Four Chiefs’ Roadless Letter: Our Colorado Experience Was Different on Fuel Treatment and Need for Road Maintenance

Comments on Roadless are due Friday. As a person who worked for six years on Colorado Roadless and read many, many public comments, including all of them during one iteration, I encourage you to be clear upfront whether you want to keep it as is, change it, or remove it. Most of the people I know want to change it. Those of us with experience in Colorado, Idaho and Alaska, employees, former employees, and the public, probably have some ideas about how to tune up  the 2001, and how not to.  If you have particular issues with it, or things you think are important to keep, be clear about those also.

As a goal for a tune-up, I can’t say it any better than Chris Wood said on an old TSW post on the Idaho Rule.

“The Idaho rule is a demonstration of what can happen when common sense is applied to a common problem for the common good,” Wood said.

Certainly this kind of “once every 25 year tune-up: could be initiated with the same goal.

I ran across this letterfrom four former Forest Service Chiefs on Roadless, so I thought it would be interesting to take a look.
The four Chiefs seem to be in the “fix it’ camp, but they might be in the “don’t do anything but if you feel you need to fix it, here are our ideas for the process.”

We urge you to consider additional alternatives that would require a collaborative, transparent process to identify potential changes that would protect roadless values and allow additional flexibility for addressing wildfire risks to communities.

I disagree with two of their arguments, which I don’t think would matter so much, except I’ve seen the same arguments in other letters as well.
From the letter:

There is the assertion that the Rule restricts fire prevention and wildfire suppression efforts and that more flexibility is needed to reduce fire risk near the urban-wildland interface. The 2001 Rule specifically permits activities aimed at preventing and mitigating wildfire risks. In fact, nearly 2 million acres of roadless areas have been treated to reduce fire risk in recent years. Significantly more resources need to be directed toward the critical work of reducing fire risk in and around human habitation-the wildland urban interface.

We don’t know how much of the 2 mill acres they cite was managed fire, prescribed fire or mechanical treatment. It would be interesting to know, and where exactly those projects were.
But the fact is that D and R state and federal administrations all agreed that the 2001 language needed to be clarified, and exceptions made for fuel treatment in those plain words. 

I. Colorado Did Not Agree That Thing are Fine with the 2001 Language With Regard to Fuel Treatments

In Colorado, we found the language of the 2001 Rule to have two problems in terms of fuel treatment. One is legal and is due to the language of the tree-cutting provisions, and the other deals with on-the-ground conditions and the need for temporary roads.

Legal

Here’s the language in the 2001 Rule.

1) The cutting, sale, or removal of generally small diameter timber is needed for one of the following purposes and will maintain or improve one or more of the roadless area characteristics as defined in § 294.11.

(i) To improve threatened, endangered, proposed, or sensitive species habitat; or

(ii) To maintain or restore the characteristics of ecosystem composition and structure, such as to reduce the risk of uncharacteristic wildfire effects, within the range of variability that would be expected to occur under natural disturbance regimes of the current climatic period;

So suppose you had a stand of dead lodgepole next to a community as in the photo above. Is it generally small diameter? Yes, compared to bigger trees elsewhere.  But all the trees are more or less the same size, so I suppose folks could go to court and argue that if they are all 8 inches, you can’t take any trees out because they are not “smaller” diameter compared to others in the stand.

Remember this case on the Los Padres?

The panel held that the Forest Service’s conclusion that the Tecuya Ridge Project was consistent with the Roadless Area Conservation Rule was arbitrary and capricious. The panel held that the Forest Service’s determination that 21-inch dbh trees were “generally small timber” was arbitrary and capricious.

Since timber production is not a big  value on the LP, a person might think that fuels practitioners made this decision.  This language meant that the requirements of the Roadless Rule. clearer language in the Rule might have saved everyone time and effort.

You could also argue that a stand of lodgepole burning up is a “characteristic disturbance regime” of the current climatic period. Throughout history, lodgepoles have started after fires, grown old, got attacked by bark beetles, died and burned up.  Sounds pretty characteristic.

