by Nathan Rushton, 4/20/2007
The federal judge presiding over Pacific Lumber Co. and its subsidiary companies’ bankruptcy in Texas ruled Friday that the proceeding won’t be moved to California.
Judge Richard Schmidt, of the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of Texas, Corpus Christi Division, indicated in his decision that the numerous parties seeking the venue change didn’t present sufficient evidence to override PALCO’s choice of venue.
Several state agencies, the U.S. Trustee, the Official Creditor’s Committee, Humboldt County and the city of Rio Dell filed motions to the court asking Schmidt to transfer the case to the Northern District of California.
Attorneys for the various parties alleged that PALCO subsidiary Scotia Development, which they said was little more than a “phone booth” office few employees had ever visited, was formed in Corpus Christi in June 2006 as a ploy to create a venue in Texas and to keep the hearing out of California.
The court conducted a hearing on the venue issues in early March, in which senior PALCO officials provided testimony and argued that the company was formed to investigate the real estate market in south Texas.
“While many of the parties allege that venue is improper, the unrefuted facts presented at the hearing demonstrate that venue is proper in the Southern District of Texas,” Schmidt stated in his 29-page ruling.
Because Scotia Development was formed more than 180 days preceding the bankruptcy filing, Schmidt ruled the law was in PALCO’s favor and its choice of filing in Texas was proper.
Friday’s ruling follows another favorable ruling by Schmidt April 6 that determined PALCO subsidiary Scotia Pacific Co. is not a single asset real estate debtor, which precludes the holders of the bulk of the company’s approximately $700 million debt from foreclosing and taking control of SCOPAC’s more than 200,000 acres of property.
Andrea Arnot, PALCO director of communications, said Friday that company officials are pleased with the court’s decision.
“Our goal is to get our reorganization plan filed as soon as possible,” Arnot said.
A hearing is scheduled for May 10 in the Texas court to address that plan.
Copyright (C) 2005, The Eureka Reporter. All rights reserved.
Nestled in Nanning Creek in an ancient old growth redwood grove, two massive trees—dubbed Spooner and Grandma—enchant their protectors with resident flying squirrels, neighborly salamanders, and treetop fern and mushroom gardens. Spooner—more than 42 feet around and 290 feet tall—and Grandma—attached to her Siamese twin, Grandpa—rest on the edge of a cliff directly above the Nanning Creek watershed and are likely the largest trees ever defended by sitters here.
Nanning Creek is "saved", action is successfully closed. Please visit EF! Humboldt 4 curent info
NEEDS IN NANNING CREEK(sorted by highest need)
- Spool of Climb Line
- Spools of Parachute Cordage
- Spool of Arborist Line
- Carabiners, repel eights, and double pulleys(highest need)
- 5/8" Truckers Rope Spools(High quality for high places)
- Rain Gear(Green and Camo preferred)
- Climb lines(200' static or dynamic)
- Themal Base Layers
- Headlamps
- Water Filters
- Backpacks(Green and Camoflauge preferred)
- Wool Pants, Shirts, Socks all sizes
- Clean Five Gallon Buckets with lids
- Dry Foods(Care Boxes greatly appreciated)
- Camoflauge or hunting clothes
- 12V Rechargable Car Jumper(for power supply)
- Solar Panels
- Soy Food Products
- Mate' Tea
- Inspirational Books
- Gas Cards
- Gift Cards for North Coast CO-OP and Eureka Natural Foods
- Wind-up solar radio(fell one too many times!)
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A TREE SIZED BRANCH!
