The Obama administration is withdrawing a controversial Bush-era logging plan for millions of acres of federal forests in western Oregon.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said Thursday the plan, put forward last December in the final days of the Bush administration, violates federal law.

(An updated version of this story ran in Friday's Oregonian.)

The plan, called the Western Oregon Plan Revisions, "is based on a legally-indefensible process. It will not stand up in court," he said.

Secretary Salazar's announcement won't silence any chainsaws currently cutting in Oregon forests because no timber sales based on the logging plan have actually gone forward.

And now perhaps none will. That's a victory for conservationists and gives pause to rural Oregon counties who were hoping stepped-up logging would mean more revenue for them from federal timber receipts.

The secretary said the administration would also review the recovery plan for the northern spotted owl, and they will ask a federal court to throw out the Bush administration's revisions to habitat set aside for the endangered bird.

Thursday's announcement is the most recent of many Obama rollbacks of Bush-era natural resource rulings.

Getting special attention are those decisions that were influenced by Julie MacDonald, the former Deputy Assistant Secretary for Fish, Wildlife and Parks.

A Department of the Interior Inspector General's report found MacDonald was "heavily involved" with editing and reshaping reports from the department's scientists, including those working in Oregon.

Salazar referenced that report multiple times in his announcement, which comes as the Obama administration is facing upcoming court deadlines on conservationists' court challenges to both the logging plan and owl habitat rules.

The owl was listed under the Endangered Species Act in 1990, leading to dramatic reductions in federal lands logging in the Northwest and intervention by President Clinton four years later to set a path for managing the region's federal timber.

The result of that effort, The Northwest Forest Plan, was meant to protect the owl while providing a steady supply of logs.

But it never provided the amount of timber it envisioned, and despite the dramatic decrease in federal lands logging the owl's numbers continue to decline by nearly 4 percent a year, in part due to increased competition from barred owls.

"To have a plan that authorizes levels of timber production that aren't ever realized is obviously a false promise," Secretary Salazar said.

A timber industry lawsuit over the Northwest Forest Plan led the Bureau of Land Management, which oversees about a quarter of Oregon, to develop a new logging plan for its Coast Range forests.

In developing the logging plan, commonly called the WOPR (pronounced "whopper"), the BLM held more than 170 public meetings and received almost 30,000 comments, most of them opposed to additional logging.

"We don't want that work to be lost. It will form the foundation of our efforts to revise and put in place a plan that is sustainable legally and based on sound science," said Tom Strickland, Interior's Assistant Secretary for Fish, Wildlife and Parks.

Strickland said the department did not have a specific time line for rewriting the plan, which would have doubled logging allowed on about 2.5 million acres of BLM-managed land, raising $75 million annually for distribution to 18 counties for programs like libraries and law enforcement and creating 1,200 new timber jobs, the agency estimated.

Environmental groups and their attorneys argued in court that the BLM didn't go through formal consultation with wildlfife agencies about the plan's impact on imperiled species like salmon and the spotted owl, as required by federal law.

The Obama adminstration agreed.

"Now, at a time when western Oregon communities are already struggling, we face the fallout of the previous administration's skirting of the law and efforts to taint scientific outcomes," Secretary Salazar said.

As of today, the management of western Oregon forests under care of the BLM reverts to the older Northwest Forest Plan, the secretary said.

"The impact is huge. It's going to be very significant," said Doug Robertson, a Douglas County commissioner.

Robertson's county is one of many in Oregon receiving federal payments to replace its share of declining timber revenues. But those payments will be cut off in two years. And counties were hoping timber sales put forward under WOPR would increase the flow of money to their coffers from federal lands.

With the logging plan now thrown out, Salazar said his agency was working to quickly identify logging projects that could move forward to create jobs and send lumber to mills.

Those would likely focus on smaller trees, which are less controversial. But any potential logging sale faces the threat of a lawsuit from conservation groups.

"We are going to concentrate on those areas that we think can get through the process," Secretary Salazar said.

-- Matthew Preusch; mattpreusch@news.oregonian.com; Twitter: mpreusch