July 2019 Bar Bulletin
By Peter Goldman
A Long-Simmering and Environmentally Significant State Constitutional Issue
The U.S. Constitution may be getting most of the attention these days, but did you know that a controversial provision in the Washington State Constitution, article XVI, section 1, controls how the Department of Natural Resources (DNR) and its policy-setting board, the Board of Natural Resources (“Board”), plans and conducts logging on 2 million acres of state-owned forests?
In fact, did you even know that the State is the largest, non-federal forest landowner in Washington? Logging has yielded a rough average of 400 million board feet of lumber annually — about 20,000 log trucks.1
Article...