RoadlessLocalSayToCome

By JOE GROSSMAN, UPI Science News

WASHINGTON, May 4 (UPI) - - Agriculture Secretary Ann M. Veneman announced early this afternoon that the Roadless Rule devised under the Clinton Administration would be allowed go into effect on May 12, 2001. However, the entire rule-making process will be reopened, probably by June of this year.

The decision may not directly effect six current lawsuits against the Government that aim to stop the Roadless Rule and it is still possible that a judge may halt implementation prior to the May 12 starting date. Secretary Veneman and Forest Service Chief Dale Bosworth repeatedly said at their joint news briefing that local input would be sought in developing the new rule.

"We agree that we need a common sense approach to roadless protection, one that addresses legitimate concerns in a fair and reasonable way," Veneman said. Although the Roadless Rule now scheduled to go into effect May 12 took about a year and a half to go through the entire review process, Veneman said rules can take ten years to develop, although that was not expected to be the case.

Bosworth said, "I've been with the Forest Service for 35 years and we've been struggling with the Roadless Rule for that whole time. . . I don't want to imply that we have the magic answer yet."

Both Veneman and Bosworth indicated that under the rule changes they have in mind that changes in forest plans would be approved at a local level. This will allow roadless areas to be either elected or discarded in any of the national forests and will effectively end any national roadless plan.

Each of the approximately 150 national forests have traditionally taken local input when revising their plans. Although review occurs at the regional level and in Washington, plans usually bear a local imprint.

Earlier this week, 300 leading environmental scientists presented a letter to President Bush, saying that "we feel it wise that the few remaining, intact roadless areas with the national forest be preserved." The scientists thanked the President "for considering our views on this matter of vital importance to the national ecological health."

Republican Senator Larry Craig of Idaho said after the announcement today that, "The Administration's decision to revise the rule is the first step in bringing justice to what the courts have found to be obvious violations of the National Environmental Policy Act."

Democratic Senator Maria Cantwell of Washington said this afternoon, "Given (the) level of public participation and support, I believe it will be extremely difficult for the Administration to make any changes that people perceive as threatening those protections or weakening the Roadless Forest Protection Rule."

Much has been made of the fact that attorney General John Ashcroft said he would uphold the laws of the land at his confirmation hearing. During his confirmation hearing in January, Ashcroft was asked about the roadless rule by Senator Maria Cantwell of Washington, and answered, "Very frankly, I'm not familiar with this rule. And I would have to examine it carefully and make a decision based on the outcome of my consultation with members of the department and others in the process."

Reaction from the environmental community was swift and critical. Tiernan Sittenfeld, a conservation advocate with the U.S. Public Interest Research Group said, "By announcing that it will modify the forests rule, the Bush Administration is caving to the special interests yet again rather than protecting our national forests. The Administration has said it plans to allow a rule to protect our national forest roadless areas to go forward, but that it will give local officials power to modify the plan on a case by case basis."

The Bush Administration will submit its Court-ordered report detailing what it plans to do about the Roadless Rule later today. The report was ordered during proceedings in a lawsuit brought by a diverse group of interests to stop the Roadless Rule from going into effect.

The Roadless Rule sets aside 90,000 square miles of national forest as officially roadless and off-limits to most development. The rule prohibits maintaining existing roads or building new ones, except under emergency conditions. Logging, mining and drilling are essentially prohibited.

The case that forced the Administration report today, pits timber giant Boise Cascade, snowmobile groups, the Kootenai tribe, several Idaho counties and two cattle ranchers as plaintiffs seeking to overturn the rule, against the former heads of the U.S. Forest Service and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, as defendants. In reality, it is the agencies and the Government that must respond in a Federal Court in Idaho with Judge Edward J. Lodge hearing the case.

The Bush Administration is in the position of having to defend a rule they do not support and a number environmental groups have been granted official intevenor status by the Court to actively defend the rule.

The intervenors state that the Department of Justice is making no attempt to save the rule. "They are setting up a process that allows individual national forests to opt out of the roadless rule on a case by case basis. It would pretty thoroughly gut the rule," Nathaniel Lawrence, attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council, told United Press International. Lawrence is defending the rule in Federal Court in Idaho.

The plaintiffs argue that proper procedure was not followed in establishing the rule. They claim that: the 60-day public hearing period was too short; that Forest Service presenters at the hearings were ill-prepared and unable to answer questions as to the location of the roadless areas, and that at least five Acts of Congress were violated.
The plaintiffs ask that a preliminary injunction be granted by the Court to prevent the rule from going into effect on May 12, or irreparable harm will be done to the plaintiffs. The rule, originally set to go into effect on March 13, 2001, was postponed several months ago on President Bush's instructions.

On April 5, Judge Lodge issued an order in which he stated that he believed that the plaintiff's claims had merit and that they would likely succeed in trial, thereby laying the ground work for issuing a preliminary injunction. However, the Judge wrote that the issue of irreparable injury was premature and would have to wait until the Bush Administration said what it was going to do about the Roadless Rule. The Judge then set today as the deadline for a statement from the Administration as to their intent.

When the rule was published in the Federal Register on January 12, the Forest Service stated that, "The straightforward nature of the proposed rule and the sheer volume of comments received are compelling evidence that there was an adequate opportunity for the public to be heard, and sufficient information for officials to make a reasoned and informed decision." More than 20,000 people attended the meetings and more than a million comments were received.
Much of the case complaint revolves around whether or not the hundreds of meeting held around the country were adequate.

In their complaint, the plaintiffs accuse the former Secretary of Agriculture Daniel Glickman and former Chief Forester of USDA Forest Service, Michael Dombeck of "having embarked upon an unprecedented and illegal scheme to permanently prevent road and trail construction and reconstruction in ‘inventoried roadless areas' of the national forests . . . In their hurried efforts to unilaterally impose a federal lands legacy as directed by the Clinton Administration Defendants have done violence to numerous statues designed to safeguard the environment."

Intevenor attorneys Douglas L. Honnold of Earthjustice Legal Defense Fund and Nathaniel Lawrence of the Natural Resources Defense Council both told UPI they believe all applicable law was followed in completing the Roadless Rule.
Christine Jourdain, Executive Director of one the American Council of Snowmobile Associations, one of the plaintiffs, told UPI they got involved in the lawsuit because "We just felt shutout . . . You would ask for information and it was never available . . . The Forest Service people on the local level didn't know anything. I felt sorry for them."

But John McCarthy, conservation director for the Idaho Conservation League, one of the intervenors defending the Roadless Rule, told UPI he attended more than five of the meetings. At the meetings held in late 1999 to discuss the general idea of the rule there was not a lot of detail, but that at the public meetings in 2000, about the actual proposed rule, there was very detailed information, McCarthy told UPI.

"They had extensive documentation, extensive maps, you could find on the maps and through the documentation whether any land that you knew about in the national forest was included in this project or not." Forest Service staff were well-prepared to answer questions, McCarthy added.

The reality of the public hearings may be relatively easy for a judge to decide, since extensive records are kept of the meetings. There are tape recordings and there are thousands of members of the public who gave testimony and who could be subpoenaed to testify as to the nature of the hearings.