No Map For Clinton Forest Plan Forest Service Says Impact Big, But Details Unavailable

Local Forest Service employees aren’t surprised by President Clinton’s plans to limit road building, logging and mining in more than 40 million acres of national forests.

But they also have no idea what it all means for the Idaho Panhandle, Clearwater, Kootenai and Colville national forests.

“It’s still an unknown to us exactly what we’re going to have to do,” Rick Roberts said from the agency’s Northern Region headquarters in Missoula.

Clinton’s plan addresses more than 2 million acres of road-free federal forests in Idaho and Washington.

Anthony Matthews, a forest planner for the Idaho Panhandle National Forests, said he learned about the plan from a few early newspaper articles about the anticipated announcement. Forest headquarters doesn’t get CNN, so Matthews and other local Forest Service staffers couldn’t watch the president unveil his roadless area plan Wednesday in Virginia’s George Washington National Forest.

“I read about it in the paper over the weekend,” Matthews said. “It was the first thing I saw on it.”

Conservationists said Clinton’s plan could guarantee protection of places such as the proposed 200,000-acre Great Burn Wilderness Area straddling the Montana border in the Clearwater National Forest or could ban logging proposed at Granite Mountain in the Colville National Forest.

Roadless areas generally contain trees that aren’t commercially valuable or hard-to-reach timber where it has been too expensive to build roads, said Larry McLaud of the Idaho Conservation League.

Most national forests, including those in the Inland Northwest, have lost money logging and road-building in 1993-1997, according to federal General Accounting Office studies. Conservationists argue the losses come from the agency’s tendency to log more in roadless areas, increasing the cost of getting low-value timber.

“The roadless country is roadless for a reason,” McLaud said. “It’s the worst timber ground but perhaps some of the best recreational ground that we have left.”

Idaho’s congressional delegation and the timber industry lambasted Clinton’s announcement. Western lawmakers sent Forest Service chief Mike Dombeck a letter denouncing “this step backward to feudal European politics.”

Industry leaders say logging limits on roadless areas remove local decision-making on federal forests and blocks efforts to stem insect infestations and wildfire.

“Drawing lines around areas on a map doesn’t protect them - only careful, thoughtful modern forestry can do that,” said Jim Riley, executive director of the Intermountain Forest Association.

The proposal - described as broad by top Forest Service staffers - comes with numerous potential pitfalls.

Congress could deny funding for creating future roadless areas. Alaska’s Tongass National Forest, with 10 million roadless acres alone, is currently included in Clinton’s proposal, but may be dropped.

“There’s a lot of mines in the road for this agency,” acknowledged Chris Wood, a top aide to Dombeck. “But there’s more problems if we don’t address it.”

The Clinton plan will target drinking water quality, fish and wildlife habitat and public forest values like recreation, Wood said.

Likening himself to Teddy Roosevelt, Clinton in his Wednesday speech directed the Forest Service to draw up regulations giving roadless areas long-term protection. Along with the 40 million acres known as roadless, his plan calls for preserving more acreage in smaller parcels not yet inventoried.

The plan doesn’t require congressional action and relies on regulations issued after Forest Service review, including several public comment periods.

A final regulation is due in a year.

In the Inland Northwest, the Clinton plan covers more than 2.4 million acres originally surveyed for roadless designation by the Forest Service in the 1970s and 1980s. The four national forests in the region - Colville, Panhandle, Clearwater and Kootenai - kept a little more than a million acres as roadless, with no mining or logging, in the 1980s.

But the rest - some 1.3 million acres - is open to logging.

Clinton’s plan would make the biggest splash in forest land that was inventoried as roadless but not protected as such in forest plans. It would also prevent the Forest Service from removing a forest’s roadless status.

This sidebar appeared with the story: CLOSER LOOK Possible impact Here’s how Clinton’s forest plan could affect the Idaho Panhandle, Colville, Clearwater and Kootenai national forests. Estimates refer to acreage that could be declared off-limits to roads, logging and mining: Panhandle - 521,000 acres Colville - as much as 132,128 acres Clearwater - 506,600 acres Kootenai - 127,000 acres