JESSIE BONNER Associated Press writer | Posted: Monday, July 7, 2008 12:00 am
BOISE, Idaho - Nearly 140,000 people have weighed in since January on a proposed rule for managing the more than 9.3 million acres of roadless backcountry in Idaho and the U.S. Forest Service says the comments have prompted it to make changes in the proposal.
The Forest Service released a summary Thursday of public comments collected during a four-month period that ended in April. It's all part of the lengthy process of deciding how Idaho's roadless areas and other untouched lands will be managed, preserved or opened to logging and other uses.
Changes to the proposed rule, stemming from public concerns, include better definitions of where road construction and tree removal is allowed in the case of threatening fire activity, said Brad Gilbert, the Forest Service's team leader on the proposed Idaho roadless plan.
Other changes included strengthening protections on lands in the Boulder and White Clouds mountains of central Idaho, Gilbert said, as well as loosening restrictions in forests where road-building and tree removal has been allowed in the past.
"We're making quite a few modifications to the rule based on those comments," Gilbert said.
More than 50 environmental organizations earlier attacked a draft of Idaho's proposed roadless plan, saying it could set a bad precedent for roadless areas in other states. A report that the Center for Biological Diversity released in March argued that Idaho's new rule would allow eight times more logging than a 2001 federal rule for roadless areas.
The Roadless Area Conservation Rule that former President Bill Clinton issued before leaving office in January 2001 banned development and road building on almost one-third of the nation's 192 million acres of national forest land.
The ban included road building and logging on 58 million acres of remote national forests, mostly in the West, where Idaho's 9.3 million acres of roadless area is second only to Alaska, a state with 14.8 million acres of roadless area.
The Bush administration repealed the rule in 2005, allowing states to petition the federal government with their own management plans for individual forests. Some states, including Washington, Oregon and California, have sued to challenge the Bush administration policy. Idaho submitted a roadless plan in 2006.
At least one of the environmental groups that criticized a draft of the plan, the Idaho Conservation League, is pleased with recent changes the Forest Service has made in response to public concerns.
"I think, from what we're hearing, the Forest Service is tightening up a number of areas," said Jonathan Oppenheimer, a senior conservation associate with the Idaho Conservation League.
One of those areas involves a portion of the rule allowing road construction and tree removal near communities that lie close to fire-prone forests. That section of the rule has since been further defined to include communities within a buffer zone of about one mile to 1 1/2 miles from the roadless areas, Gilbert said.
The agency is scheduled to announce a final draft of the rule for Idaho's roadless backcountry in September, Gilbert said. The Bush administration is expected to approve Idaho's roadless plan before Bush leaves office early next year.