Forestry rider could bypass public comment
BOISE – Certain logging projects and other smaller-scale U.S. Forest Service activities would be exempt from a long-held public comment and appeals process under a provision inserted into a spending bill and approved recently by a key Senate committee.
Sen. Conrad Burns, R-Mont., added the amendment to a multi-agency budget measure that sailed through the Senate Appropriations Committee last month.
No date has been set for a full vote in the Senate; spending bills before the House of Representatives do not contain the rider.
The move to steer the new forest policy through Congress is the latest in a back-and-forth between environmentalists who demand public comment on timber, mining and other Forest Service projects – no matter the size – and defenders of the Bush administration’s push to fast-track certain priorities, namely forest-thinning to combat wildfires.
The Burns amendment would overturn a 2005 ruling by a federal judge in California that thwarted Forest Service regulations written in 2003. That rule change would have repealed public comment on so-called “categorical exemptions” – smaller-scale projects the Forest Service says do not require lengthy environmental analysis.
For instance, the measure would allow bypassing public comment on proposed burn projects up to 4,500 acres and fuel-reduction logging projects up to 1,000 acres. The comment and appeals process lasts up to 90 days, and in some cases longer.
Environmentalists hailed the California ruling as a rebuke of the president’s Healthy Forests initiative, but are now grousing that Bush allies are again seeking to bypass the National Environmental Policy Act.
Marty Hayden, legislative policy director for Earthjustice in Washington, D.C., said the Burns amendment effectively censors from public view any project deemed harmless by forest supervisors.
“If you’re a logging company, lots of things look harmless,” he said. “But if you are a trout fisherman, a logging project might look more harmful. What Senator Burns is saying is the trout fisherman doesn’t have the right to know.”
Matt Mackowiak, a Burns spokesman, said critical projects are languishing under the weight of an unwieldy Forest Service bureaucracy. Officials are handcuffed in their efforts to prevent wildfires, open grazing lands and address a variety of forest management issues, he said.
“Senator Burns believes that right now, hundreds of fuels reduction projects that would treat over 1 million acres and protect local communities from wildfire are being needlessly delayed by court rulings,” he said in an e-mail to the Associated Press.
That argument is a red herring, said Matt Kenna, an attorney for the Western Environmental Law Center in Durango, Colo. The group was a plaintiff in Earth Island Institute v. Ruthenbeck, the California case that beat back the 2003 Forest Service rule changes.
Projects that have already passed the comments and appeals process sit idle on millions of acres of national forest for lack of money, Kenna said.
Dan Jiron, national spokesman for the Forest Service, said this summer’s combustible fire conditions in the West underscore the need for the policy change.
“People expect that administrative processes end at some point,” he said. “They expect things will get to the ground at some point.”
Another supporter of the Burns rider, Sen. Larry Craig, R-Idaho, said just because a logging project is exempt from public comment, it’s still subject to environmental laws.
“This rule change doesn’t allow forest managers to willy-nilly get around environmental regulations,” said Craig spokesman Sid Smith.
The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco has heard an appeal from the Forest Service to restore the 2003 rule change struck down by the lower court.
After the 2005 decision, the Forest Service halted all national forest activities normally exempt from public comment, including blueberry picking, weddings and mountain bike races.
The fallout reached a symbolic tipping point when the agency stalled the cutting of the annual U.S. Capitol Christmas tree from the Cuba National Forest in New Mexico.
The district judge clarified his ruling, saying that exemptions on comment and appeal only apply to minor activities like hunting permits, but not large-scale projects like logging or oil and gas drilling.