Last February, Denise Moore got a letter from the Oregon Department of Forestry that “immediately sent up red flags.” Cullen Bangs, a forest roads manager in the department’s Astoria district office, wrote that surveyors would be around her property in the weeks ahead to review boundaries between the Clatsop State Forest and nearby private property.

Moore, who has lived with her husband and raised her three kids on 3 acres near the forest for more than 30 years, immediately emailed Bangs. She asked if the state was preparing a timber sale near her home on Gnat Creek, about 20 miles east of Astoria.

“The only neighbor we have is ODF,” she said. “In the back of my mind I assumed, yeah, at some point they may do some selective harvesting.”

Bangs confirmed a timber sale would occur, but he didn’t know when. He wrote that the department would keep Moore and neighbors apprised of the details, timelines and processes for providing public comment.

But the letter from Bangs became the first of several communications, and miscommunications, between the forestry department and its Astoria office about two planned timber sales to concerned neighbors over the course of a year. The communication breakdown would send those residents, along with community and environmental groups, into a frenzy, eventually leading one timber sale to be paused indefinitely and a Board of Forestry member to resign.

The fallout over poor communication surrounding the sales led to an investigation by the Department of Forestry’s interim director, who has since changed the agency’s policy around contacting residents living near a state logging site.

Oregon’s Department of Forestry relies on timber sales to private companies in state forests for the bulk of its budget needed to manage those forests. Michael Wilson, state forests division chief at the Oregon Department of Forestry, told the Capital Chronicle that a lot of the communication breakdown from the agency comes down to a lack of staff and a sense of urgency in getting timber sales underway after the 2024 fire season delays.

“We have been playing catch up since last fire season just to get our core business done in state forests,” Wilson said.

Communication breakdown

The two proposed timber sales on the Clatsop State Forest near Moore’s property — Mothball Hill and Davis Ridge — included a combined 267 acres of clearcuts adjacent to her and others’ homes. Some of the cuts would be within 40 feet of her property, and some neighbors had trees right outside their windows marked to be cut.

Darren Orange, whose property also abuts the sales, said he didn’t hear about surveyors until Late February or early March 2024. He heard not from the state, but from Stuntzner Engineering & Forestry, a private company hired to do the surveying.

Like Moore’s letter, it did not include any details about living near a future state timber sale, or about when the Oregon Department of Forestry would post its draft annual operations plan that details which sites are up for sale in the year ahead. It also didn’t include any information about how he could weigh in, though state law requires a 45-day comment period for the annual plan.

He learned about all of that in April, several weeks after the plan had been posted to the forestry department’s site, when the local nonprofit conservation group North Coast Communities for Watershed Protection organized a public information campaign encouraging people to submit comments.

The result was a deluge: The forestry department received more than 1,000 public comments.

Email correspondence from a North Coast Communities for Watershed Protection public records request show Wilson reaching out to Chandra Ferrari, then Gov. Tina Kotek’s natural resources adviser, warning her that the governor’s office would probably receive emails from concerned Astoria-area residents about the sales, and that she should redirect people back to the forestry department.

The problem was, the forestry department was not responding to anyone, residents said.

An open ear

Feeling deliberately cut off from the agency after weeks of calls and emails, Moore, Orange, and members of the North Coast group, along with leaders of nearly a dozen state conservation groups, expressed anger and frustration in letters and testimony at the Board of Forestry’s June 6, 2024 meeting.

New at that meeting was Bob Van Dyk, a former political science professor at Pacific University and former policy director at the nonprofit conservation group Wild Salmon Center, who’d been appointed by Kotek and confirmed by the Oregon Senate just a few weeks earlier. Residents emailed Van Dyk after the June board meeting to see if he, with a conservation background, would meet with them.

“My experience with the Department of Forestry had been: If you’re a conservationist or you’re a citizen or something, and you’re not a timber person, you’re not welcome there,” Van Dyk said.

He emailed back to say he could talk with the residents, but he cautioned them that he couldn’t influence timber sales as a member of the Board of Forestry. Emails reviewed by the Capital Chronicle show Van Dyk received permission from then-State Forester Cal Mukumoto to meet with residents, and that the forestry department approved him to receive reimbursement for mileage and a night in a local motel, as well as a per diem of $155 for two days. A 2021 law allows state board members to receive a daily allowance for official board business if they make under $50,000 annually as an individual or $100,000 annually in a dual-income household.

Jim Kelly, the forestry board chair, said that despite Mukumoto’s approval in the email, he and Mukumoto repeatedly told Van Dyk the meeting was not a good idea.

“Both Cal and myself discouraged him,” Kelly said. “We both reminded him that the board doesn’t have a role in the actual choice of timber sales, and that it would be confusing to the public for him to go. So we both discouraged him.”

The meeting with residents went well, according to Van Dyk and residents. He had invited Astoria District Forester Dan Goody to the June 24 site visit, and two other district staff came as well: Cullen Bangs, the district road manager, and Brad Catton, operations coordinator for the district.

“Until (Van Dyk) said he’d come, they weren’t willing to come talk to us,” Moore said. “Then he comes and boom, we get three people from forestry.”

Goody told residents at the meeting there was some flexibility to keep buffer zones between homes and clear cuts, protect some views and to keep some of the older trees people were concerned about.

“I felt good about it. I felt like these people got heard, you know?” Van Dyk said. “People still weren’t happy it was going to be cut, but it felt like it turned the temperature down a bit.”

Following the outpouring of public concern over the sales, but before Van Dyk’s visit, officials at the Oregon Department of Forestry decided to pause moving forward with Mothball Hill until 2026. Officials had decided, however, that they were going to go ahead with selling Davis Ridge to be logged in 2025.

In a July 2 letter, Goody, the district forester, wrote to nearby residents that preparations for logging on the Davis Ridge site would likely begin in early 2025 with some of their input in mind, and that “field foresters will meet with adjacent landowners that have expressed the desire to do so.”

Moore figured this meant Goody and others would meet with her and neighbors before any logging began. It also encouraged them to reach out to agency officials with any questions or concerns, which they continued to do.

A closed door

Not all in Astoria were pleased with Van Dyk’s visit. After he left, Clatsop County Commissioner Courtney Bangs, sister-in-law to district road manager Cullen Bangs, took to Facebook to criticize what she characterized as Van Dyk’s “funded” visit.

At a Sept. 4 Board of Forestry meeting, Board Chair Jim Kelly called out Van Dyk for making the visit and requesting the per diem, saying it caused Kelly and Mukumoto weeks of trouble and “ruined my summer.”

Van Dyk said he did not know the extent to which his visit had caused trouble for Kelly and Mukumoto until that meeting. Kelly told the Capital Chronicle that he and Van Dyk had discussed multiple times the trouble the visit had caused before the September meeting.

Kelly publicly apologized to Van Dyk the next day in light of concerns from other board members and attendees who were disappointed with his treatment of Van Dyk. A few weeks later the board, at the request of Kotek’s natural resources adviser Geoff Huntington, hired a $250-an-hour conflict mediator and consultant to investigate and to help smooth board relationships and underlying issues.

The consultant, Donna Silverberg, collected nearly $8,000 for her work and shared takeaways with the board, but there was no further action taken against Van Dyk or Kelly.

In late October, after just about five months serving, Van Dyk told his fellow board members he would not seek another term, feeling he no longer had the support of Kelly, or the governor’s office that backed Kelly, and that he no longer wanted to work with Kelly. Van Dyk’s term officially ended at the beginning of January.

The board has since changed its policy to limit what members can call official business eligible for reimbursement from the state. Van Dyk’s trip to listen to concerned residents near the two timber sales in June 2024 would not qualify under the new policy, Kelly said.

Rushed sale

Meanwhile, the concerned residents in the Clatsop State Forest were stuck in limbo. After that July 2, 2024 letter from Goody promising a meeting from field foresters with adjacent landowners, Moore and others heard nothing.

But by early April 2025, they did hear the rumbling of logging roads being built.

They called and emailed Goody and other district officials asking for meetings. By the April 23 Board of Forestry meeting, they had received a long-awaited public records request, including emails that showed Astoria foresters including Goody appeared to be trying to rush the final sale of the Davis Ridge logging site so it would not be delayed another year, and get another public comment period.

“Could you please change the auction date for Davis Ridge to March? (…) The big reason we would like this sale to be auctioned in March is that it has some pressure politically and we want it to be sold prior to the public comment period for the FY2026 AOPs (annual operation plans),” John Tillotson, head of marketing timber sales in the district, emailed to an agency contract specialist in January.

In another internal email, Astoria District forester Goody urged selling the Davis Ridge site in March to “save a bunch of grief during public comment.”

Residents and the North Coast Communities for Watershed Protection presented those emails at the Board of Forestry’s recent April meeting, prompting board members to call for Interim State Forester Kate Skinner to investigate.

Skinner completed her investigation in under a month, and produced a three-page report, including a timeline of communications that did or did not happen in an effective way. Agency officials said the Davis Ridge sale had already been approved in the last annual operations plan and thus, by March, auctioning it off to a private company was not being rushed but was, in fact, behind schedule.

Residents provided the Capital Chronicle with emails that refute Skinner’s finding that forestry officials “did not receive any contact from adjacent landowners as a result of (Dan Goody’s July 2, 2024) letter.” Anna Kaufman of the North Coast Communities for Watershed Protection also denies Skinner’s claim in the report that Kaufman and others received any response from the Oregon Department of Forestry during the 45-day public comment period. She says Skinner’s claim that Astoria district foresters met with her and other members of the group to talk about the timber sales in January and February of 2024 is misrepresented. She said she met with officials over a clear cut near a fish hatchery on Gnat Creek and that district foresters said nothing about a forthcoming annual operations plan, including the potential Mothball Hill or Davis Ridge sales.

Goody wrote to residents a few weeks ago, on April 29, to let them know agency officials had decided to suspended the Mothball Hill sale indefinitely. Logging on Davis Ridge is underway now.

The agency’s new policy is to send a letter to everyone living directly adjacent to a potential timber sale site listed in the state’s annual operations plan at least a week before the plan is published and the public comment period begins, Wilson said.

“We’re really trying to do better, quite frankly, making sure we close the loop at the local level,” he said.

Astoria-based state forestry officials met with Moore and neighbors in late April and again on May 5 to discuss a plan for communicating better with one another while logging work occurs at the Davis Ridge site through October.

Moore had something to get off her chest, too.

“I told them: ‘I do not trust you anymore,’” she said.

Oregon Capital Chronicle is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501(c)(3) public charity. Oregon Capital Chronicle maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Julia Shumway for questions: info@oregoncapitalchronicle.com. Follow Oregon Capital Chronicle on Facebook and X.

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