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Thorpe rejects timber harvesting

Jim Thorpe Borough Council voted Thursday night to reject a proposal to harvest timber on borough-owned land after residents urged members to protect the forest surrounding the municipality’s reservoirs.

Keystone Timber and Forestry had proposed selling about 1,700 marked trees across a 128-acre tract.

Before the vote, council members said they had spent months gathering information and seeking legal advice about the plan.

Councilman Connor Rodgers said the research coupled with public feedback made the decision clear.

“I kind of feel that it’s pretty one-sided,” he said. “I think the residents and everyone who has made comments tonight have made good comments. I don’t really see anything at this point that would warrant us moving forward with it.”

Rodgers made a motion to deny Keystone’s request and inform the company that Jim Thorpe Borough “is not interested in moving forward with any timber harvesting.” The motion was seconded and approved after the council voted to move the item from old business to the action agenda.

Residents raised a wide range of concerns about the proposal, including environmental damage, road conditions, and flood risks.

Local business owner Brandon Fogel said the plan didn’t make sense financially and could cause more harm than good.

“We’re concerned about it,” he said. “Financially, it doesn’t look like a good deal. It might wind up costing more to remediate than we could actually make on those trees. There could be a lot of damage to the roads and also to the woods themselves in that area.”

Keystone previously told council the disturbed area would be limited to less than 10 acres, confined to skid trails and landings. Access, he said, would come from Route 903 onto Center Street and then Reservoir Road.

Fogel also questioned the claim that tree removal would help prevent wildfires.

“The stuff that burned in the big brush fire we had recently was not the large hardwoods that they’re looking to remove,” he said. “It was the undergrowth. If you removed those large hardwoods, it would just promote the growth of more undergrowth.”

He described the borough property in question as one of the few remaining quiet natural areas used by local residents.

“It’s one of the last kind of places in the town that the locals can go and use,” he said. “I think it’d be a shame if that got trashed just to make a few bucks on the wood.”

Strubinger said the borough had not sought out the proposal but allowed the process to play out to learn more.

“This organization came into the borough and made a proposal,” he said. “The borough wasn’t inquiring or looking to do this. It was being brought forth as an ecological venture that the borough could hypothetically make some money.”

He said council and its solicitor had been “answering some of the legal questions with some of the proposals” and emphasized the need for an informed decision.

‘Shortsighted’

Dan Kunkel, retired executive director of the Lehigh Gap Nature Center and special adviser to the Carbon County Open Space Board, told the borough that logging would be both ecologically damaging and financially shortsighted.

“I just want to make you aware of the ecological dangers of logging this land,” he said. “If you want to restore that land after it’s done, it is going to cost you far more to regrow an oak forest on that land than preserving it the way it is now.”

Kunkel said he had “no vested interest in anything here, except that I care about ecology and the forest,” and urged the borough to consider preservation options that could also generate revenue.

“If you log first, the land will be less valuable for preservation,” he said.

Several residents who live near the reservoir raised questions about flooding and road damage if logging trucks were brought through the area.

Pat Huber, who lives along Center Street, said she was worried about the impact of heavy trucks on recently repaved roads.

“Center Street was just repaved,” she said. “We waited 50 years to get that paved. You have to consider the size of the logging trucks. Pennsylvania’s limit on them is 80,000 pounds.”

Huber also said the project could conflict with the borough’s upcoming dam removal work.

“They said they would stay clear of the dam removal project, but they were just referring to the cutting down of the trees, not the traffic on these roads,” she said. “If they have equipment going out to the reservoir, that’s a concern if the two are going on at the same time.”

She questioned why the borough would remove mature trees when “oak trees take a good 60 years” to grow.

“It just seems like a lot of devastation to our natural forest,” she added.

Other residents asked about the specific sections of land involved and the potential for runoff into the Silk Mill area.

Marianne Monteleone said flooding on Germantown Road had already stranded residents during storms.

“If these trees are timbered, the water runoff into the Silk Mill, in addition to the demolition of the reservoirs, can create an enormous impact in our community,” she said.

Former federal conservation planner Ciro Lo Pinto told council that the borough should seek help from the Department of Conservation and Natural Resources before agreeing to any forestry work.

“Once you have a forest management plan, we as the owners dictate which trees we would like to be cut based on the long-range plan,” he said.

DCNR, he added, would provide such a review “free of charge” and cautioned against allowing commercial operators to dictate the terms.

“If a commercial operation comes in and tells you what they want to cut, it’s for their best interest, not for our best interest,” Lo Pinto said.

Emma Bast, an environmental attorney who lives in Jim Thorpe, also urged the council not to rely solely on state oversight.

“There’s often a tendency for some boards or municipal advisories to sort of say, ‘Oh, DEP will take care of it,’” she said. “That’s not always the case. There’s less protection around things like sedimentation and erosion than you might expect.”

She described the plan as “a practice called high cutting,” which she said “is very much for the benefit of the business.”

After hearing from residents, council’s vote to deny the Keystone Timber proposal drew applause from the audience.

Strubinger noted that no contract had been signed with Keystone and confirmed that there was no penalty to the borough for declining to proceed.