Tag Archives: Von Donop Cutblocks

Cortes Island’s Community Forest Operations in 2025/26

The Cortes Forestry General Partnership held its public meeting on October 9th, 2025. In today’s interview, Operations Manager Mark Lombard talks about leadership transitions, plans for selective logging, the Forest Stewardship Plan review, and other topics from the meeting. He also shares his personal opinion about how climate change is affecting our forest.

“We try to have a public meeting every year and we cover whatever topics are relevant at that point. There’s always the year in review, so what have we done in the last year since the last public meeting and what are we planning in the coming year,” explained Lombard.

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Cortes Forestry General Partnership Public Meeting Covers Wildfire Prevention and the Five-Year Plan

The Cortes Forestry General Partnership (CFGP) held a public meeting on Thursday, May 30, 2024. CFGP is an equal partnership between the Klahoose First Nation and the Cortes Community Forest Co-operative and manages operations in the Community Forest, comprised of much of the island’s Crown forests. 

The main theme of the meeting was wildfire prevention. Fire Chief Eli McKenty offered an opening presentation on ways the Community Forest and Cortes Island Fire Department are collaborating to reduce fire risks. 

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Mark Lombard: Community Forest 5-Year Plan

The Cortes Community Forestry Co-operative held its annual AGM on May 7th at Mansons Hall. The Co-operative is an equal partner with Klahoose First Nation in the Cortes Forestry General Partnership, locally known as the “Community Forest.” Mark Lombard is the General Manager for the Partnership.

At the Forestry Co-op AGM, Mark reminded attendees that a public meeting would be held soon (May 11 at the Klahoose Multipurpose Hall). At this meeting he would present a review of the Partnership’s activities to date, and their plans for the next few years. This event would mark the launch of a public input period for the “Five Year Plan” for the Community Forest project.

At this point in the planning process, the five year plan is wide open for comment and feedback. And if there’s an area that someone thinks would be a sensible area to operate in — in the next five years — that hasn’t been considered, please bring that forward.

If there are any other features or concerns or ideas… basically what I’m trying to say is, it’s wide open to public feedback, so we’d like to hear from people, and everything’s on the table at this point.

— Mark Lombard

Currents interviewed Mark on May 19th, to offer our readers/listeners an overview of the material he covered in his May 11 presentation. [The audio version of this interview is quite different from the image-heavy text version, so we recommend that interested readers check out both media.]

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