Commissioners approve forest-plan comments

By JIM MANN

The Daily Inter Lake

The Flathead County Commission has approved comments on a proposed forest-plan revision for the Flathead National Forest, with considerable disagreement over wilderness and timber management.

Commissioners Gary Hall and Bob Watne voted Wednesday to approve the recommendations developed by a county task force. Commissioner Joe Brenneman dissented. The deadline for commenting on the Flathead's long-term strategic forest plan is Sept. 7.

The Flathead County Forest Plan Task Force has been meeting regularly for several months, going through the proposed plan page by page, debating suggested amendments. The comments approved by the commission include 42 individual amendments, many of them minor changes that were agreed on by all 10 members.

But there were sharp divisions regarding the plan's provisions for timber management and recommended wilderness designations.

Brenneman said he opposed the task force recommendations partly because the task force voted 5-3 against a major recommended wilderness designation for the northern end of the Whitefish Range. He predicts that excluding the designation will result in litigation that will stall other provisions for forest management, to the detriment of the local timber industry.

Brenneman praised Commissioner Hall for his leadership in organizing the task force, but he said the integrity of the panel was undermined after the group's majority "forced" a straw-poll question regarding roadless areas onto the county's June primary ballot.

Several conservation-minded members quit shortly after, and that "soured the cohesion" of the task force, Brenneman claims.

Not so, said Hall, who participated in all the meetings as a nonvoting member, with state Sen. Greg Barkus, R-Kalispell, sitting as chairman of the task force.

Hall said that the remaining conservation members on the committee handpicked replacements for those who left. He said Flathead forest officials wanted input from a diverse group, and he insists that the task force was diverse, made up of individuals from a wide variety of personal and professional backgrounds.

But the majority was single-minded when it came to forest management, said Bill Baum, one of the original wilderness advocates on the task force.

"The task force was stacked by Gary Hall, and he knows it," said Baum, who wrote to Brenneman, strongly urging him to reject the group's recommendations.

"The task force's majority only represents themselves, a majority of this small committee, but only a small minority of Flathead County residents," Baum wrote, later suggesting that the majority was "monopolized" by Montanans for Multiple Use representation.

"I don't know what basis they have to make that statement," said Fred Hodgeboom, the only member of Montanans for Multiple Use who sits on the task force. "We had a vote in the primary election that contradicts that very strongly."

About 65 percent of those who voted in June supported the idea that roadless areas should be "managed for multiple-use purposes."

Hodgeboom said the majority of the task force opposed the forest-plan proposal to designate about 60,000 acres of federal forest around Thompson-Seton and Tuchuck mountains as "recommended wilderness." That amounted to 141,000 acres with that designation, a substantial increase over the 98,000 acres that are recommended for wilderness in the current forest plan.

Hodgeboom said there was concern that the designation would lead to the same type of regulatory restrictions reserved for true wilderness areas "before Congress ever declares it wilderness."

It would "institute de facto wilderness in areas that have historic motorized access by administrative decree," Hodgeboom said.

The panel voted unanimously to support areas around the Bob Marshall Wilderness Complex as "recommended wilderness" annexations.

For Baum and others in the minority, wilderness was the biggest issue.

"That's what the war was really over," he said, referring to spirited debates at task force meetings. "The North Fork is where the big fight is."

Baum argues that the most Americans "do not want to see our national forests under the control of those who would betray wildlife and their habitat for a small number of very vocal, politically active people wanting motorized recreational user access" in areas that should be protected.

"It's a national forest, it's not a county forest," Baum said.

Another major theme for the task-force majority is the proposed plan's general volume and budget-based approach toward timber management. The proposal projects, largely based on budgeting predictions, that about 25 million board-feet of timber would be harvested annually, compared with the current ceiling of 50 million board-feet that is "allowable" but never has been reached on the Flathead forest.

A strategic forest plan that is driven largely to achieve "desired conditions" on the forest should not prescribe timber harvest by volume or unknown budgeting conditions, the task force concluded.

The forest plan should define timber management in terms of "acres of treatments needed to achieve desired conditions," such as improving wildlife habitat or reducing fire fuel loads, the group concluded unanimously.

The task force takes issue with the proposed plan's provisions designating certain areas for low, medium or high intensity timber management. Instead, all areas with potential for timber harvest should be designated as "general forest, suitable for timber production," with management aimed at achieving desired conditions.

"Most task-force members believe including 'low intensity' to define permitted timber harvest would be a significant barrier to achieving desired conditions by providing fodder for needless appeals and lawsuits challenging whether projects are low intensity," according to the task force report.

The report makes a series of other significant recommendations:

. With a 7-2 vote, it declares the decommissioning of roads as "detrimental to protection of resources, detrimental to achieving most desired conditions stated in the plan and detrimental to recreation opportunities."

. On a 6-4 vote, it calls for a provision in the plan that would require land acquisitions by the Flathead forest to be balanced by land disposals "so that no county suffers a net loss of tax base."

. Unanimously, the group opposed the provision to designate the Jewel Basin as a national recreation area, out of concern that it would increase pressure on an area that has high use.

Comments received by the Forest Service before Sept. 7 will be considered in developing a final forest plan that could be finished by the end of the year. A "protest period" will be afterward, and only those who participated in the comments can file formal protests under new rules approved last year.

Details on the proposed plan are available on the Internet at:

http://www.fs.fed.us/r1/wmpz