Keep the Children's Forest

Based on current plans, the State Land Board and OSU are pickpocketing Oregon's Common School Fund to create a new OSU Research Forest. .

I cannot think of a better example of "The road to hell is paved with good intentions" than the OSU Research Plan. It permanently locks up most of the Elliott State Forest, will grow and store unsustainable amounts of carbon, and then likely burn in a massive firestorm that will rapidly release all the carbon, kill thousands of resident wildlife -- including endangered species -- and greatly damage local communities.
 --Bob Zybach, PhD, OSU Environmental Sciences


Giving OSU $870,000 of Common School Money to come up with a plan that would enable them to get the land for free is just plain weird. For example, if somebody wanted to buy your tree farm, why would you give the buyer money in advance?

-- James M. Worl, Forester/Tree Farmer, Colton, Oregon

About this website

This website is all about the Elliott State Forest, a magical place with 93,000 acres in near Coos Bay. We worked hard to make this website informative and entertaining. Because there is a lot to learn, we broke the website into fourteen pages.

  • Home: Provides an overview of the KeepTheChildrensForest.org website.

  • Broken Trust: Uses a case study to explain in simple terms how the State Land Board and OSU are working together to pickpocket the Common School Fund.

  • Carbon Credit Scam: Describes an advance-fee scheme used by consultants and College of Forestry staff to get paid for preparing highly questionable future plans to sell carbon-credits.

  • Questions for OSU: Asks OSU administrators to comment on important questions, such as: Would OSU accept ownership and management for the Elliott State Forest if the transfer takes place for less than a quarter of the forest's fair market value?

  • Growth and Volume: Explains basic ideas about timber growth and volume that the OSU College of Forestry has kept hidden. For example, the Elliott State Forest now has six times more timber volume than it had when Oregon acquired it in 1930, despite more than 50 years of logging and active management.

  • Market Value: Looks at the value of the Elliott State Forest to determine what an appropriate sales price would be: an artificially low $221 million or a fair market value over $1 billion?

  • Giesy Plan: Describes an alternative management plan for the Elliott State Forest.

  • Harvest Volumes : Looks at how much has been harvested in the past, and compares how much each plan (DSL/OSU and ORWW/Giesy) would harvest in the future.

  • Catastrophic Fires: Looks at how catastrophic fires repeatedly swept over the Elliott Forest in the 1800s, and examines how fires will shape it in the future.

  • History: Describes how the Elliott State Forest was formed to become the Children's Forest; that is, part of the School Trust Lands as a permanent endowment for future generations of Oregon's schoolchildren.

  • Research Visions: Compares the types of research that would be done under the DSL/OSU and ORWW/Giesy Plans.

  • Legal Ideas: Explains why the Oregon State Lands Board has a legal responsibility to manage the Elliott State Forest for Oregon's K-12 school districts and describes our on-going Civil Complaint under way in the Polk County Circuit Court.

  • Education: Explains Elliott State Forest educational projects that have been completed by Oregon Websites and Watersheds Project, Inc. This includes virtual Elliott State Forest tours so you can learn more about the Elliott without leaving your home.

  • Secrecy and Bias: Describes how deliberately hidden information, secret meetings and biased advisory committees have all been used to deflect attention from an effort to steal from our children's School Trust endowment.

  • About Us: Describes the non-profit educational organizations associated with this website.

OSU's College of Forestry is one of, if not the premier forestry school in the USA. This is due in part to it’s very large and diverse research forests -- probably the largest in the US.

MANY industrial and private forest owners (including me) would gladly cooperate in their research projects. They’ve been doing this for years. Consequently, it seems to me the College of Forestry doesn’t need the Elliott for a research forest.
-- Kent Tresidder , retired forester and licensed real estate appraiser

The proposed plan is little more than an elaborate ruse to convert the Elliott into a de facto wilderness. It appears the plan will shortchange the Common School Fund, something I find morally reprehensible.
 -- Dave Sullivan, emeritus Professor of Business, OSU

I was involved in the proposed sale of the Elliott a few years ago and could not believe the low value of the appraisal. ... I suggest the establishment of the low value was politically motivated to allow for a cheaper decoupling of the common school fund’s primary responsibility.
 -- Bill Lansing, President and CEO, retired, Menasha Forest Products Corporation

Overview

The Elliott is Oregon’s first state forest and was created specifically for Oregon’s K-12 children as School Trust Land in 1930. Oregon’s Constitution requires School Trust Lands, such as the Elliott State Forest, to be managed for the benefit of the Common School Fund. These lands were intended to provide a permanent endowment for future generations of Oregon's schoolchildren.

