Denise Reinhart
March 29, 1996I was born and raised in Prineville. My father, Bill Denison, worked at Hudspeths sawmill while I was growing up. Dad was born and raised in Pomeroy, Washington and served in the U.S. Army. He was a Master Sergeant in England during World War II. He and my mother met in Yorkshire County in a town called Hull.
Mom was 25 when she and Dad married. She was a bus conductress during the War. In England unmarried women had to be in some kind of service during the War. Her job was to run the troop buses and the local buses in her town out to all the different barracks around the town. That's how she met my Dad.
They were married in 1945. Mom came over on a boat with a boatload of war brides into Ellis Island at New York Harbor. After meeting up with Dad when he got out of the service they went to Wallowa County where my grandfather owned a ranch. Dad and his brother ran the ranch for five years. I don't think Mom ever forgave Dad for taking her from a large city--a quarter of a million people--to the small town of Wallowa, Oregon.
They moved to Prineville in 1952 after Dad was recalled during the Korean conflict. He didn't actually serve in Korea. They lived in California for a while and ended up in Prineville after talking to another soldier and it sounded like a good place to live.
Mom never did become an American citizen. Twice she got ready to take her citizenship test but she felt so strongly about her English roots that she couldn't do it. She was very proud to be in America and proud of all the opportunities that had been given her here. She had a very successful business as an upholsterer but she just could not give up her 'Englishness.' She and Dad owned our home and a number of rental properties and did very well.
Our home was on Beaver Street across from the former Prineville Funeral Home and now the site of the Prineville Bank. The house at one time had been quite a showplace when the Elkins family lived there and then the Hagedorns. It had been a rooming house for a number of years and had fallen into disrepair. Mom and Dad put a tremendous amount of work into that house and made it into a beautiful home once again.
I graduated from Crook County High School in 1971 with a scholarship to Central Oregon Community College. I attended Central Oregon Community College two years majoring in French and Journalism. After the two years at COCC I went to work for a real estate developer who was developing the Riverside Ranch near Post.
My mother encouraged me to contact Shirley Coonse who worked at the Forest Service in the Resource Section. I had taken my civil service exam which you still had to do at that time. I went to the office every single day and asked if there was a job available. One day Shirley phoned to say she had a position open. I started work the next Monday in February of 1974. I worked in the Resource Section until Shirley retired at which time I moved into her position. I've been with Ochoco National Forest 22 years.
In the Resource Section we worked on timber sales, grazing permits and special use permits. We worked with engineers and foresters and with people in all the different disciplines in the natural resources side of our work.
I started as a scale clerk. I got to go out into the mills every day. At that time all logs delivered to the mills were scaled by Forest Service scalers. That's where I met my husband, Ken. He was hired to supervise the scalers in the mills. He came from the Paisley Ranger District on the Fremont National Forest.
Working in the Resource Section for so many years I had the opportunity to work my way up through the different positions in the department until I was in timber sales. When I first attended timber auctions, I was the board girl. It was my job to write the bids on a chalk board. The bidders would have brought in their sealed bids prior to the auction on bid forms we had mailed out. There was a lot of visiting and joking prior to the auction but as soon as Shirley Coonse announced that the time for receiving sealed bids was passed, everything was all business and no one even looked at anyone else.
The principal bidders at that time were Hudspeth Pine, Ochoco Lumber Company, Pine Products Corporation, and Timber Investors which was Consolidated Pine. Each mill was represented by one person and oftentimes two.
It took anywhere from a year to two years to plan a timber sale. The ranger district would determine where the sale area would be. The timber was marked and cruised to determine the volume. At that time most of our sales were anywhere from eight million feet on up. We usually had a fairly good idea in the early planning stage as to how many board feet it would be.
An appraisal was done at the ranger district where the sale was located. The timber was valued based on tables giving the diameter and the grade of the timber. There would be a slash disposal plan that would determine how much work the purchaser was going to do as far as disposing of the slash. Some of the brush disposal work was done by the purchaser and some was done by Forest Service crews. It might be machine piled or, if it was along a road or in a visual area, it would be hand piled. We collected deposits for this work in addition to the stumpage cost.
The Forest Service engineers would determine if there was to be road construction or reconstruction or if some temporary roads had to be built. The engineers worked in concert with the foresters who were laying out the timber sale. The district would then send us an appraisal packet and a draft of the sale contract. It was our responsibility to review the appraisal, making sure it met all of the legal requirements for the costs that had been done and then compare it to the timber sale contract. From there we would go through and pull all the specifications for the roads and then prepare the final contract. All of that would be in place and ready at the time the sale was advertised.
At the same time the advertisement was published in the newspaper, bid packages were sent to each of the mills. Bid packets included bid forms, a prospectus with specific information about the sale, and a map.
The prospective bidders bring in their bid envelope with the bids filled out on a form provided in the packet. Their bid form has to include the minimum bid filled in on the appropriate blanks. This has not changed over time. They will have a cashier's check, certified check, money order or cash, or a bank draft in the amount of the bid guarantee which is 10 percent of the value of the sale rounded up to the next $100. Or they can be bonded by an insurance company. This is called a 'bid bond.' The highest bidder will have his check retained. All other checks will be returned to the unsuccessful bidders.
