Columbia Basin Plan Could Die Hostile Critics, More Expense May Halt Work

It studies an area the size of France - 144 million acres in parts of seven states.

It’s been five years in the making, has cost about $40 million and comes with roughly 7,000 pages in supporting documents.

And on Thursday, Inland Northwest congressional leaders said they’re not sure it’s even worth completing.

A draft version of the massive Interior Columbia Basin Ecosystem Management Project was almost universally panned at a congressional hearing in Spokane Thursday.

“Clearly, there are expectations here that have not been met,” said U.S. Sen. Larry Craig, R-Idaho.

Started in 1993, the project was designed to be a comprehensive effort to consistently manage federal land between the Cascades and Rocky Mountains.

But loggers, farmers and resource industry officials said Thursday the plan was too vague and could lead to one-size-fits-all land management.

Elected officials from rural areas said they worried about a loss of local control in decision-making in a plan that focuses too much on saving salmon.

A lone man representing environmental groups said he feared congressional leaders would let the plan be continually watered down by industry lobbyists.

In fact, the only point agreed upon by most who testified Thursday was that the plan should be stopped.

“This was promised to be different,” said Dale White, a commissioner in rural Harney County, Ore. “The promise was broken.”

“The motto in the environmental community right now is ‘fix it or nix it,”’ said Mark Solomon, of the Inland Empire Public Lands Council.

The idea behind the project was to evaluate the health of resources - forests, grasslands, wildlife - in a region that stretches from Wenatchee to Missoula and Canada to the tip of Utah.

From the plan, the area’s 74 separate forests and BLM areas - covering more than 70 million acres of federal land - would develop individual plans.

Such an ecosystem-wide approach, it was thought, would help eliminate the likelihood that critics could sue the BLM and Forest Service over management plans that have in the past been largely inconsistent.

But critics, a handful of whom picketed outside the hearing Thursday at Spokane City Hall, contend the plan is too broad for detailed review. For example, it sets timber harvest for all of Idaho and Western Montana, rather than forest-by-forest.

“It will tell you that x-number of roads will be closed, but it doesn’t say whether it’s this road or that road,” said Eric Williams, a resource consultant in Cheney.

Critics also said they lost faith in the plan after Forest Service Chief Mike Dombeck unveiled earlier this year an 18-month moratorium on logging and road-building on 33 million acres of forest land.

Dombeck said the moratorium was based on scientific evidence that came out as a result of planning. Critics fear it was designed to circumvent that planning.

“This moratorium’s an edict applied nationwide,” White said. “It’s not based on science; it’s based on politics.”

The plan also was to include a socio-economic analysis, so rural communities could know how it would affect their livelihoods.

But that analysis has left many skeptical.

Othello was “listed as a community in which there is no agricultural employment specialization,” said U.S. Sen. Slade Gorton, R-Wash. So was Pasco, Wenatchee and Moses Lake.

“The quality of that analysis is rather shuddering,” Gorton said.

Forest officials told the senators up to $6 million more would be needed before a final draft of the plan was adopted. The Clinton administration also has estimated it would cost agencies about $268 million a year to implement the program.

Funding, Craig and Gorton said, is where Congress comes in.

“In the next few weeks, the Congress will have to decide how and if we go forward,” Craig said.