“I don't think we're going to get there but it's going to be close,” county forest administrator John Bilogan said Wednesday. “I think we're going to end up somewhere around $950,000.”

The county makes money off its forest by bidding out areas of the forest for logging.

According to Bilogan, and assistant forest administrator Paul Fiene, approximately 1,600 acres were set up for timber harvesting this year. The county then takes bids from loggers who buy the right to harvest the timber in a particular area. The county is reimbursed for the actual volume of timber harvested by the loggers. Loggers are typically given three or four years to harvest a particular area of the forest.

Bilogan and Fiene attribute the current timber sale revenues to a competitive market which drove up the price.

Loggers have been willing to pay top dollar in order to ensure they have access to timber for the next three or four years, Fiene said.

The tumultuous hurricane season, and the resulting reconstruction, may also have played a role, Bilogan said.

Besides the benefit to the county coffers (Bilogan says the revenue allows his department to be completely self-sufficient), timber sales also benefit towns that have county forest land within their borders.

Towns with sections of county forest receive a portion of timber revenue in lieu of the property taxes the municipalities would ordinarily receive if the land was on the tax rolls.

For example, Fiene says the town of Lynne (which has 41 percent of the county forest land) will receive approximately $38,000 of stumpage revenue this year.

At the same time, careful forest management ensures the county's 82,000 acres of forest remain at no risk. Bilogan and Fiene stress that the forest is carefully evaluated on an annual basis to determine the best locations for timber harvesting, and the health of the forest as a whole is never compromised.

Bilogan says there's another reason healthy timber revenue is beneficial to everyone in the Northwoods. At a time when industrial forest land is being bought and sold at alarming rates (according to a November 19 article in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, one million acres of forest were sold in Wisconsin between 1997 an 2002) the county is a secure caretaker for what may be the most valuable resource in Northern Wisconsin.

“The forest is what makes the Northwoods the Northwoods,” Bilogan says.