Judge halts logging above Dutch Charlie Creek with most of it already done • The Mendocino Voice

MENDOCINO CO., 9/7/26 — Logging on 926 acres in the hills west of Laytonville is stopped under two court orders at once. The First District Court of Appeal froze most timber operations there on Aug. 17. Mendocino County Superior Court Judge Charlotte Scott granted a preliminary injunction, the second order, on Sept. 2, according to a Sept. 4 release from Friends of Dutch Charlie Creek, the citizens' group that sued Cal Fire. A notice of Scott's decision was filed in the group's appeal the next day. The fight is over two timber harvest plans the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection approved on July 2 and 3. The agency's notices list Redwood Timber Company LLC as landowner and Redwood Forest Operating Company LLC as the plan submitter. The larger plan, called Hot Tuna, covers 594 acres. The smaller one, Lincoln Logs, covers 332. Both call for selection logging rather than clearcutting. Court papers also call Hot Tuna by a second name, Lincoln Ridge. Friends of Dutch Charlie Creek, which litigates as Friends of Shaahnaa Lhook, sued Cal Fire on July 7, four days after it says the logging began. Its claim under the California Environmental Quality Act is that the plans never assess the sediment they will send into the creek, one of two reliable coho spawning streams left in the upper South Fork Eel, the group says. Coho on the Eel side of the county are listed as threatened under both the state and federal endangered species acts. A coho salmon holds beneath a submerged branch in Dutch Charlie Creek west of Laytonville, Calif., on Wednesday, Jan. 17, 2024. The citizens' group suing Cal Fire says the creek is one of two reliable coho spawning streams left in the upper South Fork Eel. (Philip McGarvey/Friends of Dutch Charlie Creek via Bay City News) Judge Ann Moorman refused the Friends a temporary restraining order on July 13, according to the group, and the appeal runs from that order. The appellate court turned down an immediate stay on July 24. Then on Aug. 17, it granted the group's petition and barred the companies, their employees and anyone acting for them from 'any timber operations,' as state law defines the term, on either plan while the appeal is pending. The order carved out one exception: the companies may take 'protective actions, consistent with the Forest Practice Rules and the Plans to protect water quality and other resources.' The court required no bond from the group and put the appeal on an expedited briefing schedule. The same order said the parties 'appear to agree' that a trial court ruling on the injunction would moot the appeal and require the stay to end. The court said it would entertain a request to dissolve the stay once Scott ruled, and a separate motion to dismiss the appeal. It did not say the stay would end on its own. Unless the court orders otherwise, the stay lasts until the appeal is final. Scott has ruled. As of Monday, the appellate register of actions shows no request to dissolve the stay and no motion to dismiss. On paper, both orders stand. The group's website says crews kept yarding and hauling logs out of the harvest area on Aug. 18, the day after the stay took effect, and that the companies called the work protective actions. In its Sept. 4 release, the group says Cal Fire inspected the site on Aug. 21 and, in its inspection report, 'observed an excavator constructing proposed road' while crews went on yarding and hauling logs. The company told the court on Aug. 27 that it had felled 776 of the 926 acres, had yarded or skidded logs off 186 acres and still had 590 acres to yard, according to the group's release. The release quotes a company filing calling the downed logs a 'HUGE FIRE HAZARD' that had to come out. The group calls that an excuse to keep hauling, and says the plans let the slash, the branches and treetops, sit on the ground through fire season. No court has ruled on whether any of that work fell inside the appellate order's exception for protective actions. Two old trunks lean together in the forest above Dutch Charlie Creek west of Laytonville, Calif., on Wednesday, March 27, 2019. (Philip McGarvey/Friends of Dutch Charlie Creek via Bay City News) About 100 people came to the Ukiah courthouse for the injunction hearing on Aug. 27, enough to fill two courtrooms, with the overflow watching on a video feed, Rick Coates, executive director of Forest Unlimited, said in an email. The hearing ran about two hours, and Scott took the motion under submission and said she would rule by Sept. 4, Coates said. Forest Unlimited is the Friends' fiscal