Forest Service to bail out South Dakota sawmill

During remarks to the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, Forest Service Chief Randy Moore outlined a plan to ship logs from as far away as California to sawmills owned by Hulett, Wyoming's Neiman Enterprises. 

One of the mills is in Spearditch, South Dakota that Jim Neiman has threatened to close after increases in sales of timber have been deprioritized in the Black Hills National Forest's revised plan. The operation in Hulett employs a third of that community’s population. To minimize the movement of insects and diseases the logs will be peeled and some might even be shipped by rail to sidings in Gillette or Moorcroft, Wyoming then trucked to Neiman’s mills.

Chief Moore said that before widespread settlement in the West populations of ponderosa pine were about forty per acre but are as high as 600 per acre today.

Neiman also wants to log 20 million board feet of ponderosa pine per year in Colorado for the next 20 years. Neiman purchased Montrose Forest Products in Colorado in 2012 but in 2018 after the Trump Organization gutted the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) Neiman shipped twelve loads of timber from the San Juan National Forest to mills in South Dakota. In 2020 Neiman bought Interfor Corporation’s specialty sawmill in the Klamath County town of Gilchrist, Oregon. 

The Biden administration is anxious to reward US Representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) for her efforts to bring the Trump Organization to justice. Neiman waited until Donald Trump was forced from the White House then shuttered his sawmill in Hill City, South Dakota and blamed the Forest Service. One needs to look no further than the BHNF for how politics has completely altered a landscape but there are plenty other public lands examples that illustrate the red state, blue state divide.

The Biden administration has been slow to restore the NEPA rules Earth hating Republicans like South Dakota's John Thune and Wyoming's John Barrasso want to eliminate. So, as expected, Neiman will enjoy the fruits of socialism as the two Republican US Senators introduce a bill to inject taxpayer dollars into the Black Hills timber monopoly. They call the bill, The Save Jim Neiman's Ass Act Black Hills Forest Protection and Jobs Preservation Act of 2022.

In a related story President Joe Biden told New Mexicans the federal government will bear the costs of the Calf Canyon and Hermits Peak fires after prescribed burns got away from the Forest Service.

View the Senate hearing agenda and webcast linked here.

It's the view of this interested party that the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management should be merged in the Interior Department as the US Forest and Land Management Service.

ip photo from 2015: the Jasper Fire in 2000 created landscapes that more closely resemble the pre-settlement southern Black Hills.