County favors detour over dust control

Recreation will take a detour around industry in the Taylor County Forest.

Forestry committee members on Friday rejected a request from the town of Rib Lake to cost-share dust control for Fawn Ave. and instead said in the future ATV/UTV riders would be asked to seek alternate routes around active logging areas.

The Taylor County Forest is a yearlong recreational hub for residents and visitors to the northeastern part of the county. It is particularly popular with ATV and UTV riders who take advantage of the town and forest logging roads criss-crossing the forest for group ride events which can bring several dozen vehicles at a time with one ride this summer having about 100 vehicles.

The forest is also managed for timber sales which bring in hundreds of thousands of dollars to the county treasury each year while providing local work for local loggers and haulers.

Last summer these two uses butted See COUNTY on page 4 heads on Fawn Ave. in the town of Rib Lake. According to county forest administrator Jake Walcisak, the last two years have been busy ones in that portion of the forest with active summer sales. He estimated that there were about 40 loads a week being hauled on Fawn Ave. for two months this summer, which he noted is actually 80 trips. In addition there was gravel hauled for road improvements and logging equipment.

While a dry spell was good for loggers to get access to the timber sales, it also led to a lot of dust on the roads from the increased traffic.

“The dust was really bad on Fawn this year,” Walcisak said.

While this had minimal overall impact on the three year-round, and three season homeowners along the two mile stretch of road, town board member Doug Polacek said it created at times unsafe situations for ATV/UTV riders who often had to pull off to let the dust settle because of lack of visibility.

Fawn Ave. is a popular town road route for ATV/UTV riders to connect the county forest to the village of Rib Lake.

Polacek’s solution is to spray the road with a load of calcium chloride. This serves as a binding agent on the road and helps reduce the amount of dust. However, it does not come cheap, and Polacek said based on what the town paid for dust control last summer the cost would be about $5,580 for the two mile stretch. He asked if the county would cost share on this.

Committee chairman Scott Mildbrand started the conversation noting that when the county agreed to allow roads to be opened for ATV and UTV use, it was with the condition that there was no cost to the county. He said any agreement to cost share dust control to improve conditions for recreational riders would be a change to that policy that he said he felt should go to the full county board and come out of the overall county budget rather than being a forestry expense.

Polacek said he felt it was a safety concern and was due to the amount of truck traffic on the road this summer.

“Safety is obviously important,” Mildbrand said. He suggested that if the road is deemed unsafe for ATV/UTV traffic, the best way to handle it would be to reroute that traffic to nearby paved roads to avoid having heavy trucks and ATV/ UTVs in the same areas at the same time. In this area, it would require a detour of about a mile to take an alternate route.

As part of the discussion, committee members expressed concern that putting dust control on this section of road could rapidly expand with requests to put dust control on roads throughout the forest.

“I don’t think we would be able to dust control the whole works,” Mildbrand said.

“I don’t know how or where we would stop,” said committee member Jim Gebauer, who is also town chairman of the town of Greenwood. He noted they have similar issues with their town roads leading into the forest.

Polacek noted Fawn Ave. is the main route coming out of the county forest.

Prior to the meeting Walcisak had looked into seeing if the state transportation aids given for trail maintenance could be used for dust control. He said the state does not allow it to be used for that purpose on road routes.

“It is a problem in every town,” said committee member Gary Beadles who along with committee member Myron Brooks serves on the Jump River town board.

Assistant forest administrator Jordan Lutz noted that the sales that caused traffic on Fawn Ave. this summer have been completed and the next logging sale that will impact that area of road is a winter ground sale which takes place when the ground is frozen and dust is not an issue. “I don’t anticipate anything on Fawn Ave. this summer,” Lutz said.

Committee member Rollie Thums said that as much as he wanted to put dust control down and have the county pay for it, he worried about where it would stop. He noted Fawn Ave. is not a Taylor County road, but a town road.

“Where do we stop?” Gebauer said. Mildbrand returned to the solution of closing off that portion of Fawn Ave. to ATV/UTV traffic to alleviate the problem when there is active logging going on.

Walcisak said the county already does a similar thing with snowmobile trails posting signs when there is active logging taking place along trail corridors and asking riders take an alternate route.