sponsor. A clerk in the court's civil division confirmed by phone the next morning that no ruling had been issued. Dutch Charlie Creek is the same water the state has spent more than a decade and a million dollars trying to repair. Records in the California Department of Fish and Wildlife's own grant database show three Fisheries Restoration Grant Program awards on the creek, all to Trout Unlimited: a $129,770 planning grant in 2012, a $659,327 sediment-reduction project in 2018 and a $240,639 instream habitat project in 2019. That is $1,029,736 from one program. The 2018 project decommissioned 7.23 miles of legacy road and upgraded another 1,737 feet, work the state's project description credits with keeping about 11,304 cubic yards of sediment out of the creek. The 2019 project put 203 pieces of large wood into two miles of the creek for spawning and rearing habitat. The group's press release says the timber harvesting plans include three miles of new road construction, including on steep slopes and near the creek. Its website says 'millions' in state money went into road removal in the watershed. The grant record shows at least $1.03 million from the fisheries program. Other state funding sources were not checked. Roads shed fine sediment into streams, and fine sediment buries the gravel coho spawn in. The appellate court's own briefing order in July asked the parties to address whether it is undisputed that logging would add sediment to what the court called an already impacted stream system. Cal Fire's response to public comment says the Hot Tuna plan itself recognizes that the waters downstream are listed as impaired for sediment and temperature. Dutch Charlie Creek flows past moss-covered boulders west of Laytonville, Calif., on Tuesday, April 26, 2022. Mendocino County Superior Court Judge Charlotte Scott granted a preliminary injunction against logging in the watershed on Wednesday, Sept. 2, 2026. (Philip McGarvey/Friends of Dutch Charlie Creek via Bay City News) Every account of this fight, including the group's, treats it as a fight over one Eel River tributary. Cal Fire's own notices say otherwise. The Hot Tuna notice lists the plan's watersheds as Dutch Charlie Creek, Jack of Hearts Creek and Juan Creek. The Lincoln Logs notice lists DeHaven Creek and Dutch Charlie Creek. Dutch Charlie and Jack of Hearts creeks run east to the South Fork Eel. Juan Creek and DeHaven Creek run west to the Pacific near Westport, according to the U.S. Geological Survey's place-name database. That is a legal line as well as a ridge. Coho from rivers that reach the ocean north of Punta Gorda, in Humboldt County, including the Eel, belong to a population listed as threatened. Coho from streams south of that point belong to the Central California Coast population, which the federal government reclassified from threatened to endangered in 2005 and which the state lists as endangered as well. NOAA's critical habitat designation, as published in the state's own mapping database, covers Juan Creek, DeHaven Creek and their forks. How much of the 926 acres drains west is not in the notices. It would be in the plan maps, which sit on Cal Fire's CalTREES system. That system could not be reached Monday. Cal Fire's 48-page official response to public comment on Hot Tuna, dated July 3, does not mention Juan Creek. In January 2022, Lyme Timber Company announced that its funds had sold 111,967 acres of coastal California timberland, together with the management company that ran it, to Redwood Timber Company LLC, a partner of Lyme's since 2015. Lyme's announcement said the 18-person Fort Bragg management team would stay on. Neither the harvest plan notices nor the appellate record says who owns Redwood Timber Company. Declarations filed in the appeal on the companies' behalf came from Roger Burch and Joe Burch, according to the register of actions. The group's release states that Redwood Timber, like Gualala Redwood Timber, is owned by the Burch family. Friends of Dutch Charlie Creek are all volunteers. Its website says it had raised and spent $135,000 on the case as of Sept. 2 and expects to need $20,000 more. It is represented by Thomas N. Lippe of San Francisco, with Rebecca L. Davis of Lozeau Drury in Oakland joining the case Aug. 20. The injunction does not decide the case. Whether what is left of the 926 acres gets logged is the question the case still has to answer, and the next move on the appellate court's stay belongs to the parties. Fog settles over forested ridges in the Dutch Charlie Creek watershed west of Laytonville, Calif., at dusk on Friday, Nov. 6, 2020. (Philip McGarvey/Friends of Dutch Charlie Creek via Bay City News)