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Sylva officials consider helicopter logging at town’s Pinnacle Park
By Carey King
Money doesn’t grow on trees. Or does it?
That’s a question Sylva town board members are considering as they plan for future expenses that include a complete overhaul of the town’s stormwater drainage system and expanded services for a growing population.
At a budget planning session May 11, town leaders discussed an idea that has surfaced intermittently throughout the spring: selling off timber from Pinnacle Park.
The 1,100-acre tract, located north of Sylva on the southern side of the Plott Balsams, was purchased by the town in 1912 to use as its source of drinking water. The property includes the headwaters of Fisher Creek, which supplied Sylva with water until 1997, when the Tuckaseigee Water and Sewer Authority began drawing its supply from the Tuckaseigee River in Cullowhee.
A Boeing Vertol helicopter lifts a harvested tree from the forests on North Fork in late April. Property owners contracted with Gilkey Lumber Co. of Rutherfordton to cut timber there five years ago, and Gilkey brought in Columbia Helicopters of Portland, Ore., last month to retrieve oak, cherry and maple trees from the steepest, hardest-to-reach areas of the forest. (See related story, page 6A) – Herald photo by Carey King
At a planning retreat in March, town leaders decided to have three foresters survey the park to estimate its timber’s worth. One estimate should be complete by early summer; the town has yet to secure foresters to conduct the other two appraisals.
“We’re just looking at options and seeing what’s possible,” said Mayor Brenda Oliver. “It’s just an idea to pursue to see if it’s plausible. It’s not something we’ll enter into lightly.”
And, Town Manager Richard McHargue said, the only way the board will consider the idea is if the cutting is done in an environmentally-sound way, such as logging by helicopter (see related story, page 11A).
Whatever decision is made will depend on the details of a 25-year lease the town signed in 1995 with the Pinnacle Park Foundation, a non-profit created to preserve the area for recreation, education and research.
The foundation’s mission is to uphold the goals of a resolution Sylva leaders passed in 1992 when the land was decommissioned as a water source – a resolution that called upon future town leaders to preserve the property in the public domain and to prohibit development and extraction of natural resources.
Jay Coward, the foundation’s president, said recently that he is against the logging idea and that he told Oliver so in a conversation late last fall.
“The way we left it is that I’m opposed to it,” Coward said. “Before I could be convinced that logging is a good idea, there would have to be a huge cost benefit to outweigh keeping the land in a natural state.”
Besides, he said, the foundation’s lease of the park – at a price of $10 a year – won’t expire until November 2020, with the foundation having the option to exercise five 5-year options to renew.
“It’s a legal issue. (Sylva has) a lease with the Pinnacle Park Foundation,” Coward said. “Under the terms of that lease, no extraction of natural resources is allowed. The 1992 resolution definitely says there should be no mining or logging.”
According to town records, the former watershed was last logged in the late 1950s and early 1960s by Hennessee Lumber Co., which paid about $35,000 for the trees. At that time, only 600 of the total 1,100 acres was accessible by ground-logging equipment.
Should the town decide to log now, helicopters could reach more of the property, cutting enough lumber to bring a sum a few Sylva officials put in the ballpark of $1 to 2 million.
Coward disagrees with the estimate.
“There’s not a million dollars worth of timber up there,” he said. Much of the forest is second-growth from previous logging jobs, he said.
“When you have an open canopy (after trees are cut), what grows fastest and thickest is poplar, and sometimes pine,” Coward said. “If you check the lumber market for those trees, you get rock-bottom prices.”
Coward describes the park as a “mixed forest” with some oak and cherry that’s not mature enough to harvest.
“The park’s facing the wrong direction for there to be good timber. In a textbook analysis, the best timber’s on the north, the next best’s on the east, then west,” he said. “But this park faces south.”
Hellilogging “would be the most expensive way of logging for the least expensive kind of tree in a park that’s been set aside for recreation, education and research,” Coward said. “It just doesn’t add up to me.”
Another alternative
The other money-making option on the table for the park is to put the land into a conservation easement with dollars from a preservation group such as the North Carolina Clean Water Management Trust Fund. The fund recently offered Bryson City $1.4 million in exchange for the development rights to its watershed.
“They would give the town a certain amount of dollars and the town would not be able to do anything to disturb the land,” Oliver said. “It may be worth pursuing, both environmentally and economically.”
Such an agreement, Oliver said, would prohibit extraction of minerals, though some logging might be allowed, depending on the contract terms negotiated.
“For a conservation easement, the rule of thumb is (that we give) no more than half of the fair market value of the land. The town matches the other 50 percent,” said Tom Massie, the fund’s western representative.
The debate between conservation and tree-cutting has been before the town before: In 1998, Sylva leaders rejected a conservation easement agreement with the Conservation Trust of North Carolina that would have required Pinnacle Park to be maintained in its natural state forever, with hiking the only permitted public use.
At the time, the park foundation and Oliver – who sits on the foundation’s board – favored the easement, but the majority of board members rejected the idea, saying it was too risky to make a decision that would restrict the land’s use forever.
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