News that Weyerhauser Co. will shutter its recently acquired lumber-mill and corporate operations in Columbia Falls and cut 200 local jobs rattled through the Flathead Valley Wednesday and was predictably followed by vigorous finger-pointing from politicians, interest groups and individuals throughout the state.

The company has declined to elaborate on the reasons for closing its Columbia Falls lumber mill, plywood mill and corporate offices other than pointing to a decline in available timber supply in the region, where mills have been averaging only 60 to 70 percent of their operating capacity.

Montana’s congressional delegation and Gov. Steve Bullock followed the closure news with statements blaming the log supply shortage on a lack of production in the region’s federal forests, but forest officials and industry experts say that’s only part of the problem.

Flathead National Forest Supervisor Chip Weber said Thursday that while the forest’s current timber harvest is only about one-quarter to one-third of its peak 50 years ago, harvest has recently increased and has exceeded annual targets for several years.

“It’s pretty clear that this is not solely an available-log-supply decision,” he said. “It’s simplistic to say it’s only that, but it’s clear the industry has wanted more logs.”

The past few years’ harvest of 30 million board-feet of timber from the Flathead Forest is up from an average of about 23 million over the past decade.

Still, that’s just a shadow of the industry’s heyday, he said, when the Flathead averaged 140 million board-feet per year in the 1960s and 1970s.

Montana’s congressional Republicans, Sen. Steve Daines and Rep. Ryan Zinke, pointed specifically to federal regulations, “fringe environmentalists” and litigious activists for curtailing logging in national forests.

Weber said while environmental lawsuits don’t help, the agency’s budget problems are the larger obstacle stifling the supply.

“Litigation tends to make it more expensive for us to do our planning and it may delay things,” he said, but added that he has never seen a project permanently halted by a lawsuit.

“The amount of our organizational capacity and our budget that gets committed to fire [suppression] has grown and grown,” he said. “Early in my career, we spent about 10 percent of my budget on fire and now we’re over 50 percent. Under a different financing system, we might be able to put more of that money into all of the things the forest produces.”

Known as “fire borrowing,” the agency is forced to pull funding from other areas, including logging projects, to cover suppression costs in extreme fire years.

Todd Morgan, the director of forestry industry research at the University of Montana’s Bureau of Business and Economic Research, agreed, noting the supply problem also has roots in private timber lands.

“During the ’90s, a lot of that decline was attributable to the changes in the Forest Service timber harvest levels,” he said. “But also during the ’90s, and not as widely talked about, was private harvest as well.”

While only accounting for 30 percent of Montana’s nearly 20 million acres of timber property available for harvest, privately and tribally owned lands produce 60 to 65 percent of the state’s lumber supply. National forests contain 61 percent of those lands, but produce just 20 to 25 percent of the state’s logs.

Before it was purchased by Weyerhaeuser this year, Plum Creek Timber Co. sold close to half a million acres of its land in Montana over the last decade, and harvest practices on the remaining holdings left relatively little merchantable wood standing.

“There’s a lot of young trees out there on private land, less than 40 years old, and it’s going to be a decade or two before a lot of those trees start getting to the age where they’re ready to be harvested,” Morgan said.

Conservation groups also pointed to over-harvesting on private land, firing back on Thursday against accusations that the environmental community was to blame.

Matt Koehler, director of the WildWest Institute, suggested the mill closures were part of Weyerhaeuser’s plan from the start, after most merchantable timber had been cleared from its land.

“Is it entirely possible that a $25 billion corporation would purchase an $8 billion corporation six months ago and have no idea what they just announced is coming down the pipeline?” he asked. “Weyerhaeuser’s job is to produce revenue for their shareholders. Their job is not to make lumber in Montana and their job is not to employ people in Montana.”

He also pointed to lagging demand for wood products and last year’s expiration of the softwood lumber trade agreement between the United States and Canada, expected to lead to cheap Canadian lumber “flooding the market” and putting domestic suppliers out of business.

But Morgan said despite many industry analysts’ fears, that scenario hasn’t yet developed.

“There wasn’t a huge flood of Canadian lumber into the U.S. as a result,” he said. “It’s higher than it was, but they didn’t really turn on the spigot.”

Morgan said he believes Canadian timber stands are struggling with beetle infestation problems, and suggested exporters may be exercising caution to avoid prompting a trade dispute with the United States.

Another environmental group, Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics, suggested that Weyerhaeuser may have closed its mills because as an exporter of raw logs, it is barred from using timber harvested from the region’s national forests.

However, Carol McKenzie of the Forest Service regional headquarters in Missoula said that claim isn’t true.

“Plum Creek and now Weyerhaeuser have been accepting logs at the gate from independent loggers. Some of these loggers have contracts with the Forest Service,” she said in an email Thursday. “The logs they cut from federal sales need to be minimally processed in the U.S. They cannot export raw logs.”

In addition to supply issues, Morgan said that depressed demand from a still-recovering construction industry has taken its toll on U.S. lumber producers, and increased efficiencies over the years could play a role in low employment numbers.

Still, he said timber supply is the biggest factor in the industry’s decline in Montana, where most of the available timber supply lies on national forest land.

“There’s a future for the industry. It’s not like the past, and I don’t think we’re likely at all to get back to what we saw in terms of the late ’80s,” he said. “The employment has fallen proportionately to the harvest level, and we’ve seen a decline in capacity that has basically fallen with the harvest level.”

Like Weber, he said he believes solving the supply problem will require an overhaul of the Forest Service budget for wildfire suppression. That would also free up more funding for fuels reduction and addressing beetle infestations.

“I think fires have played a role, and every summer people in Montana become a little more aware of the fire issues,” he said. “I think there’s a level of awareness today that’s better than it was ... Perhaps there’s an opportunity that they’ll start to bear fruit in terms of producing real change in forest management.”

Reporter Sam Wilson can be reached at 758-4407 or by email at swilson@dailyinterlake.com.