By PAULA TRACY, InDepthNH.org

PITTSBURG – A carbon credit company that owns the tip of the state has increased its plans for logging the 146,872-acre Connecticut Lakes Headwaters tract for the next 10 years, but an advisory committee who claim that is still lower than previous cuts wants more time to consider the document and its potential impacts to the economy.

At the Pittsburg Fire Station Wednesday at 1 p.m., members of the Connecticut Lakes Headwaters Citizens Advisory Committee met and were given a briefing of the plan by officials for Aurora Sustainable Lands LLC, which instead of cutting between 10,000 and 20,000 cords each year, is looking to increase it to 20,000 to 30,000 under its new revised draft.

The body is an advisory committee on land use for the massive, wooded tract. 

It advises and recommends actions to the commissioner of the state Department of Natural and Cultural Resources, Sarah Stewart, who attended the meeting remotely.

Initially, Stewart said a comment period on the almost 150-page revised document would be allowed until next Friday.

The committee voted to ask her to extend that time frame until Oct. 4 and she agreed.

Some said the state needs to know far more about what carbon credit farms are and their future impact to the state’s habitat, municipal and county revenue loss, logging jobs and recreation, before any long-term agreement should be signed by the state, which holds an easement requiring a cut plan.

Also, registry data for such carbon capture farms – which allow trees to grow to be used to offset carbon emissions for companies, rather than logging – is now being developed by the state along with an analysis of lost revenue from timber tax. The recent passage into law of House Bill 1697 https://www.gencourt.state.nh.us/bill_status/billinfo.aspx?id=2225&inflect=2 will create that data but is not yet available, and it might be wise to wait for that information before signing the plan, said Executive Councilor Joe Kenney, R-Wakefield.

The company’s previous draft plan, submitted in January, sought to cut 10,000 to 20,000 cords a year, on average. 

It was rejected by the state, which holds a $40 million easement to ensure the land is open for public recreation and logging. They entered negotiations with the Attorney General’s Office which are ongoing with no final 10-year deal. But public and advisory committee input on the revised draft is a necessary second step in the process, said the state forester Patrick Hackley.

The cuts were more like 40,000 cords on the state’s largest private tract, a year before it became enrolled in the California carbon compliance market, tying up some of the standing trees for a long-term as a carbon offset. Looking back historically as the land has been used as an industrial logging tract, there were 120,000 cords extracted a year in 1926, less than 10,000 in the 1930s and then in the 1970s it grew to about 80,000 cords a year and in 2023, 30,000, according to the draft report.

Aurora Sustainable Lands LLC President Blake Stansell said he wanted to “continue to build trust” with the community noting initially when the company acquired it in October, 2022 there was a misconception that they were not going to actively log the property.

The company’s primary goal is to conserve forests for climate impact, actively managing 1.6 million acres nationally to remove and store carbon from the atmosphere. 

Those rumors sent shock waves through this region, whose economy is largely logging and recreation.

Stansell said he thinks the range of cut now proposed in the revised draft is “achievable.” 

He stressed also that public access would continue, noting that U.S. Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, who as governor more than 20 years ago, made sure that would be the case in perpetuity. Shaheen and others including former U.S. Sen. Judd Gregg led an effort to essentially buy the rights to no development on the property through a conservation easement but allowed it to be sold for logging and kept in the private sector.

While most of the land Aurora holds is also formerly industrial logging tracts, this one has hooks in the form of easements that limit and dictate what is allowed.

The newly revised draft in July which calls for an “estimate” of 20,000 to 30,000 cords to be cut a year through 2032 has a bunch of wiggle room for the owner to get out of and is still less than the 40,000 cords averaged on the tract before it became part of the carbon capture landscape and is far less than growth levels, said Charles Levesque.

Levesque is a member of the advisory committee who was one of the original drafters of the easement on the land more than 20 years ago, before carbon capture was another way to make money on timber land.

Some members of the advisory committee said they are concerned that Aurora is not willing to increase OHRV access to the property over the next decade in that plan. It is not, also, looking to cut any access.

Coos County Commissioner Ray Gorman said he thinks the minimum cut should be 30,000 a year and Levesque suggested 25,000 to 35,000 would be easily sustainable for the land.

Gorham also expressed concern for recreational accessibility and the lack of increases offered in OHRV trails.

He also said he believes a lot more education and understanding is needed in the community adding the business owners are confused about what a carbon capture forest is.

“This is public money that bought this,” he said of the tract’s easement, “A lot of money.”

But member Harry Brown said the intent was never to have “a bunch of dirt bikes running all over it” and that the intent was for a mix of recreational and logging uses.

The headwaters tract is in Pittsburg, Clarksville and Stewartstown but most of it is in Pittsburg. Officials for the Town of Pittsburg, whose budget relies heavily on timber tax revenue to pay the bills, came to an agreement with Aurora earlier as a sort of payment in lieu of the tax for the next year because they projected revenues would decline significantly due to reduced cutting expected this year.

A copy of the new, revised draft for operations for the next 10 years that was just released is here https://www.nhstateparks.org/NHStateParks/media/NHStateParks/PDFs/Committees/CT%20Lakes%20Headwaters/REVISIONS-to-Initial-Stewardship-Plan-by-Fee-Holder-for-Distribution-(08-15-24).pdf