PORT ANGELES — A draft management plan that sets a five-year course for the state Department of Natural Resources can be reviewed and commented upon at a DNR-sponsored meeting Tuesday.
The get-together is from 6:30 p.m. to 8 p.m. at the Port Angeles Senior Center, 328 E. Seventh St., and is intended for residents of Clallam and Jefferson counties.
Tuesday’s meeting is one of seven being held on the draft plan in Western Washington between Feb. 1 and 11, but it is the only one on the North Olympic Peninsula.
Public comment will be taken until Feb. 19.
The 40-page plan can be viewed and an online survey on the plan taken, at tinyurl.com/ybt5kbs.
“It isn’t a laundry list of everything we do,” Natural Resources spokesman Aaron Toso said Friday.
“It’s an opportunity for us to designate areas we are going to focus on and areas where we will see some changes.”
The plan’s goals include developing renewable energy resources on state lands, addressing climate change, improving forest practice rules, managing state lands, protecting working forests from being converted to other uses and cleaning up and restoring Puget Sound.
“This is a unique opportunity to determine where the agency is going in the next five years, and people can have a voice in that,” Toso said.
The plan includes an effort by DNR to develop a habitat management plan that ensures the agency complies with the federal Endangered Species Act when managing the state’s 2.6 million acres of aquatic lands.
The agency manages all shoreline bedlands, including those in navigable rivers and lakes.
Technically speaking, bedlands are those lands lying waterward of, and below the line of, the extreme low tide mark.
Plainly put, they are always under water, Toso said.
DNR has management responsibility of 30 percent of tidelands in the state, including some tidelands at the abandoned Rayonier pulp mill site east of downtown Port Angeles. The site is undergoing cleanup with oversight from the state Department of Ecology.
“[The Department of] Ecology has control of the cleanup, and we will continue to be at the table in that discussion,” Toso said.
DNR plans to conduct baseline sampling for aquatic leases to test for toxics and fine woody debris and modify leasing agreements to ensure environmental protection, according to the draft plan.
A habitat management plan already guides management of the agency’s state trust lands.
Those trust lands include the Olympic Experimental State Forest, a commercial forest of 260,000 acres in western Clallam and Jefferson counties set aside for timber production and habitat conservation.
There are 159,000 acres of DNR land in Clallam County and 199,000 acres in Jefferson County.
The experimental forest includes temperate rain forest habitat of the northern spotted owl and marbled murrelet.
Unlike other DNR land, wood is harvested and habitat conserved without designated zones separating those functions.
The draft plan is was drawn from results from an online public survey completed by 600 respondents, comments from two agency executive management retreats and 31 DNR staff meetings, Toso said.
The final plan will be considered by approval by Commissioner of Public Lands Peter Goldmark in late March or early April, Toso said.
________
Staff writer Paul Gottlieb can be reached at 360-417-3536 or at paul.gottlieb@peninsuladailynews.com.
