Arkansas land deal sails through with senator's help

HOT SPRINGS, Ark. - For Weyerhaeuser and other timber companies, life is a bit easier here in the rolling hills that surround Bill Clinton's hometown.

The trees are scrawnier than in the Northwest, but you're still allowed to cut them down. The West's environmental wars never quite arrived here.

The two largest landowners in central Arkansas, the U.S. Forest Service and Weyerhaeuser, take pride in how well they get along: "Maybe it's a Southern thing," said Nick Finzer, a Forest Service supervisor here. "We don't fight like hell like they do out West."

And so when the company, the agency and a U.S. senator hatched a plan for the largest land trade in Forest Service history, they worked out the details in as relaxed a fashion as if they had just emerged from one of the steamy, mineral-water baths for which this town gets its name.

They did no in-depth environmental study, even though more than 350 square miles of forest in Arkansas and Oklahoma were to change hands. They didn't do a formal appraisal to figure out how much the land was worth.

At one point, both sides realized the trade was skewed heavily in favor of Weyerhaeuser.

"I think you guys owe me two townships," the Forest Service negotiator said. Came the reply from Weyerhaeuser: "We don't owe you quite that much - maybe more like one township." A township is 23,040 acres - an area almost as big as the city of Tacoma.

The easygoing atmosphere carried over into Congress. When the Senate gave final approval to the trade of 229,000 acres in 1996, the language was buried in a broader parks measure and nobody commented on it one way or the other. The idea of the trade was never voted on in either the full House or Senate (it did pass one Senate committee unanimously), and was a mystery even to some politicians and staff members on Congress' key land-management committees.

"We have no idea what we did on that deal," said Allen Freemyer, staff director for the House subcommittee that oversees most land exchanges.

From the moment in early 1994 that Arkansas Sen. Dale Bumpers, Weyerhaeuser and the chief of the Forest Service agreed on the broad outlines of a trade, citizens around the Ouachita National Forest were excluded from learning much specific information about the value of the land.

Democrat Bumpers ordered the Forest Service not to do an appraisal of the lands, as is normally required by law. He was worried it would take too long and Weyerhaeuser would back out. His legislation canceled the requirement for an environmental study, as well as the right of citizens to appeal the deal or challenge it in court.

The two sides did assess the volume of the timber on the lands. But then they refused to release that survey to the public, saying the report was owned by Weyerhaeuser. The Forest Service was allowed to see the timber survey for only a few hours in order to judge the value of the trees on Weyerhaeuser land. The timber company still won't release it today, though the trade was finalized nearly two years ago.

"Isn't it amazing that this is the way the government trades land with private companies?" said Bruce McMath, a lawyer in Little Rock and chairman of the Arkansas Sierra Club. "It's negotiated in secret. Then Congress cancels the environmental laws. Then everyone says, `Trust us, it's a great deal.'

"Well, maybe it is and maybe it isn't, but how do you really know?"

Paul Fuller is no environmentalist, at least in the modern sense of the word. Retired and living in the small town of Idabel, Okla., the former Forest Service ranger regards the woods more as a crop than as something to be preserved.

"I think the good Lord put the forest there to be used," he said.

So, when the Forest Service announced it wanted to trade away one of the South's finest tree plantations, Fuller became concerned. After reviewing the procedures used to value the timber, as well as the general laxity of the transaction, he could only shake his head.

"From the taxpayers' side, we got taken to the cleaners," said Fuller, who was head ranger in one of the prime timber-producing forests the government traded away.

"The public got some nice lands, especially from a recreation perspective, but there's no question in my mind this was a better deal financially for Weyerhaeuser."

Backers of the deal say Fuller is mistaken. They say the deal was fair, if not tilted in favor of the public.

Weyerhaeuser did get an extraordinarily productive plantation, a coup for a company that needs to assure a steady supply of wood for its mills. But, in return, the public got 4 acres for every 1 it traded away. Included was prime waterfront around two of the most important lakes in Arkansas and Oklahoma, as well as 25,000 acres of dramatic cypress swamp that since has become a national wildlife refuge.

