Ellen Engstedt - September 25, 2006
Montana Wood Products Association
Roadless Rule
In a recent jaunt to eastern Montana, I was again struck by the vastness of this State. It takes many acres of grassland to feed a cow or two and sadly many of those are counted this year in the 940,000 acres burned in wildfires in Montana.
We in the timber community sympathize with the landowners who lost homes, out buildings, animals, and a way of making a living from the land, at least in the near term. We sympathize because we understand their plight and how it feels to be threatened with loss, or worse yet, to experience the loss.
The timber community is under constant threat of loss of livelihood. Every day a new challenge of some type pops up to test the strength of our folks. Last week was no different when yet another California judge trumped the ruling of a Wyoming judge and declared the Clinton roadless rule was back in force. Some issues apparently just will not go away.
The most recent ruling throws more cold water on the timber community because of the uncertainty of how this will now play out. How can the Forest Service function when the rules change virtually every week when some judge practices forestry and land management from the bench? Businesses have long bemoaned the fact that it is difficult to do business in Montana because the rules keep changing. At least here the same rules are sort of in place from one legislative session to another. But with management, including timber harvest, on national forests, the rules change with the wind and the whim of the judicial system and almost always from some far off place by someone who has never seen the land or the people affected by the decision.
The Montana timber community was dismayed when our Attorney General filed a friend of the court, amicus brief in support of the lawsuit filed to bring back the Clinton rule because we have long been opposed to the rule and certainly with the way it was enacted. Those promoting the roadless rule have for six years been exaggerating the numbers and the timeframes connected to this enactment. The entire process to decide the fate of 58 million acres of public land lasted less than 15 months – October 1999 to January 2001.
According to the official documents of the Forest Service, 1.2 million individual responses were received not 2.5 million. More than 95 percent of the responses came from website generated e-mails or form letters in an orchestrated, Pew Foundation-funded campaign. In Montana, there were 10 scoping meetings held between November 17 and December 16, 1999 with a combined time allotted for public participation of less than 30 hours on a document that would cover 6.4 million acres of Montana national forest lands. If you had taken a three-week trip to visit friends or family for Thanksgiving, you would have missing the scoping timeframe.
The draft EIS was released May 10, 2000. There were 34 meetings held in Montana on this document between May 22 and June 28 with 21 for information only and 13 allowing public comments – 36 hours of public participation. During this very brief comment period the number of attendees in Region One – all of Montana and part of Idaho – was 5,661. Nationwide the total number of meeting attendees was fewer than 25,000 out of 290 million Americans and Clinton supporters claim massive public participation in the process.
The roadless rule was flawed from the get go with lines drawn on a map that included areas of Montana with roads, houses, towers, and in-holdings already there. This was the case nationwide because of the quick and dirty attempt to cram through an undertaking of this magnitude before Clinton left office.
The latest ruling throws a cloud over the petitioning process underway by governors across the country, including Montana, to determine more locally what, if anything should be deemed “roadless”. Needless to say, the whole issue is a mess and the livelihoods of a lot of good folks in the timber community are once again placed in jeopardy. Good news for the serial litigators and liberal judges, but really bad news for decent, hard-working Montana families.
For the Montana Wood Products Association based in Helena, I am Ellen Engstedt. Thanks for listening.
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