Pacific Lumber Co

Pacific Lumber Co., a timber giant on California's North Coast for more than 140 years, has filed for bankruptcy, contending that environmental restrictions imposed by the state have made it impossible to log enough to make a profit. After years of threatening bankruptcy, Pacific announced Friday that the company and its subsidiaries had filed for Chapter 11 protection a day earlier in U.S. District Court in Texas. The companies seeking to reorganize are Pacific, Scotia Pacific Co.

The company town is dead. Long live the company town. Scotia, California's last company town, has voted to become independent, according to preliminary election results released Wednesday. With 147 ballots cast — less than half of the eligible voters — 136 were to make the town an independent community services district, essentially severing the town from the New York hedge fund that owns it. Also in Tuesday's balloting, voters elected a town governing board of five people.

A company owned by the founders of Gap Inc. took control of the bankrupt Pacific Lumber Co. on Wednesday, marking a new chapter in the history of one of the country's oldest and most controversial timber firms. Pacific Lumber's logging practices over the last two decades under Maxxam Inc. of Houston have drawn widespread opposition from environmentalists. The deal was completed after Mendocino Redwood Co.

Maxxam Inc., the Houston-based investment firm headed by Charles E. Hurwitz, agreed in principle Tuesday to pay $52 million to settle lawsuits brought by former shareholders in Pacific Lumber Co., which Hurwitz took over in 1985. In the suits, filed beginning in 1988, the former shareholders alleged that Hurwitz, the former board of Scotia, Calif.-based Pacific Lumber and others used fraud and deception in the acquisition.

Armed with a court order and assisted by local law enforcement, Pacific Lumber Co. began removing the first of 18 anti-logging protesters from their platform homes high in the redwoods Monday. Shortly before 9 a.m., Pacific Lumber officials arrived with Humboldt County sheriff's deputies and California Highway Patrol officers.

A state water panel may seek a court order to stop one of California's largest and most controversial timber firms from cutting down more trees on part of its land, officials said Monday. The dispute is the latest skirmish in a years-long battle over logging between state regulators and environmentalists on one side and the Pacific Lumber Co., which owns more than 200,000 acres of timber land in Humboldt County, on the other.

A group of tree-sitting protesters ordered off Pacific Lumber Co. land last week vowed to defy a court order and remain in their small platform perches in a forest of redwoods. Pacific Lumber Co. served at least 18 of the anti-logging demonstrators with a temporary restraining order Wednesday, giving them 24 hours to come down from their platforms near this Humboldt County community. But the sitters refused to budge. Pacific Lumber Co.

With a logging moratorium in the Headwaters Forest set to expire this weekend, government negotiators indicated Thursday that there are still obstacles to a deal to preserve the nation's last stand of privately owned ancient redwood trees. "There are a whole complement of issues yet to resolve," said a spokesman for Gov. Pete Wilson. If a preservation agreement is not reached, Pacific Lumber Co. can begin limited logging operations of old-growth redwoods on Monday.

The former director of the California Department of Forestry, bolstering a civil fraud case against Pacific Lumber Co., says he would have withheld approval for the $480-million Headwaters forest deal in 1999 had he known then that the firm had submitted false data on the danger of landslides from its logging operations.

In an action hailed by environmentalists, a bankruptcy judge in Texas gave preliminary approval Friday to a plan by another timber company to reorganize financially troubled Pacific Lumber Co. and operate its 220,000 acres of Humboldt County land. Deciding the fate of the 145-year-old California forestry giant, Judge Richard S. Schmidt selected the proposal by decade-old Mendocino Redwood Co., largely owned by the Fisher family that founded the Gap Inc. clothing empire.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's administration pledged to fight any attempt to ease protections for old coastal redwoods that could be threatened by a timber company's bankruptcy filing. Pacific Lumber Co., a subsidiary of Houston-based Maxxam Corp., sought bankruptcy protection in Texas earlier this month, saying it could no longer make a profit because of logging restrictions on its 200,000 acres of timberlands in Humboldt County. The Scotia, Calif.

Pacific Lumber Co., a timber giant on California's North Coast for more than 140 years, has filed for bankruptcy, contending that environmental restrictions imposed by the state have made it impossible to log enough to make a profit. After years of threatening bankruptcy, Pacific announced Friday that the company and its subsidiaries had filed for Chapter 11 protection a day earlier in U.S. District Court in Texas. The companies seeking to reorganize are Pacific, Scotia Pacific Co.

The Schwarzenegger administration is poised to allow financially troubled Pacific Lumber Co. to remove special habitat protections on more than 2,000 acres covered by a historic agreement creating the Headwaters Preserve of ancient redwoods in Humboldt County. In exchange, Pacific Lumber has proposed placing the environmental restrictions on an equivalent amount of its land that company and wildlife officials say has superior conservation value.

A former official of the North Coast timber giant Pacific Lumber Co. contends in a lawsuit that the company's president ordered him to conceal the presence of underground contaminants to avoid a costly cleanup and to expedite construction of sawmill facilities in Humboldt County. A Pacific Lumber spokesman said the allegations were not true and added that the plaintiff's contention that he had been fired also was not true. Humboldt County Dist. Atty.

Pacific Lumber Co., a financially troubled titan of California's timber industry, is offering to sell more than a quarter of its 220,000 acres of land in Humboldt County, a spokesman said Friday. The company informed federal securities regulators that it was marketing ranch lands, recreational areas and timberlands that did not figure in its core business as a major redwood lumber producer.

In a lawsuit filed Monday, Humboldt County's new district attorney accuses Pacific Lumber Co., a logging firm and long-standing economic force on the North Coast, of fraudulent business practices in its handling of environmental documents.

Environmental activists and sympathetic politicians rallied to criticize a Los Angeles-based company's plans to cut down the world's largest remaining privately owned virgin redwood forest. Several dozen demonstrators gathered at the Westwood headquarters of Maxxam Corp., which was criticized for over-harvesting redwood forests to pay off debt incurred during its hostile 1986 takeover of the Pacific Lumber Co. At issue is a Humboldt County redwood grove known as the Headwaters Forest.

In a case involving Pacific Lumber Co.'s redwood groves, the California Supreme Court on Monday ruled that state water officials have the power to order timber companies to monitor the quality of streams and rivers near logging sites. Pacific Lumber Co. had challenged a state water board order that required it to measure the effects of logging about 700 acres on the south fork of the Elk River in Humboldt County.

A judge in Houston has ordered the federal government to pay $72 million to a company controlled by financier Charles Hurwitz, after concluding that federal banking officials had filed baseless legal actions against Hurwitz at the behest of California environmentalists. Likening the government's conduct to that of a "cosa nostra," U.S. District Judge Lynn N. Hughes said Tuesday that regulators had a hidden political agenda when they sued Hurwitz and Maxxam Inc.