The Malheur National Forest has pressed the pause button on plans for a new long-term stewardship contract, but that doesn’t mean logging and other management activity on the forest will stop.

“The forest is considering all the options for different contractual (mechanisms),” said Acting Forest Supervisor Ann Niesen, who assumed the post with the retirement of Craig Trulock on Feb. 3. “We’re going to continue to put wood on the market.”

The stewardship contract awarded to Iron Triangle in 2013, which has dominated timber harvest on the Malheur for a decade, is set to expire on March 1.

Worth an estimated $69 million, the contract is widely credited with saving what was then Grant County’s last remaining lumber mill, Malheur Lumber, by providing a steady stream of saw logs while also creating hundreds of jobs and improving forest health. But the arrangement has also sparked criticism from those who say it allowed Iron Triangle to prosper at the expense of rival operators.

With the contract getting ready to expire, timber industry players had been lining up to bid on a new long-term stewardship deal, although it wasn’t clear exactly what that would look like.

In interviews with the Blue Mountain Eagle last year, Trulock said he was leaning toward awarding another long-term stewardship contract, but suggested it would likely include a smaller share of the overall timber volume coming off the forest and would be part of a mix of contracting mechanisms that would provide more opportunities for smaller operators. Trulock also warned that the forest’s annual timber harvest target was expected to drop from 75 million board feet to between 50 and 55 million board feet.

Bidding on a new stewardship contract was supposed to begin in November, but that was delayed. Now the bidding process appears to have been postponed indefinitely, in part because the Malheur currently lacks the planning capacity to develop requirements for such a large and complicated contract.

“Because of where we’re at with our staffing, we made the conscious decision to focus on our program of work for this year and then evaluate the long-term contract piece going forward,” Niesen said.

Another factor, Niesen acknowledged, is the antitrust lawsuit filed in September by the Malheur Forest Fairness Coalition, which represents the Prairie Wood Products sawmill in Prairie City as well as a group of local loggers and ranchers.

Lastly, Niesen said, the particular type of long-term stewardship contract awarded to Iron Triangle a decade ago is no longer part of the Forest Service playbook for getting work done in the woods.

“We don’t even use that anymore,” she said. “There’s all kinds of other tools we have in our toolbox for doing this work.”

The Malheur’s timber harvest target for this year is 45 million board feet, Niesen said.

“It’s going to go up to 50 million next year,” she added. “(After that) we think we can maintain 55 million board feet a year.”

Niesen said the Malheur would likely use a number of different contracting mechanisms to ensure a reliable supply of commercial timber to area mills while also accomplishing the pre-commercial thinning, brush-clearing and other work needed to make the forest healthier and more fire-resilient.

Those mechanisms could run the gamut from straight timber sales to integrated resource timber contracts to short-term stewardship agreements under a blanket purchase agreement. Blanket purchase agreements, or BPAs, allow forest officials to put out call orders for specific jobs to a pool of qualified contractors.

“(The BPA) incites open competition for all the work all the time,” said Matthew Cawlfield, the timber program manager for the Malheur. “It’s just a different way to ensure all your local market players get to look at the work and bid on it.”

That’s just fine with Iron Triangle, according to owner Russ Young. He said his company is prepared to bid on jobs coming out of the Malheur National Forest no matter what form the contract takes.

“Iron Triangle understands the changing landscape associated with natural resource management and the ever-changing social and political desires under which the U.S. Forest Service operates,” he said in an email to the newspaper.

Young suggested that Iron Triangle is well-positioned to be successful even if the Malheur chooses not to issue another long-term stewardship contract. Since the current contract was awarded 10 years ago, he noted, the company has grown its workforce to more than 130 employees and diversified its operations, adding a post and pole plant in Seneca and getting into residential construction and property management.

“Iron Triangle has a diverse portfolio of timber and restoration projects on the Malheur, Wallowa-Whitman and Umatilla national forests, providing opportunities for seasonally diverse operations over fluctuating markets,” he said.

“(The company) has invested in equipment and personnel to meet the diverse and evolving requirements of current forest management and the accelerated restoration projects.”

Mark Webb, executive director of regional forestry collaborative Blue Mountain Forest Partners, said he’s not worried that Grant County’s wood products industry will grind to a halt with the expiration of the long-term stewardship contract.

“I think the timber sales already in place will continue to provide volume,” he said. “Even if the Forest Service decides not to issue another long-term stewardship contract, there will still be timber contracts coming out.”

The question, he said, is who will get those contracts.

Under the long-term stewardship deal, Webb said, projects on the Malheur National Forest were more or less guaranteed to go to local operators — even jobs that Iron Triangle pieced out to subcontractors. While shorter-term stewardship contracts can have the same sort of “local benefit” requirement, other types of contracts have no such restrictions.

“That is my main concern — there’s a chance more wood will go out of county and outside loggers will come in and take more of the work,” Webb said.