For many decades, this arrangement worked well and generated more than $700 million dollars for Oregon schools along with hundreds of good paying jobs for rural Oregon workers. But in recent years, the State Land Board halted all timber sales and has no plans for future timber sales, so the Elliott has been losing money each year. The State Land Board has spent the last two years planning to give the Elliott State Forest to the OSU College of Forestry in a sweetheart deal for pennies on the dollar. In its December 8, 2020 meeting, the State Land Board announced it will spend the next two years planning for this impending change. We have entered a never-ending planning process that makes environmentalists happy, but leaves the Common School Fund and rural communities in permanent decline.

Along the way, the State Land Board has spent more than $870,000 from the Common School Fund to pay OSU to prepare the Elliott State Research Forest proposal. Both the State Land Board and OSU should be ashamed for taking this money from Oregon's schoolchildren. If the State of Oregon decides to create more research forests (OSU already has ten other research forests), and if funds are needed to prepare those proposals, then those funds should be appropriated by legislation, not taken from the Common School Fund.

This deliberate squandering of Common School Funds comes from a political desire to avoid logging and "sequester carbon." While this is popular among urban environmentalists, it robs Oregon's school children of an important source of revenue for local school districts. A similar court case involving the “Oregon Forest Trust Lands” was decided in November 2019 when a Linn County jury gave Oregon counties a $1.1 billion dollar award because Oregon had breached its contract with 13 rural counties by failing to maximize logging revenues on state land.

We hope the State Land Board voluntarily resumes active management and logging on the Elliott State Forest. This would restore hundreds of rural jobs and resume funding K-12 school districts from the Common School Fund.

Finally, if the Elliott State Forest is to be given to the OSU College of Forestry, then the Common School Fund should be compensated for the forest's fair market value -- which is estimated to be between $1.2 and $1.5 billion -- not for an arbitrarily reduced $221 million as current plans suggest.

Wikipedia says "In theatrical magic, misdirection is a form of deception in which the performer draws audience attention to one thing to distract it from another. "

Like a magician with an assistant, the Department of State Lands (DSL) and OSU have used the idea of creating a "research forest" as a misdirection ploy while hiding critical information about Market Value, Harvest Volumes, Broken Trust, Catastrophic Fires and the other issues discussed in this website.

As in the Wizard of OZ, this website pulls back the curtain so everyone can see what really happening.

Misdirection, politics and hidden information

The State Land Board and OSU have worked together to use misdirection and keep basic facts hidden about their plan to give the Elliott State Forest to the OSU College of Forestry. As educational non-profit organizations (see the About Us page), we have done our best to uncover and publish these facts so Oregonians can make an informed choice about how the Elliott State Forest should be owned and managed. In some cases we have succeeded, but many critical questions about the DSL/OSU plans remain unanswered and ignored. We remain cautiously optimistic OSU administrators will read and respond to the Questions for OSU page in this website.

Collecting the facts in this website hasn't been easy: basic information has been deliberately hidden by the Department of State Lands (DSL), and most planning meetings at both DSL and OSU have been held in secret (see the Secrecy and Bias page). Meanwhile the DSL and OSU websites claim they want public input. This sort of "public engagement theater" is dishonorable. All our early requests for information were rebuffed or ignored, so we eventually began filing formal Freedom of Information -- Public Records requests backed up by the obvious threat of legal action if the requests continued to be ignored. Responses from the Department of State Lands and Oregon State University have been slow and incomplete, and many critical questions remain unanswered.

The State Land Board has been caught between a rock and a hard place. The rock comes from their urban political base driven by militant environmental groups against all logging on the Elliott State Forest. For example, Ben Jones of Cascadia Forest Defenders, said “The Common School Fund system is unjust and broken, and it’s not really our job to fix it." (Earth First! Newswire, February 6, 2014: "Victory in the Elliott State Forest! 28 Oregon Coast Timber Sales Cancelled")

The hard place comes from the Oregon constitution: the State Land Board has a legal responsibility to manage the Elliott State Forest for the benefit of the Common School Fund; that is, our K-12 children.

At least so far in this conflict, the rock is winning.

A typical road junction in the Elliott State Forest with no signs or markers anywhere. If you are curious about the lack of road signs on the Elliott, learn more at Road Secrets.
Photo credit: Barbara Sullivan, February 2020.

