Large timberland conservation easement faces mining challenge
Laura Lundquist
On Friday, Bill Schenk, Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks Lands and Water Program manager, asked the FWP commission to approve a proposal to use Habitat Montana money to help purchase a conservation easement on almost 33,000 acres of former Weyerhaeuser land in the Cabinet and Salish Mountains west of Kalispell.
“This conservation easement essentially keeps the land as it is. For three generations or more, this land has been available for public access. Weyerhaeuser and other timber companies that have this in the chain of title have treated this as essentially public land,” Schenk said. “Second, all of Montana is facing development pressure. Of the original estate that Weyerhaeuser sold, some is already being subdivided. But the bulk of it we’re aiming to get into conservation easements.”
In December 2019, when Weyerhaeuser Company announced it was selling its 630,000 acres of timberland in western Montana to Southern Pine Plantations, many Montanans wondered what that meant for the land they’d accessed for decades. Would it be kept as timberland or sold to private developers?
Southern Pine Plantation said it would retain some of the land. Then in January 2021, it sold almost half of the Weyerhaeuser land to Washington state-based Green Diamond Resources Company. At that time, Green Diamond COO Neal Ewald assured the public that the company would manage the property as working timberlands and would honor the plans for the conservation easement that was already underway and eventually became the Montana Great Outdoors Conservation Easement in June 2021.
Schenk said the conservation easement is valued at slightly more than $39.5 million. FWP couldn’t cover the cost alone because Habitat Montana could contribute only $1.5 million. But a number of entities have pitched in to put the purchase within reach. The Trust for Public Lands raised almost $4.2 million while the U.S. Forest Service pledged $20 million from its Forest Legacy Program. But they were still about $13.9 million short of the total. Then the landowner, Green Diamond, pledged to donate the balance.
On Friday, Green Diamond vice president John Davis said the conservation easements would line up well with the company’s operations, so his company appreciated all the time and effort that had gone into creating the easement and wanted to see it become a reality.
“In just a short period of time, 10 to 15 years, we’ve seen the land base of productive commercial timberland shrink dramatically. These conservation easements are an opportunity for us to keep large blocks of timberland in play and open to the public,” Diamond said.
All the money is in place for the transaction. But one hurdle remains in the form of a lawsuit.
WRH Nevada Properties, backed by Gallatin Gateway-based Citizens for Balanced Use and represented by Scott Law of Bozeman, filed a lawsuit on Monday to stop the conservation easement. In Montana, one entity can own the land while someone else can own a right to mine the land below the surface and the landowner can’t stop them. While Green Diamond owns the subsurface mineral rights on half of its land, WRH owns mineral rights on most of the other half.
In 2020, before it sold the land, Southern Pine Plantation offered to buy WRH out of its mineral rights but WRH refused, according to FWP documents. It’s likely because WRH had bigger plans. On its website, WRH advertises an “opportunity” for a buyer to purchase the mineral rights that WRH owns under almost 825 million acres or almost 1,300 square miles extending from Libby to Lolo Pass to Lincoln and Garrison Junction in western Montana.
A conservation easement could interfere with part of that opportunity. As a result, WRH is opposed to the myriad of land sales and easements that seek to preserve wildlands in western Montana, including the Lost Trail Conservation Area Easement north of the Green Diamond property.
“The underlying claims in the lawsuit - there’s a wide range of them - but they include claims that the (Montana Environmental Policy Act) process was not followed appropriately, claims that the underlying authorities for the state’s Forest Legacy program are not statutorily authorized, just a bunch of things thrown kind of against the wall,” said FWP attorney Jeff Hindoien.
The FWP commission was listed as a defendant in a temporary restraining order WRH filed on Tuesday, but FWP attorneys said the judge only barred the final closing on the deal - the commission could still approve the deal, which it did with a unanimous vote Friday.
Now, the proposal will have to be considered by the Land Board because more than $1 million in state funds are being used. But WRH is trying to get an injunction to stop that, with a hearing scheduled for next month. Hindoien said FWP attorneys would likely be dealing with the lawsuit “for a while.”
This easement is only Phase 1 of the Montana Great Outdoors Conservation Easement. The original plan was to put a conservation easement on almost 86,000 acres of Green Diamond property extending north and south of the Thompson Chain of Lakes along U.S. Highway 2. But there was no way that FWP could raise the money to pay for an area twice as large.
Phase 1 surrounds Phase 2 with one area of Phase 1 land sitting south of the Thompson Chain of Lakes and a second area is north of Wolf Creek Road and east of the already-acquired Thompson-Fisher easement.
“Because of limitations on funding, we’ve had to break it into two phases,” Schenk said. “The breakout between the two phases was made with an eye toward existing conservation easements, the uncertainty of funding for the second phase, and what we and Green Diamond Company would like to accomplish first.”
Contact reporter Laura Lundquist at lundquist@missoulacurrent.com.