Old Trees, New Laws: Southern Humboldt Brings Its Forestry Concerns to Town Hall

This is the third in a series of reports from Assemblymember Chris Rogers’s April 4 town hall in Southern Humboldt. Previous pieces covered federal Medicaid cuts and their impact on local healthcare, as well as Rogers’s AB 1984 and the fight over corporate money in elections. Future reports will cover PG&E energy infrastructure, the proposed Garberville Business Improvement District, and the nationwide US Forest Service restructuring.

A question about redwood trees in a lower Redway neighborhood opened one of the more layered conversations at last Saturday’s Garberville town hall, touching on decades of redwood conservation work in Southern Humboldt, a jurisdictional gap between state and county authority, and eventually the forestry legislation Assemblymember Chris Rogers has been moving in Sacramento.

Several attendees raised the ongoing controversy over the removal of large redwood trees from a residential property in lower Redway, an issue that has been simmering in the community since January. The area has a long history of redwood conservation advocacy, and residents have fought for generations to protect old growth trees that in some cases predate European settlement by centuries. The recent cutting, done under a Cal Fire hazard exemption, exposed a gap that left the community without a clear answer: the county’s Q Zone Ordinance provides enhanced protections for redwoods in residential areas, but as Humboldt County Planning and Building Director John Ford clarified after initial reporting, at the time of the lower Redway tree removal, the county believed Cal Fire’s authority superseded the county ordinance when the agency issues a hazard exemption. A KMUD News interview with Director Ford revealed that the previous belief may have been erroneous. The county has since halted Q Zone cutting while it works through the muddy waters of how Q zone and Cal Fire exemption work together.

Rogers was clear the Q Zone is a county matter, not a state one. But the issue had already reached his desk. Field representative Heidi McHugh had flagged it weeks earlier. Several residents invited Rogers to view the site after the meeting. He offered one concrete commitment: Cal Fire’s director is scheduled to appear before his budget subcommittee this month, and Roger’s said the director will be asked about it directly.

Though the Q Zone sits squarely in the county’s lap, the shared concern over forest health and protection led naturally into what Rogers has been working on in Sacramento.

Rogers has introduced a package of four forestry bills, each targeting a different piece of a system he argues has not been updated to reflect how California thinks about its forests today.

The centerpiece for North Coast communities is AB 2494, which applies to California’s 14 state-owned demonstration forests, including two within Rogers’s district. The Jackson Demonstration State Forest in Mendocino County, the largest in the system at nearly 50,000 acres, has been at the center of years of tension over how state forests should be managed.

The management principles governing demonstration forests have not been updated in decades, Rogers said. They predate the state’s 30 by 30 conservation commitments, its climate goals, and any formal recognition of the role redwood forests play in carbon sequestration. Rogers noted that redwood forests are the highest carbon-sequestering forests per acre anywhere on the planet.

AB 2494 would not stop logging in state forests. Rogers was explicit about that. Timber harvest would continue but only as a byproduct of ecological restoration or research, not as the primary purpose driving management decisions. The bill also builds in a local preference provision so that when timber does come out of state forest projects, smaller local sawmills get first opportunity at the work.

“We want them to do land management,” Rogers told the crowd. “We actually want them to do more land management. But it can’t just be clear cutting on public land for the sake of clear cutting.”

The bill has drawn support from tribal nations, conservation groups and Mendocino County supervisors. Mendocino County Fifth District Supervisor Ted Williams, whose district includes the Jackson forest, said in a statement that the bill would help rural communities transition away from economies that rely primarily on extractive industries toward opportunities in ecotourism, restoration work and biodiversity stewardship.

Rogers acknowledged the bill is a fight. The forestry industry is not enthusiastic. Cal Fire is not enthusiastic. But he argued that the current incentive structure, which requires all state forest management costs to be paid for by logging revenue, creates a perverse pressure toward cutting that no longer reflects what communities or the climate need.

“Right now, the system requires all management of the forest to come from the logging that happens in the forest,” Rogers said. “That is a perverse incentive that has many folks in the community concerned about how the decisions are made.”

A second bill, AB 1699, the Good Fire Act, tackles the regulatory tangle that has kept prescribed burns and cultural burning from happening at the scale the state needs. Rogers said he spent three days with the Karuk Tribe last summer learning about traditional fire management practices. A tribal elder described how they would collect material, form it into a ball, light it and push it off a hillside, trusting that what caught fire needed to burn.

“I told them I didn’t think we could get back to that,” Rogers said. “But we certainly can make it easier.”

The bill removes bureaucratic barriers that currently discourage Cal Fire from participating in community-led burns, expands liability protections for tribal governments and volunteer fire departments, and creates clearer pathways to certification for burn bosses. One of the specific fixes Rogers described addresses a catch that has frustrated practitioners for years: if a nonprofit or individual is running a prescribed burn and has been granted an exemption from full environmental review, Cal Fire’s participation in that same burn currently triggers the review requirements anyway. The bill would end that.

AB 1699 has 18 co-authors, split evenly between Democrats and Republicans. It passed committee on consent and Rogers said he expects the governor to sign it.

A third bill, AB 1666, addresses something a town hall attendee brought up directly: the piles of slash and woody debris left behind after logging and restoration projects. Right now that material is typically burned in open piles, contributing to air quality problems and releasing carbon. AB 1666, the Biomass Innovation Parks Act, would create a grant and financing program to establish regional processing facilities that convert that wood waste into building materials and other carbon-beneficial products using non-combustion technology.

The bill tries to thread a needle Rogers said the community is right to watch carefully: making biomass economically useful without creating an incentive to cut more trees just to feed the processing facilities. The bill specifies that parks can only process wood waste that originated in California and only from material that is a byproduct of other projects, not harvested for the purpose of biomass production.

“We want to find some additional level of economy that furthers the environmental goals,” Rogers said, “while also not tipping the scales so far that people are concerned that forest management will happen as a byproduct of trying to create the biomass.”

A fourth bill would create a state office of eco-tourism to market the North Coast’s natural assets, from old growth forests to coastal access to river restoration, as a unified economic opportunity. Rogers said eco-tourism is one of four economic pillars GoBiz has identified for the North Coast region and that it remains underdeveloped partly because there is no single place for visitors or investors to find what the region offers.

Through all four bills runs a theme Rogers returned to more than once at the town hall: the current incentive structure is broken, and it is hurting the local operators it was supposed to support. Rogers said he hears from foresters that what they need most is a steady, predictable supply of work, and that the bills are designed to provide exactly that.

“The forest can be for everybody if it’s managed appropriately,” Rogers said. “And it needs to be managed appropriately.”

One more forestry topic surfaced at the end of the town hall, though Rogers was candid it was too early to address fully. The US Forest Service had announced just days before the Garberville meeting that it was consolidating management operations out of state, a move that would significantly affect Trinity County, which Rogers said is roughly 89 percent federally managed and which is also home to one of the two demonstration forests in his district targeted by AB 2494. Rogers said at the time the announcement was only about a week old, Sacramento had begun conversations about how Cal Fire and other state resources might fill some of the gaps, but no plan had taken shape yet.

That story, and what the restructuring means for Northern California communities that have relied on the Forest Service for wildfire management, watershed research and land stewardship, will be covered in a separate report.

Articles in this series: 

• ‘We’re Trying to Do the Hard Things’, Assemblymember Rogers Told SoHum in a Town Hall Yesterday
• ‘It’s a Big Club and You’re Not In It’: Assemblymember Chris Rogers on Dark Money, Rural Power and the June Primary
• Old Trees, New Laws: Southern Humboldt Brings Its Forestry Concerns to Town Hall