopted changes are inadequate to protect anadromous salmonids or provide for properly functioning habitat conditions. Specifically, the California Forest Practice Rules with the interim changes lack critical elements necessary to avoid, minimize and/or mitigate adverse site-specific and cumulative watershed impacts on salmonid populations.Nonetheless, the Board gave a wink and a nod to the logging industry when it passed rules for "threatened and impaired watersheds" in 1999, promising to provide a means by which corporations could easily bypass them. The Board and industry wasted no time in devising a means to do so, but fortunately, EPIC and other citizens were twice successful in blocking the rules at the administrative level. Undeterred, the Board passed the IWMA rules again in July 2002, forcing EPIC to turn to the courts in this case.
EPIC hopes this third time blocking the IWMA rules is the charm and the Board of Forestry will finally heed the call to take immediate, concrete actions to improve, not reverse, protection for California's disappearing salmon and steelhead.