Update on Planning Rule Process

From the Planning Rule Team:

We’ve learned a tremendous amount about what should be in a new planning
rule since the Notice of Intent (NOI) was issued last December. We
received over 26,000 written comments on the NOI, over 300 blog comments
and have had over 40 public meetings attended by over 3000 people. We’ve
worked hard to get input from Tribes through our regional and national
Tribal roundtables; from scientists through the science forum and
scientists’ continued involvement throughout the roundtables; from Forest
Service employees through various internal feedback mechanisms; and from
other federal agencies through the Federal Interagency Working Group.
We’re committed to building a proposed rule and draft environmental impact
statement (DEIS) that reflect the diverse opinions and common themes that
have emerged from the public involvement process.

We’ve now entered a new phase of the rule development process. We are
currently finalizing the proposed rule and DEIS for clearance by the
Department of Agriculture and Office of Management and Budget. We expect
the proposed rule and DEIS to be published in the Federal Register in late
December.

We are committed to keeping planning rule development open, transparent and
participatory. Please take advantage of the following opportunities to
stay engaged over the coming months:
* We will continue to send out periodic updates on this listserv.
Encourage other people who you think would be interested to join as well.
Sign-up can be accessed from the right hand column of the planning rule
homepage or by going directly to this link.

* Check back often to the planning rule website for the latest information.

* While we won’t be looking for additional blog comments on the rule
substance until the proposed rule comes out in December, the planning rule
blog will continue to host discussions on what the public engagement
process should look like when the proposed rule is released. Visit the blog
here.

* You can also follow the Forest Service on Twitter here.

We will seek formal comment on the proposed rule and DEIS, and will hold
additional public meetings when the proposed rule and DEIS are published in
December.

Thank you again for your involvement in the rule development process. Your
continued participation in the process will be critical to its success.

Three Former Chiefs support Rocky Mountain Front Heritage Act

See this story on the three former FS chiefs supporting the Rocky Mountain Front Heritage Act.

“It’s sort of a special place. A wide variety of people have been working together for a long time and I think they’ve done an outstanding job,” (former Chief Dale) Bosworth said Tuesday. “But if they never see any outcome, they have to question of why they spent so much time together pounding something out.”

But despite its “uniqueness”, it seems like people could feel this way about many areas (this is a quote from a Save the Front factsheet):

Why is a Conservation Management Area needed? The 2007 Travel Plan is a good Forest Service commitment but will only be in place for 10 or 15 years. However, after that a future Forest Service supervisor or Washington, D.C. political appointee could make changes that would hurt the integrity of the land or limit local uses. For example, maybe a future Forest Supervisor will think it is a great idea to open new routes at the expense of stock travel and hiking. Reasonable side-boards on the Forest Service and the BLM will protect access for future generations of hikers, horseback riders, and mountain bike users in the same areas the forest plan allows today.

This quote reminded me of a quote from Mark Rey about the roadless issue in Martin Nie’s interview with him here

So when we came in, we looked at that history and we concluded that the crux of the problem with this issue is that it’s—on the one hand—an intensely political debate because it’s a basic resource allocation question over resources that people feel very strongly about. On the other hand, it’s a very technical debate because you’re trying to decide the fate of individual areas, putting boundaries around them that are based upon site specific data and so therefore you have to be able to amass and work with a substantial database to make good decisions.

In the case of trying to do a nationwide rule, you know you can get all the political closure you want to finally end the debate. You can have the president of the United States stand on the side of a ridge in southern Virginia and announce the outcome, but as the courts have told us, it’s hard to do justice to all the technical detail that is required to make the decision sound from the standpoint of a reviewing judge.

On the other hand, if you deal with this on a forest-by-forest basis, you can—by virtue of the fact that you have a lot less data to deal with—deal with it more intelligently.

The problem is that you can’t really get political closure to the decision because the decision is going to be made by a GS-14 or a GS-15 career civil servant and everybody knows that you can take the debate on up the food chain to see if you can get a better result. So you don’t get any real closure to the issue, both because of where it’s made and also because you don’t engage national interests to the same degree that you do in a national debate.

So we thought if we tried to find a middle road or a third path by working on a state-by-state basis, we could, on the one hand, reduce the size of the decision down to a manageable level, and on the other hand engage for the purposes of bringing better political closure to this, the one person who’s arguably elected to represent all the citizens of the state and that’s the governor, and that in a partnership with the governor we could get the right balance.

Have “lines on maps” and “what you can do on the ground effectively” decisions that have moved beyond being able to reach closure through the forest planning process? and beyond local civil servants?