The Smokey Wire : National Forest News and Views
Community Sourced, Shared and Supported
So what’s wrong with this? Better to gamble taxpayer dollars on a losing hand?
Some observations about the recently revised Kootenai forest plan.
Robyn King, president of the stakeholders’ group, said her organization hasn’t taken a stand on the broader forest plan, although they did publicly support the East Reservoir Project that could result in several small-to-medium timber sales in Lincoln County this year.
“As you can imagine, due to the diversity of our group, there are quite a few opinions about the new forest plan! The coalition did not work together on a joint response to the forest plan,” King said.
Peck points to the stakeholders’ group as an example of how forest management should take place. “The best solutions come from the closest spot to the impact. Who better to make the decisions than a diverse group of people living here, in and around the forest?”
That involvement will continue, promised King. “What we are looking forward to is our continued involvement at the project level collaborating with each other and with the United States Forest Service to find common ground agreements on vegetative management for the forest,” she said.
Despite the hype associated with the 2012 planning rule’s foray into collaboration, I think this is a more realistic approach. The broader, regional and national interests that are hard to collaborate with are more relevant to overall strategic planning for national forests than to specific projects. In addition, the track record so far for collaboration for forest plan revisions is not encouraging. I would be more inclined to agree with Peck’s statement if he is talking about a project that is being developed consistent with a forest plan that reflects broader interests.
The latest on Montana, giving credit where credit is due (i.e. there’s nothing ‘grassroots’ about it):
“The American Lands Council is leading the charge on this. I’m not a member, but I do appreciate that they’re helping elected officials get better educated on this,” Fielder said.
I’m sure that education includes these facts:
ALC bases much of its justification for lands transfer on sections in the Western states’ Enabling Acts that say the federal government “is obligated to extinguish title to additional lands.”
But a University of Utah legal analysis published in October found that phrase applied only to Indian lands, not public lands. The analysis also outlined several laws and Supreme Court decisions that firmly establish federal control of public lands.
“As the owner of public lands, the United States holds the public lands ‘in trust for the people of the whole country,’ not solely for the benefit of adjacent landowners,” the report said.
Someone came up with a new financial twist – give states the land, federal tax dollars keep paying for the upkeep:
Fielder said the state wouldn’t need that much money if the federal government were required to pitch in. “This catastrophic wildfire condition has grown on their watch. So keeping the federal government on the hook for helping with fire suppression is something we ought to look at,” Fielder said.
And these folks don’t like to collaborate:
But Fielder dismissed collaboratives as ineffective. “Citizens have very little chance to get their objectives inserted in federal land management plans because paid lobbyists are there at every meeting. They pretty much drown out the local community’s voice,” Fielder said.
I’m sure that’s based on a good set of facts, too.
Sometimes winning a lawsuit doesn’t get you anywhere.
“EPA has concluded that forest roads are a “major source of erosion from forested lands, contributing up to 90 percent of the total sediment production from forestry operations.
“In 2003, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ordered EPA to strengthen and correct rules for urban runoff that flows through small municipal storm sewer systems, and examine the evidence on forest road runoff to determine whether it is necessary to regulate that water pollution source.
“More than a decade later, EPA has failed to comply with the Court’s order on both issues. NRDC and EDC have filed a petition in the same Court that issued this order to enforce the duties it imposed on EPA.”
Aside from showing the difficulty of making the government so something, there are some forest planning implications. EPA will comment on forest plans, and the Forest Service should be paying attention to what EPA thinks is needed in the plans to mesh with their non-point source pollution permitting process (current or as influenced by this litigation).
One of the first of the new century (that started in 2012) of forest plans: “A summary of the proposed changes for the revised Francis Marion Land and Resources Management Plan.”
I just rediscovered this in the ‘drafts’ file. I think I was intending to share this as a concise example of how the Forest Service tends to view the changes from old plans to plans under the new planning rule. It does a better job of explaining ‘why’ than most. (Hopefully these explanations come from the required assessment.)
There is a summary of key changes on p. 2. Here are some things that I thought were noteworthy:
There is nothing in this article about travel planning that points out that the federal government is not required to follow the Grant County ordinance that is a key part of this meeting. Let’s assume that is because the forest supervisor didn’t bring it up. Is this a reasonable ‘get-along’ strategy, or does it encourage more Clive Bundy-think – that the federal government lacks authority?
I saw FOIA from the government side when I was a regional FOIA coordinator as an unfunded mandate that made agency staff drop their priority work, but then sometimes get bogged down in attempts to deny requests under changing administration policies regarding the “presumption of openness.” But when I hosted a FOIA conference, I invited a newspaper reporter as a guest speaker to offer the rest of the world’s perspective. Which is a lot like the one in this editorial.
This might get some more of this group interested in sage grouse.
This article on the Desert Renewable Energy Conservation Plan raises this question based on a rather extreme case of intimidating government documents. But it comes up on much simpler NEPA efforts where the agency states that the NEPA process is not about the number of “votes” received on a project. My legalistic response is that NEPA is about getting the facts right to form opinions, not about the opinions themselves, and that opinions can be offered at any time based on any set of facts (or lack thereof). But NEPA is also about providing both useable information and sufficient time for both the decision-maker and the public to understand it before a decision is made.
(I don’t know if there are many NEPA-nerds on this blog, and I don’t remember seeing any previous discussions, but I saw it was a ‘category.’)