By Matt Spaw
WNPA Olympia News Bureau
OLYMPIA — Hilary Franz became the state’s new commissioner of Public Lands last month after earning that title in the November election.
The management of much of the state’s natural resources rests with her department.
Washington is one of only four states that elect public lands commissioners. The others are Arkansas, New Mexico and South Dakota. In many states, this position is called director of Natural Resources. Wyoming is the only state without this position.
“This is one of the least known positions in Washington State, but I believe it’s one of the most important due to the amount of land we manage and regulate,” Franz said,
As commissioner, Franz administers the state Department of Natural Resources and its 1,500 employees, directs the management of 5.6 million acres of state-owned lands, and directs resource protection on millions of acres of state and private forest lands.
She also leads the state’s Board of Natural Resources, which has final say on state trust-land timber sales, and on sales, exchanges or purchases of trust lands. It also establishes the sustainable harvest level for forested trust lands.
The board Tuesday is set to consider a compromise that aims to safeguard trail systems at the popular Wallace Falls State Park, while providing timber revenue to local governments. Disagreement over the proposed Singletary sale on state woodland northeast of Gold Bar has been ongoing for almost a decade.
The commissioner also leads the Forest Practices Board, which sets standards for practices on state and private timberlands, including timber harvests, pre-commercial thinning, road construction and forest chemical applications.
The decisions of the commissioner heavily affect rural communities and the surrounding environment. Franz is aware of this duality.
“I will focus on improving the health of our environment and how that pertains to our public, agricultural, forest, aquatic lands,” Franz said. “Equally important is strengthening rural economic health. Many communities near DNR lands have economies dependent on our natural resources.”
The 5.6 million acres of DNR-managed state-owned land includes forestlands, agricultural leased lands, commercial lands, and aquatic lands, such as navigable lakes and streams, as well as the underwater earth of the coast and Puget Sound. DNR and the Board of Natural Resources award leases and timber harvest rights on state-owned lands to generate revenue for an array of public benefits, such as K-12 school construction, universities, state Capitol buildings and certain forested counties.
Those looking for an answer to the McCleary question on school funding should look somewhere other than DNR managed lands, Franz said. Trust land revenue, she noted, doesn’t go toward the operating budgets of schools, the budget the McCleary decision is concerned with. Instead, it goes to the capital budget for school construction.
Franz said DNR also regulates and provides wildfire protection on over 8 million acres of private and state-owned land.
One of the greatest challenges and duties facing the DNR, according to Franz, is preventing and fighting forest fires. The new commissioner said 2.7 million acres of private and state-owned forestlands are in poor health, which makes that land even more susceptible to burning. Her department has the largest on-call fire department in the state, with 1,300 people trained to respond to wildfires.
Franz, who ran as a Democrat in the November election against Steve McLaughlin, received strong support from environmentalists. She is the former executive director of Futurewise, a nonprofit that supports the state’s Growth Management Act, adopted by the Legislature in 1990. The organization had an important role in the Whatcom County v. Hirst suit, where the court found that it is the job of counties, not the Department of Ecology, to determine water availability. That suit was filed when she was executive director at Futurewise.
The department she now leads has little responsibility for overseeing water resources, she says.
Franz won 53 percent of the vote in the November election while losing in all eastern Washington counties, in some cases getting less than half the votes that McLaughlin tallied there.
The new commissioner has ideas about how to diversify land use, such as encouraging DNR land be leased for wind and solar power.
Franz is a third-generation cattle farmer and owns land in Pierce County. In a recent state Senate Natural Resources and Parks committee meeting, she noted that her family owned “some of the last Ponderosa pine west of the Cascades.”
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