Chances are, the officials who write regulations for the various industries in our state don’t intend to drive businesses out of California. Surely, they would rather we grow here, adding jobs and strengthening an economy that’s far too fragile. They can’t possibly want to see us grow our business somewhere else.
An increasingly unfriendly regulatory environment is exactly what has caused my business, the Soper-Wheeler Company, to make the painful decision to find a new location for our company’s growth.
Rather than invest in more forestland in California, we are putting our money and our seedlings in a place where the government welcomes responsible forest management practices and offers a reasonable regulatory environment. Where is this place? New Zealand.
Though we’re committed to our California lands and love living and working here, the unfriendly business climate is making it impossible for us to continue expanding here.
Certainly, this isn’t how the Soper family of Chicago and the Wheeler family of Pennsylvania envisioned things when they joined together to purchase forestland in Northern California nearly 100 years ago. Like many others, they viewed California as a great place for the future.
So they forged the Soper-Wheeler Company, a forest management organization built on sustainable forest management practices—practices that not only help our company make a good return on its investments but also help the environment.
Over the last 50 years, we’ve invested a substantial portion of each year’s income into buying additional forestland and implementing forestry practices that have left the lands in excellent shape.
Today, we operate in the counties of Butte, Humboldt, Mendocino, Nevada, Plumas, Santa Cruz, Sierra, Sonoma and Yuba, managing 103,000 acres. We harvest enough wood to build 2,250 homes per year. By 2010, Soper-Wheeler will produce enough wood for 5,000 homes per year. Every year, we grow more trees than we harvest.
The growth we’ve enjoyed over this last century could have continued here in California. But from an investment standpoint, staying put wouldn’t make sense.
The fact is, the soaring cost of regulation does little, if anything, to improve forest management for a company that has always practiced sustainable forest management. The voluminous paperwork, the extensive delays, the unreasonable mitigations, the bureaucratic maneuvering between agenciesÑall impose excessive costs in money and manpower.
And as these regulations drive costs up, it becomes tougher and tougher to earn a reasonable return on an investment, particularly when we must compete against wood imports from less-regulated states and from countries with no regulations at all.
The regulatory environment, along with relentless efforts to prevent any tree harvesting on public forestland, has driven nearly all of the 70 mills in our area out of business. For many of the mills, there were simply no trees to buy. Without those mills, the price we get for our wood drops, putting increased pressure on our operations.
In addition, every company with land near unhealthy, overgrown government forestland runs the risk of losing its land to a wildfire. These overgrown lands threaten our investment every summer.
In New Zealand, though, we found optimum growing conditions for redwood and Douglas firÑand a government that appreciates responsible forest management.
New Zealand requires strict adherence to a Resource Management Act that puts local Regional Councils in charge of maintaining the environment. Landowners who want to invest in forestry must submit a plan that details what they intend to do with the property, including planting, road building, stream crossings and eventual harvesting. These plans are far less complicated than the harvest permit process California requires and are usually approved in just a few days.
In New Zealand, forestry and environmental protection work hand-in-hand. The results can be found in the spectacular scenery, clean air and clear streams.
Despite New Zealand’s beauty, though, we would rather be here, making the kind of investment that leads to more jobs from healthy, privately managed forests, and more California-grown wood for consumers.
But until our state and federal governments begin to correct policies that have created spiraling costs, poor forest management of public lands and increased reliance on less-regulated imported wood, we’re left with no choice.
We look forward to—and hope for—a time when we might be able to invest again in our state.
H. James Holmes, president of Soper-Wheeler Company in Yuba County, has been working for Soper-Wheeler since 1992; his father started working for the company in 1944.
