Forest landowners have long provided Maine with abundant wildlife habitat, outstanding recreational opportunities and the raw materials for the state’s largest manufacturing industry – the forest products industry. Maine’s private landowners – who own 96 percent of the state’s forestland – have been and remain at the forefront of efforts to ensure that a healthy, productive forest continues to be one of Maine’s defining traits.

Maine is fortunate to have individuals and companies that strive to balance the economic and environmental benefits that forests provide. Many private landowners buy and hold land for long periods of time. This isn’t surprising – trees take decades to mature, and landowners often have the patience to sit back and watch the forest grow.

Sadly, it’s getting harder and harder to have this patience. Forest landowners face annual expenses to own the land (often due long before they see any financial return from forestry activities), uncertainty that strong markets for forest products will remain, aggravation from a small handful of irresponsible recreational users, and an unstable regulatory and policy climate. It’s easy to see why many opt to sell their land when balancing these issues against the growing financial opportunity to sell land for its development value as the next subdivision. Some have called this “liquidation harvesting.”

The issue of “liquidation harvesting” has gained attention recently. The Legislature defines it as the purchase, harvest without regard to the future forest value and the sale or attempted sale of a piece of land in a five-year period. While the overwhelming majority of harvests statewide are not liquidation harvests, it is clear that some do occur.

In an effort to address this issue, some have suggested punitive taxes to keep people from buying and selling forestland in short order. This won’t work. Firms engaged in liquidation harvesting are quite knowledgeable of the laws they operate under. These firms will simply pay less for land, factoring the cost of the tax into the purchase price This means less money to the seller. Instead of discouraging liquidation harvests, a punitive tax would do little but rob long-term landowners of the value they have gained in their land through patient management.

But more importantly, those who propose a punitive tax on liquidation harvesting are missing the real issue – it is becoming increasingly difficult to own and manage forestland for the long-term. Instead of punishing landowners, we need to look for way to support long-term forestland ownership.

A recent report prepared for the Maine Forest Products Council, “Promoting Long-Term Forest Management,” looks at the challenges faced by Maine’s forestry community and offers ways to ensure that landowners who want to manage land for the long-term can do so. Ideas include using participation in existing “cost share” programs to ensure future forestry activity; low interest loans to help landowners purchase land and commit to making certain that the land remains a forest; and encouraging “term easements” – allowing a seller of land to ensure that the land will remain forested while not losing money on the investment they have made in their land. These and other ideas are designed to assure that private landowners are supported as they seek to provide the many public benefits that forests provide.

The Legislature passed a law this session that creates a commission to look at ways to outlaw liquidation harvesting. I would urge them to be very careful with their analysis because, frankly, some have exaggerated the issue. Most people don’t know what it is, or if there is a problem. Yet some groups are claiming that liquidation harvesting is destroying our timberland. The Maine Forest Service inventory shows that our standing timber in Maine is rapidly increasing. In fact, the most recent MFS inventory, taken in 1999, shows that the volume of wood standing in Maine’s forests has increased by 37 percent since 1959 and 9 percent since 1995. This same report shows that the total area of timberland in Maine has increased by 500,000 acres since 1995.

The Maine woods industry is now under tremendous pressure at all levels – from the mills to the loggers and landowners caused by the strong U.S. dollar and foreign competition. I’m sure we are all sensitive to the recent the shutdowns and mill closures. Put simply, Maine can’t afford costly and needless regulations that fail to address a real issue and that could also potentially hurt those long-term forest landowners that we should be rewarding.

Jim Robbins is president of Robbins Lumber Inc. in Searsmont.