A New Westminster forestry company has been awarded timber-cutting rights for an area in the Theodosia River Valley.
TSL A84892 covers 259 acres of timber, a volume of 94,769 cubic metres of wood. According to a Ministry of Forests, Lands and Natural Resources spokesperson about 23 per cent is old growth forest. The area, while inside Tla’amin (Sliammon) First Nation traditional territory, is not a part of its treaty settlement lands.
Probyn Log Ltd., a company based out of New Westminster, won the BC Timber Sales (BCTS) auction, and will pay close to $600,000 to the provincial government for the wood.
A minimum bid price of $532,524.69 was set for the wood and Probyn won the auction with a final offer of $586,856.57. This price also includes the costs for reforestation.
Despite the total size of the area being 105 hectares, BC Forest Practices Code limits the size of coastal cutblocks to 40 hectares (99 acres). According to the ministry, Coast Forest Region cutblocks average about 16 hectares in size. A number of factors determine the size and distribution of cutblocks, including legislative requirements, high-level harvest plans, forest health, wildfire, visual quality, timber type and market conditions.
The provincial government established BCTS in 2003 to provide cost and price benchmarks for timber harvested from public land. BCTS manages approximately 20 per cent of the provincial Crown allowable annual cut.
BCTS is one of the province’s largest tree planters with more that 458 million seedlings planted since 2003.
