Community forest bigger now

The forest expansion agreement is signed by Shasta Trinity National Forest Supervisor Sharon Heywood (foreground) and Colleen O'Sullivan, Resource Conservation District (RCD) board chair. Watching behind them by PHIL NELSON are (from left) Jim French, chair of the Resource Advisory Council; Pat Frost, RCD executive director; Sam Frink of the Forest Service; Supervisor Jeff Morris; and Patrick Truman, RCD board member. A nearly 12,000-acre expansion of the Weaverville Community Forest became a reality two days before Christmas when the Trinity County Resource Conservation District Board of Directors voted to enter a 10-year agreement with the U.S. Forest Service to manage the land through a cooperative relationship.

The expansion area involves 11,850 acres of Forest Service land to the north and northeast of Weaverville. It includes all of the public lands outside the wilderness boundaries within the watersheds

of West Weaver Creek, Garden Gulch, East Weaver

Creek, the East Branch of East Weaver and Rush Creek.

Shasta-Trinity National Forest Supervisor Sharon Heywood signed the master agreement with the RCD earlier in December to add the national forest lands in the Weaverville Basin to the existing Weaverville Community Forest of nearly 1,000 acres immediately southwest of the town.

The first 1,000 acres is owned by the Bureau of Land Management and managed jointly by the BLM and the RCD. The community forest designation came about after a group of citizens concerned about protecting the town's viewshed protested a proposed land exchange in 1999 from BLM to a private timber company. The exchange never happened and a stewardship contract was formed instead between the BLM and the RCD to manage the area cooperatively as a community forest.

Now the same type of relationship has been formed between the RCD and the Forest Service under the 10-year agreement signed last week.

The Forest Service retains ownership and ultimate responsibility for the land, but the RCD is charged as the local agent to engage public input and help develop projects, including fuels reduction,

trail work, sediment reduction and storm-proofing existing roads.

RCD Executive Director Pat Frost said the community forest expansion was made possible by an earlier decision of the regional forester that allows the receipts from any commercial activity in the stewardship area to be retained at the local level for additional community forest projects instead of going into the federal treasury.

Frost said public meetings will be held "to involve the community in deciding what we need to do out there. We want to hear from hikers, bikers, off-highway vehicle users, equestrians and the residents next door."

Frost noted that managing the original BLM portion of the community forest has gone very well and was another motivating factor.

"This is more than a tenfold increase, but the methods and strategies we've developed on the BLM land will serve us well. Transparency is very important," Frost said, adding that with the original community forest, "we've been careful in the scale of what we do. We've done 200 acres of fuels treatment and timber harvest — not all 980 acres. Then we look at how to adapt what we learned and accomplished with that."

Few other community forest models exist. The City of Arcata has a community forest, but it also owns the land. There's a community forest in Canada where a local entity manages the land in partnership with federal land managers similar to the situation in Weaverville.

Otherwise, Frost said, "I think we're it. We're a very small special district— the smallest form of government— entering an agreement with the biggest government of all, the feds. So essentially, we're out there going somewhere no one else has gone before."