Idaho Wilderness Hearings

Statement:

Mr. Pavia. Good morning, Senator. First of all, I would like to say that I've worked the last 11% years in sawmills, so I feel that the economics presented to you were real scant today. I'll get to that a little later. About the fact about the wildlife in Long Canyon, I've been in Long Canyon many times and my feeling is that the sights and fronts and the tracks I've seen in Long Canyon contain all the representative wildlife that's found in the entire Selkirks, maybe except for the caribou which I haven't found there yet. Second, disease, as you know, is part of the forest, and when you save an overgrown forest as wilderness, that's a part of it. 206 Buffer zones according to the Forest Service people, when you're talking about buffer zones you have to manage a buffer zone as wilderness with specific management. The Forest Service says they have no mandate to manage lands outside of the wilderness boundaries of buffer zones. As far as some of the finances, I'd like to just maybe get into the school board a little bit, and I have complied figures from the last 10 years. I felt in that way it would show the cycle of how recession works, and I feel that the reason that the money coming into the county right now is also due because the timber industry is still rising out of the current recession, and that's why the funds are down. If you take the value of Long Canyon as 3 million board feet, I've estimated that it would cost—for the last 10 years would be approximately $7,400 per year, and that would come out to less than a dollar a person in the county, and that's out of the budget, by the way, of next year of $21V2 million. And I'd also like to say that I appreciate the fact that you are here listening to us and that this is a free society, and we are able to gather here for a give and take, and I hope that you will save Long Canyon and the Selkirk Crest as wilderness. Thank you very much.