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“Most of the wood that is cut and felled is not merchantable,” he says.

“There are limited roads and where the roads are, there’s not a lot of merchantable timber.”

“Commercially merchantable timber was removed in large volume; small trees, slash and brush were left,” Plain resident Rich Haydon, a retired 31-year employee of the Forest Service, wrote in a declaration filed with the lawsuit.

At 75 percent full, Stevenson said that Genscape considers Cushing to be operationally full with merchantable space extremely limited.

He said the inability to cut merchantable timber on federal lands precipitated the Secure Rural Schools Act and is at the root of the problem.