Revised plans for forests unveiled
Kootenai proposal: No 'recommended wilderness'
The Kootenai and Idaho Panhandle national forests unveiled their proposed forest-plan revisions Wednesday, with strikingly different approaches toward "recommended wilderness."
Kootenai supervisor Bob Castaneda infuriated wilderness advocates in October when he eliminated the "recommended wilderness" designation in a draft version of the forest-plan revision, replacing it with a new designation: "wild lands."
Meanwhile, the Idaho Panhandle revision proposal includes 138,900 acres of recommended wilderness.
The Kootenai's proposed revision has not changed since October, Castaneda said in a teleconference
Wednesday afternoon.
"Essentially what we were sharing with the public with the [forest-plan revision] map and suitable uses are still the same," Castaneda said.
Castaneda said that the forest's initial proposal for about 93,000 acres of "recommended wilderness" was met with considerable local opposition.
He said people "could not really agree" on what to do with several large areas - Scotchman Peaks in the West Cabinet Mountain Range, the Ten Lakes area and parts of the Northern Whitefish Divide, and the Northwest Peaks area in extreme northwest Montana.
"I was looking for a management strategy that protected wilderness values, but call it something other than recommended wilderness," he said.
Activities such as timber harvest, road building, and snowmobiling "would generally not occur" in the major wild-lands areas, which total about 127,000 acres, according to forest-plan-revision information distributed by the forest.
But that's acceptable to some groups that opposed the recommended-wilderness designations.
Donna O'Neil, president of the Kootenai Snow-Kats, said the designation essentially confers permanent protection to lands, establishing them as wilderness areas without a formal designation by Congress. Meanwhile, there is nothing permanent about areas of the forest that are used for motorized recreation.
"Wilderness is permanent but recreation isn't," she said.
O'Neil has praised Castaneda's "wild lands" designation as a change that "defused a bomb" on the forest. The change has led to recent negotiations between wilderness advocates and motorized-recreation groups, she said.
The discussions have involved "areas where they are willing to allow recreation to happen and some areas where there could be proposed wilderness designations," she said.
"They're not happy with the wild-lands designation," she said, "but it still protects what's on the ground."
Cesar Hernandez, northwest Montana field representative for the Montana Wilderness Association, contends that the wild-lands designation "doesn't mean squat" in terms of protecting wilderness values.
It was an "arbitrary" designation that easily could be disregarded by future forest supervisors, he said.
Hernandez contends that legal problems exist with the inconsistent planning approaches between the Kootenai National Forest and the Idaho Panhandle National Forest, and he thinks the forest has failed to meet "collaborative planning" requirements.
The "wild lands" designation hasn't actually smoothed over differences between wilderness advocates and others in Lincoln County, he said.
"You still have a county that is virtually as divided in forest planning now as it was when forest planning started," he said.
Doug Ferrell, a Trout Creek resident and member of the Cabinet Resource Group, has a similar view.
"How can the Forest Service even dream that their process for public involvement will have any credibility with the public?" he said in a Wednesday press release. "They have a lot of explaining to do, and at this point we are interested in action, not
bureaucratic excuses."
Ferrell added that "the forest supervisor made a sweeping and unprecedented decision without public involvement and in violation of the agency's own decision-making process."
Castaneda and Idaho Panhandle Supervisor Ranotta McNair stressed that the revision proposals launch another, more-intensive round of public comment during the next 90 days. The two forests will be holding about a dozen meetings in Lincoln and Sanders counties and in Idaho Panhandle communities throughout May.
More information on the proposed plans is available on the Internet at: