Opinions vary on new rules for forest planning

They will slice through red tape, curb litigation, encourage public involvement and bring clarity to management of national forest lands. Or, they will do away with commitments and obligations, leaving the U.S. Forest Service to do as it pleases with less public influence.

Those are some of the varying predictions for new regulations the agency is using to develop long-range national forest plans, including one for the Flathead National Forest.

Whether they are hopeful or skeptical, observers say the planning regulations approved in January are an experimental sea-change from the 1982 regulations used to approve the last round of long-range forest plans.

"Since 1982, we've learned a lot about forest

planning," said Rob Carlin, the lead planner for the Flathead forest. "We've learned that long-term plans should be strategic rather than tactical."

The agency bills its new regulations as being designed to create forest plans that are "strategic and aspirational in nature."

The Forest Service bases that approach largely on two Supreme Court decisions that are cited prominently in the new regulations. One of the decisions, Norton v. Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, asserts that forest plans "are a preliminary step in the overall process for managing public lands."

"They're saying that the final agency action is at the project level," Carlin said. "Up until you make that decision, forest planning is merely guidance, and it doesn't compel you to do anything."

As a result, one of the biggest changes with the new regulations is the replacement of defined standards with strategic guidelines, objectives and "desired conditions" for the forest landscape.

"To some people, that amounts to a loss of accountability," Carlin said. "But to us, that's not necessarily the case."

The Forest Service is still obliged to pursue the goals, objectives and desired conditions in a forest plan. It cannot, for instance, pursue logging or mining in a proposed wilderness area.

But that's hardly reassuring to John Gatchell, conservation director for the Montana Wilderness Association.

"We view the long-range forest-management plan as a contract between the people who own the land and the people who are charged with managing it," Gatchell said. "Do you want that contract to be clear, or do you want it to be fuzzy and vague?"

Gatchell agrees that substantial problems existed with the old planning process.

"It was top down," said Gatchell, who was deeply involved with development of the current Flathead forest plan, a process that took several years.

And the old forest plans tended to have "hard-wired" timber targets that conflicted with other provisions in those plans, he added.

Gatchell says the quality of the plans varied from one forest to another. The Lolo National Forest plan "held up" fairly well, he said, largely because the Forest Service successfully incorporated input from the public.

But the Flathead forest plan, adopted in 1986, has been amended 24 times, with some of the amendments taking a couple of years to complete.

Although Gatchell says "the jury is out" about the outcome of the new planning regulations, he mainly is concerned about the clarity and commitments that will come with the next round of long-term forest plans.

"I think there are some serious problems with the new planning process, and the main one is whether it's going to carry any commitments," he said. "A good forest plan will actually help move forest management forward by providing clear direction. It should actually empower district rangers to make good decisions."

Fred Hodgeboom, president of Montanans for Multiple Use, sees benefits in the new regulations, but he also has concerns.

The previous regulations, Hodgeboom said, "required too much detailed analysis that provided too much fodder for litigation" that has hog-tied the Forest Service for the past 20 years.

"It was a never-ending spiral of appeals, litigation and amendments," said Hodgeboom, who, as the forest's timber-management officer, had a big hand in developing the 1986 Flathead Forest Plan. "And we ended up with a dead forest because of it. There was no management because it was all tied up in appeals and litigation."

But Hodgeboom, like Gatchell, is concerned that the Forest Service is bound to have more discretion with less specificity in a forest plan.

"It's kind of a two-edged sword," he said, "because it gives the Forest Service a lot more administrative discretion and requires less rigorous analysis and basis for what they are doing."

But the degree of analysis required by the 1982 regulations didn't necessarily provide a clear picture of the affects of forest-plan policies, Carlin said.

"When you assign numeric values in a forest plan, you often don't understand the impacts until you implement those values on the landscape," Carlin said.

A textbook example of this came with Amendment 19 to the current Flathead Forest Plan. The amendment established numeric standards for road densities in the forest and aimed to prove more habitat security for grizzly bears.

When the amendment was passed, it was estimated that it would require 300 miles of forest roads to be "decommissioned," but in time, as forest officials applied the standards from one grizzly bear security area to the next, it became apparent that it would involve the removal of more than 600 miles of road. It has been the most controversial provision in the Flathead Forest Plan.

The new regulations will allow for a forest plan that more easily can be revised and adapted to accommodate new scientific information or changes to the landscape, Carlin said.

Another troublesome aspect of the Forest Service's 1982 regulations, Carlin said, has been a single section that required the plans to maintain biological diversity, meaning, in part, "viable populations" of wildlife species.

The new regulations will discard copious case law pertaining to those provisions and others in the old regulations, Carlin said.

Repeatedly, national forests across the country have had timber sales and other projects challenged on the grounds that they violated the lengthy and often detailed biological-diversity provisions in their forest plans. The Flathead forest was forced to amend its forest plan to address old-growth forest management in a detailed fashion, and that amendment alone involved a huge Environmental Impact Statement. Even so, the adequacy of Amendment 21 and the legality of a timber sale called Meadow-Smith are being challenged in the courts.

The lawsuit, filed by Friends of the Wild Swan in 2003, alleges that the Meadow-Smith project would cause "irreparable injury" to old-growth forests and species that depend on old growth, and that the project violates forest-plan standards for big-game habitat.

Litigation along similar lines has pointed to the Forest Service's failures to satisfy forest-plan obligations to monitor certain wildlife species.

Joe Krueger, the Flathead forest's environmental-compliance coordinator, said those shortcomings were because of agency budget constraints that prevented population studies for so-called old-growth indicator species, such as the pileated woodpecker.

A decision from the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals eventually determined that the Forest Service could measure and provide habitat suitable for woodpeckers and other species, rather than having to count the critters.

Under the new forest plans, Carlin predicts, the agency still will have guidelines and desirable conditions that provide biological diversity, but it no longer will be tied to the long series of court decisions that directly pertain to the old regulations.

That doesn't mean litigation will end, however. Carlin acknowledges the potential for lawsuits to capitalize on vague, undefined language in forest plans. The Montana Constitution's seemingly simple guarantee of providing citizens with a "clean and healthful environment," for example, has led to voluminous case law.

The new planning regulations require a series of measures to frequently evaluate the effectiveness of a forest in meeting its planning guidelines and objectives. Carlin contends that the planning process will encourage more effective public involvement.

The Flathead forest recently released a "preferred option" for management areas that split the forest into different uses. During the next few months, he said, field tours and meetings will be held to encourage input from interested parties. That input will be used to adjust the single preferred option as necessary, he said.

Previous regulations required the agency to develop and analyze multiple alternatives for forest plans, and interested groups often would develop their own versions. These versions maximized forest conservation or resource extraction, and ultimately the Forest Service adopted a plan that compromised between the extremes, Carlin said.

Now the process aims to keep interested parties "at the same table," where the preferred plan can be adjusted, he said.

Reporter Jim Mann may be reached at 758-4407 or by e-mail at jmann@dailyinterlake.com.