EF! Journal Story on Fern Gully and Nanning Creek
United We Treesit
United We TreesitThe Humboldt Forest Defense UpdateBy Humboldt Forest DefenseAs developers and logging companies push farther and farther into the wilderness, leaving a wake of destruction in their path, it is comforting to know that there are still a few places that have been left untouched. Fern Gully is one of these places, where life still flourishes for trees and plants, forest creatures and fairies.The Fern Gully treesit village in Humboldt County is one of the longest-running forest actions in Northern California. Defenders protect a glorious grove of ancient redwood, Sitka spruce and Douglas fir trees with their hearts, minds, spirits and bodies.Fern Gully, with towering trees including Libertal, Sundance, Patience and Watsi, has been a hotspot in recent years for forest defense actions. Maxxam/Pacific Lumber (PL) plans to log directly above Freshwater Creek, across from an elementary school. Each immense and magnificent tree in the gully stands on a steep, fern-covered slope. Destroying this awe-inspiring area would not only devastate precious habitat, it would also increase silt erosion into the already heavily sediment-impaired creek.Fern Gully is walking distance from US Highway 101, near a residential area. It is unique for an uncut forest to survive so close to development, especially with ancient trees vanishing at an alarming rate.Fern Gully is in immediate danger. Months ago, when forest defenders thought the gully was in the clear due to the long-awaited expiration of PL’s logging plan, PL got the California Department of Forestry to extend the plan for at least another year. After defending Fern Gully for more than three years, we will continue to guard the sacred area. Please help us save one of the last groves of ancient forest. In just a few work hours, this centuries-old ecosystem could vanish.Meanwhile, logging has recommenced in the Nanning Creek area of the Eel River watershed, only a few miles east of PL headquarters in the soon-to-be-sold-off company town of Scotia, California. Logging in Nanning, which began 10 days before marbled murrelet nesting season ended in September, threatens to wipe out one of the last commercially owned ancient redwood stands. Forest defenders remain determined to do all they can to protect the Timber Harvest Plan, aka Timber Holocaust Plan.The forest that remains after last year’s logging in Nanning is home to endangered species, including the northern spotted owl and marbled murrelet. Early morning gate blockades (often including children), rallies, lockdowns and enduring treesits make up the short her/history to protect some of the oldest beings on Earth.Nestled in Nanning Creek, two massive trees—dubbed Spooner and Grandma—enchant their protectors with resident flying squirrels, neighborly salamanders, and treetop fern and mushroom gardens. Spooner—more than 42 feet around and 290 feet tall—and Grandma—attached to her Siamese twin, Grandpa—rest on the edge of a cliff directly above the Nanning Creek watershed and are likely the largest trees ever defended by sitters here. With the help of traverses, treesitters are protecting the trees that hold together the steep hillsides.After a storm in December, 10 trees near the Spooner treesit village fell to the forest floor. Due to recent logging, an area that has sustained itself for millennia is now vulnerable to one night of storms.Please support the Earth through persistent action and participation.For more information or to donate time, energy or resources, contact Humboldt Forest Defense, POB 28, Arcata, CA 95518; (707) 825-6598 (NCEF! hotline); (707) 845-9046 (direct line to ground support); (707) 618-9047 (Fern Gully pager); (707) 618-9181 (Nanning Creek pager); www.spoonerdirect.org.
