KVRI officials discuss retooling forest treatment plan

BONNERS FERRY — U.S. Forest Service officials said restructured contracts in the Idaho Panhandle National Forest will result in a 70% increase in 2026 timber sales for the Bonners Ferry District at Wednesday’s forestry meeting hosted by the Kootenai Valley Resource Initiative. 

The drafted regional forestry plan for 2026 consists of four sales in Bonners Ferry totaling 17 million board feet, a significant increase from the 10 MMBF that was previously said to be expected by Idaho Panhandle National Forest supervisor Tim Gilloon. 

The June 11 roundtable meeting consisted of officials from USFS, the Kootenai Tribe of Idaho, Idaho Forest Group, the Boundary County Commission and the Idaho Conservation League. 

The group also discussed the history and current outlook of projects in the Bonners Ferry District, as well as the urgent need to mitigate fire risk by treating Boundary County forests. 

The key project currently is Katkee Fuels, a 7,000-acre treatment, mostly for commercial purposes, but also for fuels reduction. That area has not been treated in several decades, but for most other treatment opportunities, the project areas overlap with recent harvests. 

“Volume per acre is nowhere near where it used to be,” said USFS Forester Ed Koberstein. 

Koberstein said there are several opportunities to treat smaller swaths of forestland in the area to protect infrastructure such as pipelines, roads and homes. Those projects have limited commercial value, but they can be feasibly accomplished this year.  

Because these fuel breaks would be smaller sales up to 3,000 acres, they would be eligible for a categorical exclusion, or an expedited environmental consultation and a relatively simple contract. 

Koberstein said the main holdup with the Forest Service currently is not its ability to accomplish environmental consultation, but its ability to have boots on the ground in the forests to meet lengthy contracting requirements needed to put a sale out to bid, such as gathering data to appraise the timber. Depending on the sale, requirements change. 

“The bottleneck is preparing the contract and getting through the administrative side,” Koberstein said. “Implementation of sales is where we’re going to hit the wall.” 

Following the meeting, the group hung around at the Boundary County Annex to discuss Canada’s forest management plan, and how the USFS could take some of those strategies and apply them to its own forest management to increase output and efficiency.