The reason this picture appears here is to remind you of Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken":

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth ...

We cannot travel both management plans facing us with the Elliott State Forest: the DSL/OSU and ORWW/Giesy Plans are mutually exclusive.

Two competing plans for the Elliott

Oregon taxpayers and school districts should reasonably consider two competing visions for how the Elliott State Forest should be owned and managed: the Department of State Lands (DSL) / Oregon State University (OSU) Elliott State Research Forest Proposal, and the ORWW/Giesy Plan for an Elliott State Educational Forest. These two plans could hardly be more different: Oregon urban and rural communities face real and important choices about how we want to practice forestry on our public lands.


  1. The DSL/OSU Elliott State Research Forest Proposal:

  • Removes the Elliott State Forest from the School Trust Lands and gives ownership to OSU.

  • The Final OSU Proposal is described in this 121-page PDF file.

  • The Elliott would be managed according to the current values of urban environmentalists and politicians, and based on federal regulations, "HCPs," and legal actions according to the DSL/OSU Plan.

  • Was written by OSU professors with input from habitat consultants, wildlife biologists, government regulators, environmental lawyers and outdoor and conservation interest groups.

  • Cost a lot to produce. DSL has paid OSU $870,000 and Oregon Consensus $320,000, and these figures don't include the costs of travel, renting facilities and so on.

  • Would convert most of the Elliott State Forest into a de facto wilderness area.

    • Two-thirds of the forest would be untouchable. Strong legal protections would guarantee these areas are never logged or reduced in size. Salvage logging of fire damaged trees would be prohibited.

    • Less than 20 percent could be actively managed, with an average 60-year rotation.

    • Less than 20 percent would be lightly managed, with an average 100-year rotation.

    • Limits the total estimated harvest volume to 17 million board feet per year, roughly one-fourth of the annual growth on the forest and not nearly enough to pay for proposed maintenance, management, and research expenses.

  • Conducts academic research of little interest or apparent value to the thousands of foresters and landowners who manage Oregon's working forests.

  • Encourages environmental groups to use courts and legal cases to enforce the plan's restrictions.

  • OSU expects annual operating costs would be $2.1 million in excess of net harvest revenues (page 4). The plan doesn't say who would pay for these expected annual losses, but taxpayers should be concerned.

  • Requires $35 million in start-up costs (page 4). Once again, the plan doesn't say who would pay for the start-up costs.

  • No timber harvest revenue would go to support the Common School Fund or K-12 education. Instead, all harvesting revenue would be spent on OSU administration, various research proposals and other overhead expenses -- and even then, there would be an estimated annual $2.1 million shortfall.


  1. The ORWW/Giesy Plan for an Elliott State Educational Forest

  • Leaves the Elliott State Forest in the School Trust as an endowment for future generations of Oregon's schoolchildren. Only exists for 20 years so that the next generation of more knowledgable and experienced forest managers, scientists, and taxpayers can make their own plans for the Elliott.

  • Is described on this website's ORWW Giesy Plan Alternative Page.

  • Would be managed according to existing law by local Coos and Douglas County Tribes, businesses, and governments.

  • Was written by experienced professional foresters, scientists, and knowledgeable volunteers for educational non-profit organizations.

  • Didn't cost taxpayers a dime: the people who created this website and the ORWW Giesy Plan donated their time and resources because they believe in -- and are highly experienced in -- forest science research, education, and active forest management.

  • Would actively manage less than one-third of the Elliott in plantations and seeded trees less than 150 years of age (post-1868 Fire) as income for Oregon School Fund and as research controls for reserved areas -- and end in 20 years for analysis and reconsideration.

  • Harvests 50 million board feet per year, about 80 percent of the annual growth on the forest, and an historically demonstrated sustainable harvest volume for decades in which commercial timber was much smaller and younger.

  • Conducts essential research about actual foraging and adaptive survival research regarding listed endangered species, and how taxpayers and students might better evaluate actively managed forests.

  • Designed for active and ongoing public debate about how our public and private forests should be managed.

  • Limits activist groups from using courts and legal cases during the twenty year experiment.

  • Maintains existing historical 550 miles of roads and trails for public recreation and forest management and research purposes.

  • Requires no start-up funds.

  • Contributes an estimated average of $25 million from timber harvesting each year ($500 million over 20 years) to the Common School Fund in support of K-12 education.