Rod S. Thompson, Star-Bulletin
Gene Kawai, left, and inventory crew leader Jim Thain
measure the girth of a tree, part of an inventory of how much
lumber is potentially available from a Hamakua Coast forest.
Budget cuts trim
timber industry plans
The state's efforts
By Rod Thompson
to create a new forest industry
are threatened
Star-BulletinHILO -- Raised on a ranch, Roaxanne Mauga likes the outdoor work involved in estimating the amount of commercial timber available in state forests.
But Mauga and a co-worker will be laid off from the state's forest inventory team this week, victims of legislative cuts which also leave in doubt the success of the state's efforts to create a new forest industry.
"It was a bombshell when it hit us, so we're in damage-control mode," said team supervisor Mike Constantinides after the Legislature declined to fund any of the team's $300,000 request.
They expected to get at least part of the money, Constantinides said.
Without the state money, an additional $300,000 in federal matching funds is in jeopardy, although program personnel are looking for other ways to match the money.
That includes hiring the remaining five members in the crew out to private land owners who want to know how much timber they have, said Mike Robinson, coordinator of the Hawaii Forest and Communities Initiative, which created the inventory team.
The initiative combines the resources of five state and three federal agencies to foster 16 programs, including the inventory.
The purpose of the initiative is to create a forest industry that is "sustainable" -- making a continuing contribution to the state's economy.
It also created workers with skills, like Mauga, who was unemployed and knew nothing about forestry before joining the team.
Married with four children, Mauga, 35, spent a typical work day getting up at 4 a.m., jogging with her son, working until 3:30 p.m., paddling a canoe in the afternoon, then taking a University of Hawaii dendrology class in the evening, said inventory crew leader Jim Thain.
The work, consisting of estimating and recording the size of all trees in sample plots of land, could be dangerous, Thain said.
"We've been in some places that were really treacherous," he said.
That includes the time they climbed into a 200-foot-deep gulch without ropes, he said.
"Timber cruising," as the process is known in forestry jargon, is standard throughout the country, Robinson said. Hawaii is one of the last places in the nation to put it into practice, he said.
By not knowing how much lumber can be cut from a forest, the landowner -- including the state, which owns large tracts of non-native timber -- is at the mercy of the loggers, Robinson said.
"You don't want a logger telling you what your timber is worth," he said.
Starting last year, the inventory identified 100 million board-feet of timber in the Hilo and Hamakua areas.
The crew estimated that five years would be needed to inventory all the forest on public and private land in Hawaii.
Timber firm gets more land
Star-BulletinHILO -- Prudential Timber Investments Inc., already in the midst of creating a 15,500-acre eucalyptus plantation on Bishop Estate land on the Big Island's Hamakua Coast, will soon expand to another 5,000 acres of Bishop land in the Kau district.
The announcement was made this week by Forest Solutions Inc., which manages the Hamakua plantation for PruTimber and will manage the Kau plantation.
Work on clearing old sugar cane from the Kau land will begin in a few weeks, said Guy Cellier, president of Forest Solutions.
Besides the new Kau plantings, his company also will manage 3,000 acres of native forest on Bishop land, Cellier said.
PruTimber will invest $5 million in Kau in each of the next two years and create 30 to 40 jobs, he said.
The company is investing $29 million in Hamakua and has created 100 jobs there, Cellier said.