In 1995, a panel of three professors of forestry from Southern universities was asked to examine the trade. They concluded it was a fair deal economically and "hugely in favor of the American public" if noneconomic factors such as preservation of the environment were considered.

"If you're in the timber business, like we are, this was a good deal," said Dave Elkin, Weyerhaeuser's lands manager in the South. "If you're in the recreation and environmental-protection business, like they are, then it was also a good deal. It just made good sense all the way around, for everyone."

But in a typical trade, the government is forbidden from considering ecological benefits when assessing the economic value of the land. The trade is supposed to be treated as a business transaction, the lands assessed for their worth on the commercial market to make sure the taxpayers are not losing money.

There was little typical about this trade, however. Shortly after the filing of the deeds that made the trade official, aides in the regional Forest Service office in Atlanta gathered up all the papers relating to the trade and shredded them.

Gone was whatever information had been used to assess the value of the deal - prices of neighboring parcels, timber prices and volumes, notes from a visit to the property by Forest Service appraisers.

The records were shredded, Forest Service officials say, because they don't want the public second-guessing complicated land deals.

"Our view is that information relating to the assessment of land values is only pertinent to a specific time and place and can be distorted if it's looked at years down the road," said Bill Kane, the Forest Service's chief appraiser for the Southern region. "Several times we've been made to look poorly in the newspapers, so now we have a policy to destroy all the information."

As the man in charge of buying, selling and trading land for Weyerhaeuser in the South, John Buenau knows that many people say the company pushes these land trades because it's easy to get a good deal from the government.

But this case, he says, was different. The government, in the form of Sen. Bumpers, came to them. The company had decided years before that it had to reduce its land holdings in Arkansas by 600,000 acres, and Weyerhaeuser was happy to sell the land on the private market.

The government already had bought 40,000 acres from Weyerhaeuser for $21 million as part of a drive to protect Lake Ouachita from development. But Bumpers predicted in 1994 that the federal budget crisis would mean no more money for these purchases.

"Senator Bumpers was hellbent to protect that lake from development," Buenau said. "He was the one really pushing for a trade. I know you probably won't believe this, but the corporate heads at Weyerhaeuser really didn't think this was a big deal to the company. We knew we needed to get rid of this land and, given a choice, we'd much rather see it protected than sold to private developers."

Still, Weyerhaeuser pushed aggressively for the trade - with the Forest Service's help. Government memos show that the agency and the company, while theoretically on opposite sides of a business deal worth at least $200 million, formed a joint committee to sell their land deal to the public.

Weyerhaeuser executives taught Forest Service employees marketing and public-speaking techniques designed to win over skeptics. The two sides discussed how to stack a public hearing with Weyerhaeuser employees and other backers of the trade. Together, they wrote letters to newspapers. They discussed how to lobby Congress.

A Weyerhaeuser executive at the corporate headquarters in Washington state drafted the legislation for the Senate to consider. And the Forest Service, while ostensibly overseeing the exchange, functioned instead as if it were a public-relations firm for Weyerhaeuser. One internal memo directed employees never to say anything negative about the proposal because it is "supported by the Forest Service from the Chief all the way down the line."

In their defense, Forest Service officials say they never had much to do with this trade. Because it crossed state lines, the exchange had to be approved by Congress, and the agency was merely responding to a directive from Washington, D.C.

"From the outside, I can see how it looked like we were in collusion with Weyerhaeuser and were short-circuiting the process," said Mike Curran, the now-retired supervisor of the Ouachita National Forest. "But the trade wouldn't have happened if we'd been forced to do an appraisal and an EIS (environmental-impact statement). It would have collapsed, and it was too good a deal for the public to pass up."

The secrecy has left some people in Arkansas with a strong distrust of the federal agencies that manage public land and a Congress that seems so willing to override environmental laws when it sees fit.

"Something is seriously wrong if the public can't be involved in federal land management, especially a land deal as big as this," said Vernon Bates, a botanist and chairman of a group fighting the deal. "I think the public can live with this exchange, but it's a bitter pill," he said. "The worst deal of all is for politicians and a federal agency to work behind the backs of the public."