The original Corvallis Forest Stewardship Plan (CFSP, 2006) was conceived and developed over two years. It involved an Advisory Commission with broad expertise of individuals appointed by the Mayor, several public presentations soliciting public comment with Q&A sessions, and importantly a peer review panel to evaluate the scientific merit of the work and to assess its suitability,
The CFSP was revised in 2013, and again included a public presentation with comment, question and answer period before its recommendation to the Council.
Corvallis Public Works implements logging and all other forest management activities under this plan, and does not involve City Council with operational activities. Those are carried out by its contracted consultant, Trout Mountain Forestry, which also helps write the management plan that pays their salaries.
Public uproar over more city logging planned along the Corvallis-to-the-Sea trail on Old Peak Road in 2022 precipitated a Council-directed halt to any commercial logging until a new Forest Plan is adopted.
Public Works has now convened its own advisory body, the Corvallis Forest Operational Advisory Committee. 5 of its 7 members are directly associated with Forestry research and industrial fiber production. For more than 3 years it was separately tasked to revise policy standards and guidelines, while staff and consultant have written the overarching Mission, Goals, and Guiding Principles, and coalesced those into a 200+ page draft forest plan. The City Council has not been involved.
Meeting as a Task Force that advisory body will meet one final time on January 20th 2026, to review any of staff revisions suggested to them, and are expected to vote to recommend the revised plan on that date, after which their Task Force assignment and will be disbanded.
Neither public presentation or peer review is planned.
Instead, only a 30 day comment period will follow, after which staff plans two weeks to incorporate whatever it chooses into a finalized plan. Public Works will present that at a closed Council work session, and immediately follow with a formal presentation to City Council for adoption.
That Operational Advisory Committee will then return to meeting, but only at the pleasure of Public Works. During these three years, it has met only 4 times, even while current plan implementation has involved riparian hardwood conversions, pre-commercial thinnings, forest-wide application of chemicals, pipeline replacement crossing fish- and lamprey- bearing streams, plans to stage in a federal Prairie Conservation Area, plus recently the mis-timed mowing of a known state-endangered larkspur population. No meeting means there can be no public involvement or discourse.
The City is now allowing Public Works free reign over its critical drinking water supply watershed, from rock mining and additional road building, even to the application of fluorine-based herbicides in its drinking water catchment basin, all without operational level feedback from the public. Is not Corvallis obliged to provide for the health and safety of its residents?