Budget Battle May Bite Into Forest Plan Reworked Bill Reduces Scope Of Rangelands Project

A management plan for federal forests and rangelands between the Cascade crest and the Rockies has become a pawn in the budget battle between Congress and President Clinton.

For the past two years, 50 scientists, planners and other federal officials, working out of Walla Walla, have been assessing the present and plotting the future of the 75 million acres of national forest and Bureau of Land Management land on the dry side of the mountains.

Their charge is to prepare a management plan that is as comprehensive as Clinton’s “Option 9” forest plan for the west side of the Cascades. That plan reduced logging in federal forests in Western Washington, Western Oregon and northwestern California to about one-fifth the level of the 1980s.

But now their work may be cut short.

Northwest lawmakers, backed by timber and agricultural interests, have inserted language in an Interior appropriations bill that would narrow the project’s scope and bar the administration from imposing any sweeping changes based on its findings.

The idea is to get away from “one-size-fits-all” regulation, says Rep. George Nethercutt, R-Wash. “I think there’s great benefit to decentralizing these decisions.”

The provision, inserted by Nethercutt and Sen. Slade Gorton, R-Wash., is one of dozens of environmental “riders” that Congress has tacked onto the spending and deficit-reduction bills now at an impasse.

While the Clinton administration opposes the Nethercutt and Gorton rider, environmentalists worry the president could still approve it if it’s part of an acceptable spending bill.

Vice President Al Gore has labeled the rider “a shortsighted action” that would “guarantee more court battles and legal gridlock.”