Oregon seeks revision of roadless forests rule

GRANTS PASS, Ore. – Gov. Ted Kulongoski formally asked the Bush administration on Friday to amend its new roadless forests rule to give states greater certainty logging can be kept out of undeveloped areas to protect clean water and wildlife habitat.

The formal petition called upon the U.S. secretary of agriculture to give states the option of adopting the 2001 roadless policy created under the Clinton administration, which barred commercial logging in undeveloped areas of national forests. In addition to ensuring more certainty for a state role, the change would save money for states and the federal government.

“The administration said when it was going to replace the Clinton rule that it intended to give governors a meaningful role in future roadless protection, but the rule we saw was far from that promise,” said Mike Carrier, natural resources adviser to Kulongoski.

He said it created a burdensome and “unnecessarily duplicitous” process without providing the governors any certainty about the outcome.

“Laughably, when the administration published its May rule it had a memo that had an estimate of $75,000 to $150,000 for each state to go through the process,” Carrier said. “No state concluded that was a reasonable number.”

Estimates ranged from several hundred thousand dollars to millions of dollars, he said.

“And it’s not worth it when you consider the fact that there is just not the certainty at the end of the day that the secretary of agriculture will adopt the governor’s recommendations,” Carrier said.

The petition comes a month and a half after Kulongoski joined California and New Mexico in a lawsuit to overturn the Bush administration roadless rule.

The Democratic governor has said he would protect all of the roadless areas in Oregon from logging to maintain sources of clean water and critical fish and wildlife habitat.

“We are happy to receive Gov. Kulongoski’s petition and look forward to working with the governor as soon as he withdraws his lawsuit,” Agriculture Undersecretary Mark Rey said in an e-mail.

Carrier said the governor would hold off making a proposal under the Bush administration rule until he sees how the lawsuit and petition fare, and how other states’ proposals are received.

The Clinton administration rule was based on the idea that roadless areas, which had escaped development due mostly to their remote and rugged terrain, were more valuable for clean water and wildlife habitat than timber.

After a federal court declared the rule illegal, the Bush administration created a new one, which gives governors the option of proposing whether roadless areas should be developed, but leaves the final decision up to the Bush administration. It opened for consideration 1.2 million acres in Oregon – 60 percent of the 2 million acres of roadless, which amount to 13 percent of the 15.6 million acres of national forest in Oregon.

“The Clinton roadless rule was found to be illegal because it took shortcuts in the process and now our governor wants that illegal rule reinstated,” said Chris West, vice president of the American Forest Resource council, a timber industry group. “It sounds like the governor only wants to play by his set of rules.”

Environmental groups have filed a similar lawsuit to overturn the Bush administration rule, and launched a petition campaign last week to reinstate the 2001 rule.

“The administration’s new roadless policy has created nothing more than confusion and ambivalence and anger with their new process,” said Rob Vandermark, director of the Heritage Forests Campaign.

Jay Ward of the Oregon Natural Resources Council said the deadline for Oregon’s proposal on whether to allow logging in roadless areas is only a year away, and he hoped the governor would hedge his bets and prepare a proposal, no matter what the cost.

Timber production has been steadily going down on national forests since high levels of logging in the 1980s led to lawsuits that won safeguards for fish and wildlife habitat, such as the Northwest Forest Plan. They account for less than 5 percent of national lumber consumption.

A recent report by the Conservation Biology Institute in Portland found that in addition to providing important fish and wildlife habitat, roadless areas contain 500,000 acres of watersheds that supply drinking water, including those of the cities of Pendleton, Bend and Ashland, said Dominick DellaSala of the World Wildlife Fund.