Despite overwhelming community support and a favorable application review, 360 Trails has not been selected for transfer to local parks ownership.
In early September, the state Board of Natural Resources, part of the Department of Natural Resources, approved a list of eight properties to be recommended for legislative funding through the Trust Land Transfer program. Key Pen Parks, which led the “Bring 360 Trails Home” campaign, was encouraged by DNR to reapply next year, according to parks director Tracey Perkosky.
DNR manages its land to provide revenue — often from timber harvest, but also through leases for grazing, clean energy and commercial real estate — for schools, colleges and county-level services. The Trust Land Transfer Program exists to transfer DNR parcels that have low fina cial returns. Often the properties have high ecological or cultural value.
Legislative appropriations allow DNR to replace the transferred properties by purchasing more economically viable parcels. According to DNR foresters, it also allows them to consolidate operations, as 360 Trails and the nearby 480-acre Key Central Forest properties are comparatively small and isolated, and therefore challenging to log efficiently.
Conversely, for the Key Peninsula, these are the largest extant forests, and the community has had access to them since 2009 when Key Pen Parks negotiated a rare 50-year public trails lease with DNR.
The lease, which expires for 360 Trails in 2059, puts the onus of property tax and maintenance on Key Pen Parks in exchange for public access. In DNR’s application review, the lease was an important factor, where it wrote:
“Because of the long-term lease ... it will be nearly four decades before this parcel can again generate revenue for trust beneficiaries. This parcel would be appropriate for a direct transfer to Key Pen Parks. ... This parcel has already proven a great fit for the Trust Land Transfer program, and the community recreation benefit and economic underperformance remain.”
The failure of 360 Trails to make the cut means that DNR could call a timber harvest on the property at any time. DNR is currently in the middle of a timber harvest at Key Central Forest, which will be completed by October 2025.
Parks Commissioner Mark Michel said “I’m pretty angry about it. I really felt it should have been a slam dunk.”
Parcels are prioritized for Trust Land Transfer by a 12-member advisory committee that scores applications in five categories: ecological values, public benefits, tribal support, community involvement and support, and economic impacts. The first three are weighted more than the last two.
This year’s recommended properties are in Clallam, Grant, King, Okanogan and Yakima Counties. Six of the eight would be transferred to tribal ownership.
More information on the recommended properties can be found in a Sept. 4 DNR press release at www.dnr. wa.gov/news/trust-land-transfer-fund- ing-request-approved-board-natural-resources.
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