County cautious about timber sale futures as market conditions remain poor

The good news is that Taylor County had bids above the minimum for all three of its timber sales. The bad news is that the overall number of bidders is declining, as are the prices being paid for the harvested timber.

According to forest administrator Jake Walcisak the county had four bids on three sales. “Only one qualifying bid is all you need,” he said. The county had 242 acres of timber out on bid with Wilson Forestry of Athens as the highest bidder on all three projects.

Assistant forest administrator Jordan Lutz said that Wilson has done a nice job on other sales the company has completed in the forest. He said they operate a fairly big crew.

Committee member Gene Knoll expressed concern about there only being one firm bidding on all the projects.

Lutz said many of the loggers are being skeptical about market conditions and how much they want to put out. “If Rapids doesn’t open this will be normal,” Walcisak warned noting the closure of the paper mill in Wisconsin Rapids has had a continued statewide impact on timber prices.

Walcisak noted that for this sale period, the county is projected to receive about $600 per acre in revenue. The fiveyear average is $990 per acre and over the past 20 years there have been variations of between $750 and $1,200 per acre.

He said one factor is that they are seeing older contracts with higher values being replaced with ones of lower value sales. He said this is a warning for the future that the large revenues of previous years are not sustainable over time.

Committee members approved granting the contracts to Wilson Forestry for the three projects. The total bid value is $145,015.

In another sign of the times, the county approved four extensions for previous timber sales.

Three of the sales are asking for one year extensions while another is asking for a two-year extension. In some cases, the sales are near completion, but require frozen ground to access and the weather has not been cooperative. Others are looking at market conditions and hoping that prices rebound. The extension will put all the sales at four years since they were bid out.

Lutz said he did not have any concerns and that the requests from the loggers were appropriate. “We are in a climate where we may need to go over four years,” he said.

In other business, committee members:

_ Approved putting a red and white pine planting project out for bid. The county is reforesting a 43-acre section with 26,000 red pine saplings and 11,000 white pine saplings. The work is to be done between April 15 and May 15.

Walcisak noted that there are two major vendors that do this type of work typi- cally utilizing migrant crews who begin in Florida in early spring and work their way north ending in Canada. He said the planting is done by hand and projected that a crew would be able to complete the county’s project in one to two days. “The general rate is 4,000 trees per day,” he said.

He explained that hand planting remains the most efficient method especially on uncleared terrain such as this one which has been harvested in the past.

_ Received an update on ongoing efforts between public and private entities to potentially reopen the Wisconsin Rapids paper mill that has been closed for over a year. There have been multiple versions of bills to provide incentives to reopen the mill, but they have so far all failed for a variety of reasons.