Minnesota Forest Resource Council members spent a busy day conducting a regional meeting at North House Folk School’s blue building several weeks ago. The council is made up of U.S. Forest Service and Minnesota Department of Natural Resources personal as well as city and county officials, loggers, farmers, environmental groups, and interested citizens who live in the four county Tip of the Arrowhead.
Between 35 and 40 people from the Minnesota Forest Resources Council (MFRC) gathered at North House Folk School Wednesday, September 17 to spend a day discussing a wide variety of subjects ranging from climate change to erosion and forest fires that affect the 7.3 million acres that comprise Cook, Lake, St. Louis, and Carlton counties that make up the territory covered by MFRC.
Located in the Tip of the Arrowhead, the MFRC’s region is comprised of 7 percent water and 85 percent of the land is forested. There are over 2,600 lakes covering 525,000 acres and 150 miles of Lake Superior shoreline and more than 10,000 miles of streams and rivers located in the Tip.
Several presentations were made including one by local MFRC board member Shawn Perich who talked about the proposed federal wildfire disaster funding act which seeks to find a new way to fund fighting forest fires.
Not too many years ago, Perich said, the U.S. Forest Service forest fighting budget was about 15 percent, but today it has grown to nearly 50 percent. To fund this increase the Forest Service takes money from other programs like timber management or recreation for its fire budget. This causes some programs to get put on hold while some take years to get back on track, if they ever do, said one member of the panel.
“It’s interesting that someone would throw out the baby with the bathwater,” Perich said.
A Forest Service employee in attendance said that nationwide there are reductions in the numbers of employees working in timber sales, campgrounds, recreation etc., while the number of employees hired to work fires has increased. She also noted that the Forest Service budget to keep up its roads has been reduced by about 50 percent.
Cook County Soil and Water Conservation District Manager Kerrie Berg gave a report about her department’s erosion control methods used on the Flute Reed River in Hovland.
Berg said “toe wood” structures were used in five places where the Flute Reed’s clay banks were causing the river to turn brown and muddy the water in Horse Shoe Bay as it emptied into Lake Superior. A contractor was hired to scrape the banks down and then logs purchased locally were driven into the clay banks to help control the erosion.
Berg’s pictures showed that the measures were working and Perich, who lives nearby, said the erosion controls were helping clear the water and benefitting the trout in the stream.
A highlight of the meeting was the unanimous vote to approve a final Northeast Landscape Plan Revision, which was three years in the making and involved a wide variety of people, and many, many meetings. The new plan will update the 2003 plan.
The plan introduces the concept of landscape planning and presents a summary of the region’s ecological, economic, and social conditions and trends related to seven forest resource topics.
Those seven areas include the forestland base, vegetation and terrestrial wildlife, water resources and aquatic wildlife, forest products, recreation, minerals, and the social and cultural uses and values of the land and water.
The MFRC council is made up of a wide variety of representatives that come from all walks of life including the U.S. Forest Service, Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, county commissioners, Sierra Club, Nature Conservancy, loggers, saw mill representatives, private land owners, Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, University of Minnesota Extension, and the North Shore Stewardship Association, to name a few.
MFRC Board Chair Shaun Hamilton said the plan was voluntary and success will be based on the cooperation, coordination and a collaboration of regional partners.
“The Committee’s overarching recommendation was to encourage all organizations and agencies, all landowners and citizens, to use this plan and the corresponding maps and data in as many ways as possible. As a regional level plan, it is intended to provide a broad context on how forest resources can be managed sustainably,” states the report.
To review the Northeast Landscape Forest Resources Plan go to http:// mn.gov/frc/.
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