But the climate is changing.. so. Climate change is not specifically addressed in the 2001 Rule, because it wasn’t as much a part of the general discussion then. T

Instead, in the Colorado Rule (which I would argue is also way more wordy and complex than necessary) hazardous fuel reduction near communities is called out specifically. There are other requirements, but I didn’t post them all here.  Also note that the Colorado Rule was finalized under a D Federal and D State Administration.

Notwithstanding the prohibition in paragraph (a) of this section, trees may be cut, sold, or removed in Colorado Roadless Areas outside upper tier acres if the responsible official, unless otherwise noted, determines the activity is consistent with the applicable land management plan, one or more of the roadless area characteristics will be maintained or improved over the long-term with the exception of paragraph (5) and (6) of this section, and one of the following circumstances exists:

(1) The Regional Forester determines tree cutting, sale, or removal is needed to reduce hazardous fuels to an at-risk community or municipal water supply system that is:

(i) Within the first one-half mile of the community protection zone, or

(ii) Within the next one-mile of the community protection zone, and is within an area identified in a Community Wildfire Protection Plan.

On-the-ground conditions

I’m not familiar with the Idaho Rule but if we believe Google AI

Permitted fuel treatment activities
Fuel treatments are permitted in certain Idaho Roadless Areas (IRAs), particularly those designated as “Backcountry/Restoration”. The permissible activities include:

Within a community protection zone: Reducing hazardous fuels is allowed if the project retains large trees appropriate for the forest type.
Outside a community protection zone: Treatments are permitted if there is a significant risk that a wildfire would adversely affect an at-risk community or municipal water supply.

In Colorado, we found that the “no temp roads” was a handicap in reducing fuels, even near communities. In some places we visited, you can’t run prescribed fire through unless you remove some fuel. In some places, stands are too thick to thin, drop the trees and pile or broadcast burn. Temp roads are needed to remove material, even just to prepare the area for a prescribed burn. That’s why the Colorado Rule specifically allows this, with RF approval and distance limits:

The Regional Forester determines a temporary road is needed to facilitate tree cutting, sale, or removal (§ 294.42(c)(1)) within the first one-half mile of the community protection zone to reduce the wildfire hazard to an at-risk community or municipal water supply system;

II. Other Colorado Rule Exceptions.  The Chiefs ask in their letter:

Are there changes in the past 25 years that require additional allowances or exceptions? If so, we encourage an open conversation with the community of interests to address potential changes to the Rule.

I agree that some kind of public process is necessary, and I have ideas  of what and what not to do.  But we already know that folks in Idaho and Colorado identified some that are not limited to those states.

In Colorado, those included water conveyance structures, fuel treatment, linear construction zones (tightening up on following the Bull Mountain Lawsuit), a ski area, and methane drainage wells. Idaho had others.  That’s the beginning of a possible list.

III. Permanent Roads that Require Funding Were Never the Issue (at least in Colorado)

One argument of the four Chiefs and others that sounds plausible is this one:

This begs the question; how many roads do we really need within the national forest system and how much do they cost to maintain? The maintenance backlog on roads and other Forest Service facilities has gotten worse and will continue to degrade as more personnel are fired or leave the agency and budgets are cut. Why invest in new roads when the Forest Service cannot maintain its existing infrastructure investments?

Until you look under the hood.  Temp roads for removal of fuels wouldn’t be maintained.. because they’re.. temporary and the contractor or purchaser builds and removes them. The only possible permanent roads we ran across are those that would be maintained by the people building them.. for dam maintenance, access for power line maintenance, or whatever. As far as I can remember no one ever asked for permanent roads in roadless areas.  Maybe that’s something the Admin wants to do? But we don’t know that.

Maybe some people in Idaho wanted new permanent roads? Hopefully someone will engage here who worked on the Idaho or Alaska Rules and we can get a better idea of the different approaches to fuel treatments and temporary roads.