ECONEWS: The Pacific Lumber Story: From Hostile Takeover To Financial Ruin
ECONEWS: The Pacific Lumber Story: From Hostile Takeover To Financial Ruin
Posted by: NEC on Monday, March 05, 2007 - 03:41 PM
by Erica TerenceThe story of Pacific Lumber Company—now calling itself Palco—has been told and retold in painful detail for 22 years, ever since marauding Texas investor Charles Hurwitz leveraged enough publicly-traded stock in the company to force out a long era of more benign management.But now a new chapter is being written in the Palco saga—Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The debt-ridden company finally filed for bankruptcy protection on January 18 in a move prophesied for years by financial analysts, Humboldt County residents and even anticipated by the company itself. And many local activists and workers are hopeful that a brighter chapter beyond bankruptcy court can still be written. “As soon as the bankruptcy was filed, it was time to stop pointing fingers. We need to be looking at this as an opportunity to pull together and say what it is that we want the reorganization of Palco to look like,” said Mark Lovelace of the Humboldt Watershed Council, a group that originally organized itself to challenge Palco’s destructive logging practices and has followed the company closely since 1997. And that means many people who haven’t been so good at talking to each other sitting down in the same room together, Lovelace said. Sorrowful Saga“The last 22 years have not been good to Humboldt County. We’ve been rocked by protests, tree-sits, ceaseless litigation, layoffs, mill closures, the Judi Bari bombing, the Stafford landslide, the pepper spray incident, the death of David Chain, increased flooding, land sliding and environmental damage and a deepening polarization of our community,” Lovelace added, surveying many of the story’s characters and events. All told, Palco now owes more than $860 million to numerous creditors and to note holders who purchased bonds secured by the company’s timber. The current debt is almost exactly the same as it was following the takeover in 1985 ($867 million then, $860 million now.) But Hurwitz’s empire is a lot richer.Lovelace and most of his colleagues do not want to waste time fixing blame—they’d rather figure out how to fix the structure of the company. Still, the past chapters in this story can hardly be skipped over. Pacific Lumber (PL), founded some 140 years ago, took pride in its sustainable rates of timber harvest, steady employment record and economic durability. The company owned more than 200,000 acres of redwood and Douglas fir stands in Humboldt County, which it logged selectively rather than clear-cutting. Though the company mostly logged old growth, its long-rotation practices would have allowed its second-growth stands to average 150 years in age. Ripe For PluckingBut PL’s decision to go public in the 1970s positioned the asset-rich, low-debt company perfectly as unwitting prey for Hurwitz, who pounced. PL employees took out an advertisement in the Eureka Times Standard in November, 1985, declaring: “We do not feel that this impending takeover will be in the best interest of ourselves, the shareholders and the communities in which our company serves.” He leveraged more than $800 million from junk bond speculators to buy out more than half of the timber company’s stock in 1985. Local folks remember the event simply as “the takeover.”Shortly after, Hurwitz’s parent company, called Maxxam, liquidated PL assets, from forest lands to office buildings and the company’s welding division. Next, though studies showed that it would later lead to declines in timber and jobs, Maxxam tripled PL’s rate of timber harvest, promising economic and employment booms for the area. In ten years, PL cut and dragged half the trees off its lands, reducing PL timber rotations from about 150 years down to just 30.While PL has grossed at least $3.6 billion since 1985, most of the profits were shipped south to Houston in the form of dividends to Hurwitz and his associates instead of paying down interest on the company’s soaring debt, Palco’s own filings with the Securities Exchange Commission have shown.Starting in the late 1980s, neighbors and environmental groups grew increasingly outraged over the toll PL operations had begun to take on groves of ancient trees, soil stability and even whole watersheds. Tree sitters took up posts –with one Julia Butterfly Hill, bringing the worldwide spotlight to local forests during a two-year treetop vigil—and tensions between loggers and environmentalists rose. In 1999, the state of California and Senator Dianne Feinstein engineered the Headwaters Agreement with Palco. That agreement effectively paid Palco $480 million to preserve in federal and state hands some 3,400 acres of old growth in what’s now Headwaters forest. The agreement also granted the company an “Incidental Take Permit,” which allowed PL to kill or “take” certain endangered species such as marbled murrelets or spotted owls during logging. In exchange, the company said it would comply with a habitat conservation plan and a so-called sustained yield plan for timber harvests. PL forestry even resulted in political polarization when newly elected Humboldt County District Attorney Paul Gallegos filed a multi-million-dollar fraud suit against the company. PL responded by funding a massive ‘Recall Gallegos’ campaign which more than 60 % of Humboldt voters rejected. A Superior Court judge ruled against the District Attorney, but the case is now moving through an appeals court.Another conflict ensued as residents of the Elk River watershed and several nearby tributaries blamed landslides, sedimentation and flash flooding in their neighborhoods on PL logging practices. The floods have persisted, as many as 15 times