“I like that suggestion,” Thums said. He also supported having the county participate with putting dust control down in specific areas in the future if there are safety concerns due to the traffic caused by the county, this is something that would vary year by year depending on where sales are located and weather conditions.

Mildbrand said he still felt the easiest plans would be to put up temporary signs to route ATV/UTV traffic around where logging is taking place. “We wouldn’t be closing it, it would be temporarily rerouting it,” he said. This was compared to the county roads near the industrial park and gravel pits around the city of Medford which are closed to ATV traffic due to the large volume of heavy truck traffic.

Timber sales

Taylor County received a total of eight bids on three timber sales, which while slightly lower than the state average of three bids per sale, was enough to guarantee they all were sold.

“It only takes 1 bid to sell a sale,” Walcisak said.

Sale 6-22 covers 75 acres and had a minimum bid of $39,498.50. Three bids were received with Jason Smola having the high bid of $67,389.25 Wilson Forestry had the second high bid with $47,085 followed by Gumz Logging with a bid of $40,071.10.

Sale 7-22 covers 68 acres and had a minimum bid of $31,972.50. This project received four bids with Jason Smola again the high bidder with a price of $50,713.75. This was followed by Country Forest Products with a bid of $43,426, Wilson Forestry with a bid of $38,385 and Gumz Logging with a bid of $32,439.80.

Sale 8-22 covers 53 acres and had a minimum bid of $12,497. Wilson Forestry was the only bidder on that project with a bid of $16,520.

Walcisak noted that while Smola has worked in the forest with other companies in the past, he is a new bidder this year. “It is good to see a new contractor coming on line,” Walcisak said.

In related action, the committee also approved adopting a revised standard timber sale contract after tweaking the proposed changes.

The changes were proposed in response to issues that occurred with a logging sale last summer involving a contractor hired by Northwest Hardwoods. The language changes in the contract were taken from contracts used at the state level and also in Oneida and Marathon counties and provide additional protections to the county including the ability to terminate the contract for a variety of reasons. Committee members removed two suggested clauses involving allegations being made against the purchaser which had not yet been resolved in the court. Mildbrand said he felt there needed to be support of the idea that people are innocent until proven guilty. “If you are charged with a crime, maybe you didn’t do it,” he said. “If they are convicted of that crime, it is a different story.”

Another area of the proposed language changes involving efforts to minimize the damage to regeneration in selective cuts, committee members expressed concern over if the county’s requirements were unrealistically high.

Brooks noted that when he worked for a logging company they enforced the rules to those levels.

Walcisak explained it is a matter of doing their due diligence to minimize the impact to regeneration. He said from a practical matter it is hard to have a quantifiable number that would apply to all sales. He noted that it comes down to reasonable implementation and that loggers believed the county was not enforcing it correctly, he said the county would not receive any bids. He also noted that if they ever got to the level of imposing fines for these types of contract infractions it would be done at the committee level with all of them involved.

In other business, committee members:

  Approved allowing sale No. 668 to expire on Dec. 31 and retain the entire bond of $24,987.25 against Northwest Hardwoods for failing to complete the project in the contract period and impose a two year bidding ban on the company beginning with the expiration of the contract. By county policy, the department must retain at least half of the bond. It was estimated there is about $49,841 of value remaining on the sale but the price of the timber has dropped by $14,938.49 since it was first sold and there will be a $1,732.31 cost to the county to rebid the sale. Thums noted that the county owed it to the loggers who are doing the best job they can, to enforce the penalties against those who do not.

  Received an update on the purchase of a new pickup truck for the department that was approved in fall 2021. The county was notified by Ford that the order for a $38,000 truck ordered on Oct. 4, 2021 was canceled and that the same truck would be at least $10,000 more due largely to reductions in Ford’s municipal discount program. Ford historically hads a $7,800 discount for municipalities, but in 2023 it is dropping to $400. While the forestry department is not facing a pressing need for the truck replacement, the plan had been for forestry to replace its truck and sell the existing truck to the buildings and grounds department to replace an older vehicle there. Mildbrand advised that they should try to wait it out and keep the truck for another year. Walcisak said he would look at Ewald Automotive group out of the Milwaukee area to see if they could get a truck at the price approved last year versus buying it from the local dealer.

“I don’t know how or where we would stop”

— County Board member James Gebauer