More Time Granted For Feedback On Ecosystem Plan Forest Service And Blm Extend Community Hearings To April 6

The federal government is giving people more time to comment on a regional ecosystem management effort while it studies how the project will affect communities in several states.

Congress ordered the additional study in the 1998 Interior Appropriations bill, prompting the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management to extend the public comment period from Feb. 6 until April 6. It is the second time the comment period has been extended for the Interior Columbia Basin Ecosystem Management Project.

That will give the Forest Service and BLM time to study how different land management alternatives will affect the economic and social conditions of communities in all or part of seven states, said Andy Brunelle of the project team.

However, it will be difficult to provide fine detail because the Ecosystem Management Project is a fairly broad study. For example, the project sets timber harvest for all of Idaho and Western Montana at 950 million board feet a year under the government’s preferred alternative - about 200 million board feet more than the current harvest.

Local managers are given the discretion of figuring out which national forests those trees come from, making it more difficult to predict how each community will fare, the Forest Service said.

Instead, “I think we can talk about different types of communities, depending upon specialization - such as agriculture, timber or trade center,” Brunelle said. The economics and social study also will look at how isolated a community is and its proximity to federal land.

The new study will not be able to predict all of the possible economic and social affects from Canadian log exports, changes in the housing market, overseas demand for American lumber or timber companies acquiring plantations and production overseas.

The document will be released in mid-February and will be mailed to 5,000 addresses.

Meanwhile, the project has received about 70,000 comments. The Ecosystem Management Project covers 72 million acres of Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management lands in eastern Oregon and Washington, Idaho, Western Montana, northern Nevada and parts of Utah and Wyoming.

It was started in 1993 to give a more comprehensive approach to economic and environmental issues, such as salmon recovery, forest and rangeland health.

, DataTimes