each year according to residents, who point to a water board engineer’s estimate that sediment has filled in 60% of the stream channel, making peak flows a frequent problem. Elk River resident and licensed timber operator Jesse Noell and his family sat watching the flood waters rise 30 feet from their house last month. The Noells are completely cut off from jobs, medical services, and even potable water, since the rising water table causes contents of area septic tanks to pollute wells, the river and eventually Humboldt Bay. Noell is outraged that while the regional water board expressed vague concerns over PL’s cutting practices, it did little to actually restrict the timber company.Debt To DeathLovelace referred to water board actions to marginally restrict PL harvesting over the years as a mere hiccup in the PL story, noting that the company would not have been able to sustain its massive debt even without the very minor logging reductions. What’s important now, Lovelace has said, is severing the PL subsidiary ScoPac from Maxxam—an outcome he believes is likely. Since ScoPac exists solely as a holding company for the lands that produce the logs that its parent Palco cuts, mills and markets, a committee of creditors has called on Judge Richard Schmidt to simply foreclose on ScoPac lands as soon as May.Schmidt is also considering motions filed by creditors such as the city of Rio Dell to transfer the court proceedings from Corpus Christi, Texas to Oakland in California, where the virtually all of Palco’s employees, creditors and regulating agencies reside. But the looming questions before the court of how to rescue the beleaguered timber company from its own financially and ecologically destructive practices also must result in some sort of reorganization, activists say.Takeover Tactics“Palco is hoping it will get some breaks on its interest payments, but the bondholders could decide to do a complete regime change and that would change things, depending on who they sold the property to,” said Ali Freedlund, forest practices review coordinator for the Mattole Restoration Council. Since all of Palco’s assets combined aren’t enough to settle the debtor’s financial obligations, noteholders could reclaim the assets from Maxxam, as Freedlund suggests. Freedlund has also been tracking the bankruptcy filings in an effort to inform her community about the impact they will have on the 18,000 acres of ScoPac lands in the Mattole River watershed. “As in other watersheds, the rate of recent harvest in the Mattole has brought the seral stage down to an age where anyone who wants to do long-term management will have to look at a long period of rest,” Freedlund warned. Though such a period of rest may mean tough times for PL mills in the short-term, it has the potential eventually to stem the declines in timber and employment suffered over the past two decades, Lovelace noted. Petrolia activist and thespian David Simpson said he hopes to see responsible community based forestry used to manage the timber company differently after the reorganization. “It would be the opposite of the Maxxam structure where the wealth leaves the community,” he said. Active in restoring the Mattole watershed since the 1970s, Simpson remembers recognizing early on after the takeover that “Maxxam’s forest liquidation was bad for both the ecology and economy of Humboldt County and it was the working stiffs who would get screwed.”LayoffsPL’s predicted economic and ecological declines gathered speed in recent years, and the company dropped 90 employees off its payroll in December. Also in December, the Maxxam-run timber giant announced plans to sue the state of California for imposing additional regulations through the water board even though PL claims it agreed to “the most stringent environmental restrictions ever placed on timber harvests.” The company now argues that these additional regulations cramped its ability to log the maximum amount of timber allowed under the Headwaters agreement and caused its profits to plummet. But state attorneys weren’t buying that argument. Neither was community activist Dr. Ken Miller, a founder of the Watershed Council who calls PL’s last 22 years like he sees them: the latest in a long line of deceptively obtained, heavily indebted, financially bled and eventually bankrupted companies victimized by Charles Hurwitz.Painful PatternMiller can tick off a list of victims: Simplicity Patterns, First Executive Life Insurance, Kaiser Aluminum, Pacific Lumber. The pattern is indeed simple, though the stories may be layered and complex, according to Miller—exploit a naïve board and force a buyout, raid company pension plans, sell bonds to unsuspecting investors, flout regulations and blame the regulators (and the environmentalists, in the case of PL).The PL pattern was documented by Marin County author David Harris in his book The Last Stand. He has continued to track PL’s history through newsclippings mailed to him from friends he made in Humboldt.“As a writer, one of the things I look for is the intersection of differences, where differences rub up against each other. Humboldt County was a poster child for that: half the county looked like it just got out of the Marine Corps and the other half looked like it just got out of a Grateful Dead concert,” Harris said. Where Mendocino County was over-harvested by lumber companies such as Louisiana Pacific, which Harris says “makes Hurwitz look like the president of Sierra Club,” Humboldt and Del Norte counties truly are the last stand for large intact redwood forests, he said.The next chapter of PL’s story will likely reveal whether local communities can work out their differences and work towards a stronger economy and healthier ecosystems together, and whether the courts and other regulators will let it happen.
