Prince George, B.C.-  It has been four months since the Province released its report from the Working Roundtable on Forestry. The City of Prince George has now formalized its comments on that report and those comments will be included  in the formal response from the Union of B.C. Municipalities.

 

The Roundtable’s vision is that “BC has a vibrant, sustainable, globally competitive forest industry that provides enormous benefits for current and future generations and for strong communities”.

 

Six priorities were identified in order to realize the Roundtable’s vision:

1. A commitment to using wood first;

2. Growing trees, sequestering carbon, and ensuring that land is available from which to derive a range of forest products;

3. Creating a globally competitive, market-based operating climate;

4. Embracing innovation and diversification;

5. Supporting prosperous rural forest economies, and;

6. First Nations becoming full partners in forestry.

 

While the Roundtable identified 29 recommendations for action that are consistent with these six priorities, Prince George has submitted comments on  four of the five recommendations which the UBCM deemed as having specific interests to municipalities

 

Here are the four recommendations and the Prince George response to those recommendations:

 

Recommendation 10 – The provincial government and Union of British Columbia Municipalities should work with industry to ensure municipal tax structures support competitiveness and industrial activity in British Columbia communities:

• The City of Prince George, as other municipalities, aims at a municipal tax structure which supports competitiveness and industrial activity while also addressing the needs of the municipalities’ citizens:

 

• As a municipality we support our role in maintaining a predictive business environment through our policies, practices and zoning.

• Bio‐energy is cited as an example of a sector with emerging significance and Prince George has good examples of this trend. As Prince George is located within a landscape with significant volume of dead biomass (MPB killed forests) we support the development of this sector in ways that reduce our dependency on non‐replaceable fuels while ensuring the growth in this sector does not impact negatively on our air quality. The development of this sector may also have a role in reducing the wildfire hazard around the City of Prince George.

 

• The City of Prince George currently has a 5 year probationary CFA license with an annual cut volume of 12,000 m3/yr. This tenure agreement will be automatically converted to a 25 year license as provided by Bill 13.

• The City of Prince George is currently working with the Ministry of Forests and Range to develop a proposal for an expanded CFA license which would include Crown forested lands outside of the municipal boundary.

• The City of Prince George therefore agrees with this recommendation. Recent analysis of current CFAs indicate that a minimum volume of 60,000 m3 / yr is required for a CFA to have any chance at a sustainable business model and the preference would be to achieve a volume of between 100,000 m3/yr and 250,000 m3/yr. These higher volumes are needed in this area of the Province since a CFA would likely have a significant portion of low quality dead pine volume. The City of Prince George’s interest in an expanded CFA will in part be driven by the long term need to manage the forests around Prince George to reduce the wildfire hazard while also managing for other objectives.

• We would have been interested in the Roundtable examining the merits of utilizing volume from tenures such as BC Timber Sales and Agricultural Development Areas (ADA) in the expansion of Community Forest licenses.