the town dandy / By Hank Sims

Full Circle

(Jan. 17, 2008)  We’re counting down the days now to Jan. 30, when — as noted last week — plans for the reorganization of the bankrupt Pacific Lumber Co. are due to be filed in federal bankruptcy court. On that day, we plan to plunge headfirst into a mountain of technical and legal documentation, hoping against hope that we’ll be able to make some sort of sense of what various Wall Street-type players have planned for the future of our county.

In the meantime, here’s a spicy little lagniappe: A press release came in Tuesday from a new organization called the “Community Forestry Team.” The group includes longtime forestry activists Mark Lovelace and David Simpson as contacts — could it be that the Community Forestry Team is an outgrowth of the so-called Timber Acquisition Group, which had hoped to make a “community forestry”-based bid for Pacific Lumber lands? It was.

And what a deal they’ve put together. The press release is co-signed by the Save-the-Redwoods League, the Nature Conservancy, the Redwood Forest Foundation, mill operator Atlas Holdings and Bank of America, among others. The deal they envision for Pacific Lumber’s future looks something like this:

First of all, they’d place 12,000 acres of old growth forests and other ecologically important areas into preservation. Nearly 200,000 acres would be kept as working, harvestable forest, managed under the ecologically sensitive “community forestry” models, in which many disparate stakeholders get places at the table when it comes time to decide timber harvest plans. Atlas Holdings would manage the Scotia mill. Bank of America and other financial firms would inject the capital.

It all looks quite a bit like a deal put together by the Mendocino-based Redwood Forest Foundation, Inc. (RFFI), back in the summer, but on a much larger scale. In that deal, RFFI acquired around 60,000 acres of sawn-over land in northern Mendocino County, to be managed as community forest. Bank of America provided the capital for the venture, through an arm of the vast financial institution dedicated to green initiatives. B of A provided $65 million in capital for the Mendocino deal; its total fund for such deals amounts to $20 billion.

Now for the hard part. If it’s ever going to come to pass, the Community Forestry Team has to find sponsors amongst the players duking it out in bankruptcy court. Reached Tuesday, Mark Lovelace said that he was still bound by a confidentiality agreement, but that he was hopeful.

“We’re working on getting this evolved into a formal plan,” Lovelace said. “That’s still in development, obviously. It has to be done by the 30th. So we’ve got a little work ahead of us, but we thought it was important to get it out there to the community.”

In the past, the biggest players in the bankruptcy court — the financial firms that own around $730 million of Pacific Lumber’s debt — have said that they were in talks about Palco’s future with The Nature Conservancy. The Nature Conservancy is now one of the partners in the Community Forestry team deal. Coincidence?

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