Pacific Lumber's Phony Bankruptcy
Pacific Lumber's phony bankruptcy
Letters for editor
Those who could not see this coming have had their heads buried in the sand. Maxxam has owned PL for over 20 years, and have paid nothing on the junk bonds loan they floated to take over in the first place. The only payments made have been the minimum interest, while siphoning off millions in “profit” back to Hurwitz in Texas.
Just ask yourselves how much commitment to financial solvency could anyone possibly have, when they have paid zero on the principal while taking millions in supposed “profit.” Maxxam has planned all along to suck PL dry, and then dump it.
That's the way corporate raiders work. No commitment to longevity, only immediate profits. Their “rape and run” attitude towards their logging practices is proof enough, just ask the residents of Stafford, Freshwater, and Elk River. Just how many millions has Maxxam sucked out of the North Coast over the past 20 years is an interesting question.
But Charlie has a new trick up his sleeve. He has rented a phone booth in Corpus Christi, Texas, where he has the judge in this pocket. He now claims that this is the “real” home of Scopac, and wants the bankruptcy case to be held there instead of California where the business exists.
If he gets away with his latest slight of hand, he will get to really screw the people of the North Coast. But his chief pawn, John Campbell, and the rest of his timber minions will still get paid for lobbying to shift the venue to a more “favorable” territory. Ultimately, only the workers and retirees will get the shaft.
Frank Hutton
Fortuna
Palco wins key ruling on asset issue
Palco wins key ruling on asset issue
John Driscoll The Times-Standard
Article Launched: 04/07/2007 04:21:13 AM PDT
The Pacific Lumber Co. subsidiary that holds its timberlands won a key ruling in bankruptcy court Friday that may prevent its creditors from quickly foreclosing on the property.
U.S. Bankruptcy Court Judge Richard Schmidt determined that Scotia Pacific is not a single property or project. Schmidt wrote in his 25-page opinion that there is no clear legal definition of exactly what a single property or project is, leaving the court to make an interpretation.
If the business doesn't own property just to sell it in a good market or simply collect rent, it cannot fit the definition of single-asset real estate, Schmidt wrote. Scotia Pacific was purchased with the intent to operate it, Schmidt wrote.
”Scopac does not passively sit and collect rent or wait for the real estate market to turn around,” Schmidt wrote.
Ruling otherwise would mean lumping farms, mining operations and most oil and gas operations under the same category, Schmidt wrote, which wasn't the intent of the code.
The decision was a loss to Scotia Pacific's noteholders, which hold $714 million in debt secured by 210,000 acres of timber. They had argued that the company's sole purpose was to grow trees, and that the complex regulatory and monitoring activities on the land were also meant only for that purpose.
Scotia Pacific had argued that the trees are personal property -- not real property -- and that its employees' numerous responsibilities on the land showed the business was too complicated to be deemed a single project.
A call to a noteholders' attorney was not returned by deadline; nor was a call seeking comment from Palco.
John Driscoll can be reached at 441-0504 or jdriscoll@times-standard.com.
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