PLUM CREEK DROPS TWO PARCELS FROM LAND EXCHANGE

Thursday, November 4, 1999

By ERIK ROBINSON, Columbian staff writer

After months of increasingly intense opposition, Plum Creek Timber Co. agreed with the U.S. Forest
Service on Wednesday to drop a pair of controversial parcels from an exchange of public and private forest
land in Southwest Washington.

The deal was announced by Seattle-based Plum Creek, the environmental groups that had opposed it, U.S.
senators Slade Gorton and Patty Murray and state Rep. Brian Baird. The deal came after discussions during
the past week between Plum Creek and environmental groups that had been sued by the company last
month. The company filed suit to pre-empt a legal challenge to the land exchange that environmental
groups were expected to file.

"We found very early in the discussions that we had a lot of common ground and common objectives," said
Bob Jirsa, Plum Creek's director of government and environmental affairs.In return for giving up 31,000
acres in a checkerboard pattern along Interstate 90 east of Seattle, the company will get 10,400 acres of
federal land in the Gifford Pinchot, Mount Baker-Snoqualmie and Wenatchee national forests reducing the
total acres in the trade by a little less than a third.

The trade helps to consolidate a checkerboard pattern of land ownership dating back to the 19th century,
when the federal government granted Northern Pacific Railroad large chunks of timber land to spur the
construction of a transcontinental railroad. Plum Creek is the corporate descendant of Northern Pacific.

The most highly publicized portion of the trade, a 2,100-acre parcel called Watch Mountain near Randle,
has been dropped completely and will remain in public ownership. Residents of the logging town had
supported environmentalists who established a tree-sit on the steep parcel. Residents feared Plum Creek
would clear-cut in a way that would cause landslides, harm the town's water supply and set back the area's
already painful economic conversion from logging to tourism.

But the trade had received the support of some environmental groups, most notably the Seattle chapter of
the Sierra Club. With the club's support, the trade had been signed into law by President Clinton last year.
It was delayed earlier this year by the discovery of threatened marbled murrelets on a 1,300-acre parcel of
public land north of Mount Rainier.

Opponents, including Baird, D-Vancouver, had hoped to use the opportunity to squelch the deal altogether
or at least pare away sensitive parcels in the Gifford Pinchot. Even with the marbled murrelet portions
pulled out, Plum Creek would have given up 46,000 acres in return for 14,800 acres of public land.
Gorton, a Republican, and Murray, a Democrat, supported an amendment that removed marbled murrelet
parcels but left the Gifford Pinchot lands in the trade, causing a furor in Randle and among environmental
groups who accused Murray of ignoring their concerns. The amendment, however, went down with the rest
of a $14 billion appropriations bill that Clinton vetoed last month.

As chairman of the Senate Interior Appropriations Subcommittee, Gorton will include the latest agreement
in a new appropriations bill that is expected to be sent to the president this week. "That's a tremendous
victory for the local people in east Lewis County," Baird said Wednesday.

This latest development seems to have reasonably satisfied all sides. "Everyone's kind of reserved about
this, and everyone had to swallow a little bit to do this," said Peter Nelson, campaign coordinator for the
Pacific Crest Biodiversity Project.

AT A GLANCE .
Plum Creek Timber Co. gets: 10,400 acres of public land in the Mount Baker-Snoqualmie, Wenatchee and
Gifford Pinchot national forests valued at $49.3 million.

The public gets: 31,000 of Plum Creek lands along the Interstate 90 corridor east of Seattle valued at $53.6
million.

Source: Office of U.S. Sen. Slade Gorton, R-Wash.