CHILOQUIN (AP) - A logging limit known as the 󈭩-inch rule“ has changed forest management and the timber industry after what was intended to be a temporary rule to preserve larger trees enters it second decade.

The rules adopted in 1994 were also known as the ”eastside screens“ because proposed timber sales had to be screened to ensure they complied with new environmental regulations that were adopted on a temporary basis.

As 2005 draws to a close, loggers say those temporary rules have become permanent.

”It definitely changes how we log and how they manage forests,“ Joe Pariera, a veteran logger, told The Herald and News.

U.S. Forest Service crews hike through timber sales on federal land to spray orange paint onto trees that are 21 inches in diameter, or bigger, measured at chest height, or about 41/2 feet from the ground.

The 21-inch rule is designed to produce stands of mature timber like those that stood before settlers came west. Environmentalists say the larger trees have more benefits for wildlife.

But loggers say it is killing the timber industry. Smaller trees are less valuable and yield less lumber, factors that contributed to the closing of sawmills over the last decade.

The screens were enacted to protect forests while officials crafted a grand plan to cover forests from the California border to the Canadian border. Called the Interior Columbia Basin Ecosystem Management Project, the project would have covered nine national forests in Oregon, Idaho, Washington and Montana.

Most of the forests have watersheds that feed the Columbia River, which gave the plan its name.

The plan was to be similar to the Northwest Forest Plan, developed by the Clinton administration to save the northern spotted owl by barring loggers from old-growth timber in national forests on the western side of the Cascades.

The planning process for the Columbia Basin project had started in January 1994, but it was expected to take three years.

After a week of work, forest managers put the eastside screen rules in as amendments to the existing forest plans on the nine national forests. Study and revisions followed and the screens were clarified in 1997, but their original goal remained, including the protection of trees 21 inches in diameter or bigger.

The eastside screens were to be a fix while the plan was crafted. Three years after the planning process for the Columbia Basin project started, scientists had collected volumes of data on animals and plant species in the different forests. But the plan remained unfinished and there appeared to be no rush to complete it, said Brent Frazier, a wildlife biologist with the Fremont-Winema National Forests.

Attempts were made to finish the plan before the November 2000 election, but it was still in progress when voters went to the polls. After George W. Bush won, the plan remained unfinished.

In June 2003 Linda Goodman, Pacific Northwest regional forester for the Forest Service, issued a letter stating that the managers of the individual forests should start using that information and other studies to update their forest plans.

Now the Forest Service is set to have the nine national forests that would have been part of the Columbia Basin project come up with plans that cover only their land, or their land and a couple of neighboring forests. Two national forests in the Blue Mountains, the Malheur and the Wallowa-Whitman, have already started working on their plan revisions.

Over the next couple of months, the Fremont-Winema National Forests, which merged in 2002, will start putting together a team that will craft a new plan on the forests' 2.3 million acres in Klamath and Lake counties, said forest Supervisor Karen Shimamoto.

The goal still is to regrow the forests in the way they were, said Jerry Haugen, environmental coordinator for the Fremont-Winema.

But Gary Johnson, contract manager and log buyer for Fremont Sawmill in Lakeview, told The Herald and News he would like to see the tree size rule changed.

Before the eastside screen rules, the average timber sale would produce 5,000 to 6,000 board feet of wood per acre, Johnson said. With the screens in place, the sales produce 500 to 2,500 board feet.

”That is just too low of a volume for equipment,“ Johnson told the Klamath Falls newspaper.