September 20, 2000
FROG
Friends of the Garcia River
P.O. Box 916
Point Arena, Ca.
95468
Tel. 707-882-3086
pdobbins@mcn.org
Mr. Henry E. Gundling Sr.
Mendocino Forest Council
50 1 Low Gap Rd. Ukiah, CA 95466
Re: Mendocino Redwood Company
Dear Sir,
I am writing you to explain our current view of the Mendocino Redwood Company. MRC is the second largest landowner in the Garcia Watershed. MRC bought a strongly cutover holding from Louisiana Pacific, Corp.
Our relationship with MRC has been very good, in fact for a timber company- it is unprecedented. This is the kind of relationship that is striven for in the consensus building efforts but is rarely seen.
They have been responsive to our request to keep joy-riders in 4x4s from accessing the river from MRC property and are presently partnering with us in a grant request to create what we both believe to be a long term infrastructural solution to that problem.
They have been forthcoming with us in the sharing of monitoring data and access to their lands fur the purpose of monitoring, unlike virtually all the other timberland owners in the Garcia. They have partnered with Trout Unlimited to do major state-of-the-art road and habitat restoration in a critical sub watershed for the coho and steelhead. Water Quality personnel have spoken to us in the highest of terms of their roadwork in other sites as well.
In the few Garcia THPs they have filed so far, they have honored the TMDL rules and stayed out of the welpez areas. We very much appreciate all these efforts that they have made and that separate them entirely from the other timber corporations on the Garcia. At the same time, we are concerned about MRC's management plan target of less than 2% late seral stage (by their definition only 6-16 trees). We feel that this is an inadequate level of late seral and that it should be reflected over all their timber holdings. We understand that MRC is negotiating with The National Marine Fisheries Service and U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service over the details of a Habitat Conservation Plan, which we hope will move forward as it may resolve outstanding problems such as habitat considerations.
For Friends of the Garcia River,
Peter Y. Dobbins
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