SPEARFISH, S.D. – South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem and Wyoming Governor Mark Gordon toured the largest sawmill in the Black Hills Monday.
At Neiman Enterprises in Spearfish, owner Jim Neiman told the two state officials that it may shut down if logging levels get reduced.
The Forest Service is proposing to reduce timber sales anywhere from 35 to 50 percent. That’s because the agency says recent logging levels are not sustainable.
Neiman has already had to shutter one large sawmill – in Hill City – earlier this year. .
Neiman told S.D.P.B. Radio that if the forest rests for a decade or two, the Black Hills won’t need a timber industry.
“Because the bugs are going to come back and it’s going to burn. We got too many communities,” Neiman said. “This is the most infiltrated forest with private lands in all the national forest system. This is dangerous to have the attitude that we want to grow this back—the level of inventory—that we had in 1999. That is asinine.”
Mountain pine beetles and wildfires have killed millions of Black Hills trees in the last 20 years. Conservationists cite Forest Service research, saying current logging levels will deplete trees suitable to cut.
Noem and Gordon hope to recruit the governors of California, Colorado and Oregon to push the Forest Service to maintain current logging levels.
