Victoria - A clean audit of Riverside Forest Products, Lumby Division was released today by the Forest Practices Board.

"The instances of non-compliance with the Forest Practices Code identified in this audit were few in number and minor in nature," said board vice-chair Keith Moore. "Riverside's harvesting practices close to very small streams provided more protection than the code requires and resulted in relatively little disturbance to those areas."

The board noted that maintaining natural drainage patterns during road construction is an important part of preventing landslides. The board encouraged Riverside to ensure natural surface drainage patterns are maintained.

The audit examined Riverside's timber harvesting and road construction, maintenance and deactivation and the related operational plans, for the period Sept. 1, 1998, to Sept. 20, 1999, on Riverside's Forest Licence A20191.

The licence was selected for audit randomly, not on the basis of location or level of performance. Riverside's operating areas are located about 50 kilometres southeast of Vernon, to the west of Lower Arrow Lake and northwest of the community of Edgewood.

Riverside is one of nine audits undertaken by the board in 1999. The board has completed 25 audits to date - 20 forest companies and five Ministry of Forests small business forest enterprise programs. Ten were clean audits, meaning the forest planning and practices met code requirements in all significant respects. The remainder were qualified audits, meaning that there was some significant non-compliance with the code. Most of this non-compliance was related to logging practices near streams and the construction, maintenance and deactivation of logging roads.

The Forest Practices Board is an independent public watchdog, established in 1995, that publishes reports about compliance with the Forest Practices Code and the achievement of its intent.The board's main roles under the Forest Practices Code are:

• Investigating public complaints.
• Auditing government enforcement of the code.
• Auditing forest practices of government and licence holders on public lands.
• Undertaking special investigations of code-related forestry issues.
• Participating in administrative reviews and appeals.
• Providing reports on board activities, findings and recommendations.