The Washington County Board of Supervisors met Tuesday. On the agenda was the Sockum Ridge Recreation Area Timber Project. Washington County Conservation Executive Director Zach Rozmus gave a presentation on the proposed plan for the area as well as the bids that they received for the timber harvest. Rozmus stated, “I want to preface this at the very beginning, that everything that we are talking about here today is with the idea of, you go down to Sockum and it is predominantly white oak timber with hickories kind of sprinkled throughout it. But one of the things that we are experiencing here especially in Southeast Iowa is that we have a lot of Oak wilt, random Oak death, so we’re trying to do some management practices that fifty years from now, maybe seventy five a hundred years from now, you’re going to be able to do to Sockum Ridge, you’re going to be able to see the same park that you see today.” The cleanup of Sockum Ridge began in 2018. This next step is to do a select harvest of the trees. They will be picking out the trees that may have compromising factors, such as a lean or random oak death. The goal is to leave the trees that are good producers of acorns and to remove the trees that may cause problems in the future. Washington County Conservation is working directly with the Iowa DNR District Forestry on this project.