SANDPOINT - The Little Sand Creek Watershed will receive a welcome grooming this year.

Sandpoint council members recently cleared forester Mike Wolcott to organize a timber sale for the valuable watershed. The sale will have the double benefit of generating revenue for the city and protecting the forested land from common diseases and wildfires.

The timber sale follows a similar endeavor staged last year, which was unexpectedly successful at generating revenue. About $60,000 was anticipated from the sale, but when all was said and done, the city received $72,000 from the natural resources.

According to Wolcott, the area has since been replanted with 1,080 white pine, 400 western larch and 100 ponderosa pine at an expense of $1,800 to the city. With that job accomplished, the city is setting its sights on a larger-scale timber sale that should accomplish the same goals.

Compared to last year, which cleared out 308,000 board feet worth of timber, the proposed 2013 plan will likely remove 450,000 board feet over a 100-acre area south of the 2012 harvest region. The cleared lumber will probably bring around $100,000 into city coffers, although that number is far from certain due to the fluctuating market. Even more valuable to the city is protecting a cherished water source through preventative measures. One of the major goals in the sale is to increase the space between trees. That's because a high density of trees means a large amount of trouble if a fire starts in the region.

"There is a large component of the trees that have not been treated," Wolcott said. "A lot of the trees have intertwining crowns, and if we have a severe fire season and a fire event occurs in the watershed, it would quickly turn into a crown fire, and it's very difficult to control that."

After the trees are cleared out, Wolcott said the region will be strategically replanted with tree species resistant to insects and diseases to which the native trees are commonly weak.