Roadless area plan nearly complete

BOISE – The U.S. Forest Service is close to finishing a plan for managing more than 9.3 million acres of roadless backcountry in Idaho.

The agency released a final environmental impact statement on the proposed Idaho roadless rule Friday. The Forest Service expects to release a final draft of the proposed rule in 30 days.

The plan is the culmination of a lengthy process to determine how Idaho’s roadless areas and other untouched lands will be managed, preserved or opened to logging and other uses.

While revisions to the proposed rule include further land protections and have appeased some environmentalists who earlier criticized the proposal, national conservation groups such as the Wilderness Society say the Idaho rule undercuts a federal roadless policy that former President Bill Clinton issued before leaving office in January 2001.

The federal Roadless Area Conservation Rule banned development and road building on almost one-third of the nation’s 192 million acres of national forest land. The Bush administration repealed that rule in 2005, allowing states to petition the federal government with their own management plans for individual forests.

“The state-by-state approach just undermines what we tried to do in 2001, to have a nationwide policy,” said Craig Gehrke, regional director for the Wilderness Society in Boise.

Some states, including Washington, Oregon and California, have sued to challenge the Bush administration policy.

The Idaho plan has been revised, based on nearly 140,000 public comments and recommendations from several groups, including the federal Roadless Area Conservation National Advisory Committee, said Brad Gilbert, the Forest Service’s team leader on the Idaho roadless plan.

The federal advisory committee wrote a letter to the U.S. Department of Agriculture in May after reviewing an earlier draft of the proposed rule and suggested moving 200,000 acres in Idaho out of the general forest category and into the more protective “backcountry restoration” category.

Other changes the Forest Service made to the proposed rule included better definitions of where road construction and tree removal is allowed in the case of threatening fire activity. That section of the rule has since been further defined to include communities within a buffer zone of about one mile to a mile and a half from the roadless areas.

“We really tried to respond to as many groups and as many interests as we could,” Gilbert said.

Those revisions are the reason the Idaho Conservation League, a group that previously joined more than 50 environmental groups in criticizing earlier drafts of the plan, now supports the proposed rule.

Jonathan Oppenheimer, the league’s senior conservation associate, called the plan “greatly improved” on Friday.

“Some of the most significant concerns had to do with the lack of clarity, that it would have allowed for road building and logging on millions of acres,” Oppenheimer said. “It just wasn’t clear where the threshold was.”