We open the bids at 10:00 A.M. We announce to the purchasers what the order will be so they know which sales will be opened, in what order. After all the bids have been posted the sale is open for oral auction bidding. Each time a bid is raised, we erase the former bid and put up the new bid and keep that process going. We also keep a written bid record which is a very important record. We've had more than one court case where we've had to go back and refer to the bid record.
The faces of the purchasers have really changed over time. There is no Hudspeth Pine-Hudspeth Sawmill, no Pine Products, and no Consolidated Pine. We often see former purchasers coming in to the auction, not to bid, but to see who will buy the sale. Anyone can come and watch the auction. Among our purchasers right now are Ochoco Lumber, Crown Pacific, Bugaboo Timber Company from up on the Santiam, B&S Logging.
At present, we are not able to sell those huge ponderosa pine trees with a 25 or 30 inch diameter that for so many years fueled the mills here in Prineville. Under our current regulations and guidelines we're not allowed to harvest anything over 21 inches in diameter unless it's a hazard tree along a road or a safety hazard to the loggers that might be in the area.
The process now is so cumbersome. First, we have to do an environmental assessment before we even decide to offer a timber sale and this is a very long process. It is at least a year-long process. In an ideal situation the environmental assessment is completed and then you choose your alternative and go out and lay out the timber sale. But sometimes those two things are happening almost concurrently because of time lines and trying to push these sales out the door. We don't have the luxury of the time we used to have.
In earlier years, the environmental assessment document might sit on a shelf for two years while the sale was being marked and cruised and laid out. But now the environmental assessment might come in a month before the appraisal. There is a lot of input into the environmental assessment. It's not just foresters doing that assessment any more. It's a lot of specialists giving specific input. And we now have to give the public a chance to comment.
To do this, we publish notices saying we are in the process of looking at a project in a certain area, and people are invited to make comments. So the public has a big voice in our decisions. We encourage the local community to comment so there are not just comments from groups in Eugene and Portland.
For years there was a reluctance on the part of industry and individuals to comment on those projects. The only input we got was from the environmentalist groups. But that has changed. Some local folks have gotten tuned in to what the process is and are very astute and responsive.
In 1976 we advertised the first helicopter sale on the forest. It was the Lemon Creek Timber Sale on the Prineville Ranger District and it was very controversial. A number of our purchasers maintained that when the area was logged in the 1940's or '50's helicopters were not used. The decision to use a helicopter was made because of the steepness and the potential for erosion.
Evergreen Helicopters, a logging outfit from McMinnville, purchased the sale. Helicopter logging was a big deal around Prineville and a lot of people wanted to go up and watch the operation. We had to arrange tours from a safety standpoint to make sure that the helicopter was operating safely and that people wouldn't drive down to the landing where the loads were being dropped. Some of the logs were brought into Prineville and some went to Brooks-Scanlon in Bend and Redmond. It was a very painful time because the company was a non-traditional purchaser.
The first 'outsider' to take a sale on our forest was Louisiana-Pacific. They were newcomers to the area. In 1974 Louisiana-Pacific purchased the Muslim Mill which is now Crown Pacific. In August of the same year they purchased the North Howard Timber Sale on the Big Summit Ranger District. It was a very hotly contested sale. You could feel the tension in the room as they were bidding against the local bidders who, traditionally, had bought sales on this forest.
Again, in 1977, the room was filled with tension when for the first time Brooks-Scanlon, with a mill in Bend and a plywood plant in Redmond, bid a sale on this forest. Previously, no one outside the traditional group had deemed to actually buy a sale. When those two outside companies--Louisiana Pacific in 1974 and Brooks Scanlon in 1977--bought timber the bids were raised only five cents per thousand board feet each time. It was almost like a battle of wills. You could really sense the tension. It was a remarkable time.
Those auctions dragged on for a long time. The policy is to allow a minute of silence before the bidding is closed. They'd go right down to the last two or three seconds before a bid was raised. The tension was thick in the room. I believe at times there was emotional bidding by local purchasers who were determined that logs would not leave Prineville.
Sometimes a bidder would bid just so high and then ask for a recess to allow him to make a call to his mill before placing another bid. Over time there was concern about bidders leaving the room. There were cases of collusive bidding on other forests, so we were instructed not to allow more than one purchaser to leave at a time.
I never saw any evidence of collusive bidding. We used to do bid monitoring reports every year. We would plot out where the timber sales were and whether a certain mill bought sales in the same area. It made sense to buy timber adjacent to an area you already have and not have to move all of your equipment out to another area. I believe there was a general feeling of sticking together sometimes, trying to keep an outsider out, but I never did see it discussed.
In a lot of ways the 1970's and early 80's were the end of an era and it was a very painful way for it to end for a lot of our traditional purchasers who had been on the forest.
There was a period of time when the price of timber really skyrocketed and it was a gamble. Purchasers were betting that the price of lumber would continue to rise; that the contract was long enough that they would be able to play the market and remove the timber when things were good. But there was a downturn in the market that lasted long enough that their ability to play the market was lost.
A few of our purchasers defaulted on sales but there were no major defaults. They let the contract terminate without removing the timber. Or the Forest Service, recognizing that there would be a default, might go through a timber buyback where we actually took back some sales. We took those sales back and then re-offered them virtually with no change other than reappraising. Some of these sales went back to the original purchaser at the same or higher prices than our buyback price.
I developed a tremendous respect for people who earned their living as ranchers, farmers, loggers and millworkers. They have a tremendous work ethic and a real pride in what they do. That is a humbling thing for me.