Honing the forest vision

Groups take issue with revision affecting three national forests

The public is urged to comment by May 28 on the Blue Mountains Forest Plan Revision, and early indications are there won't be any shortage of feedback from Grant County and beyond.

Last week, the Grant County Court, community advocates and environmental groups all were getting set to take their shots at the proposed document.

The forest plan revision, in the works since 2003, updates a plan that's intended to provide an overall vision for the national forests in Northeastern Oregon: the Malheur, the Wallowa-Whitman and the Umatilla.

Federal law requires national forests to revise their plans every 10-15 years or when conditions have changed significantly. The Forest Service grouped the three forests into one planning process because of similar issues, resources, users and interest groups.

Members of the Grant County Public Forest Commission met with the County Court on May 12 to voice their concerns about the proposed revision.

"This doesn't begin to address the problems of our forests," said Tad Houpt, a Forest Commissioner. "We're losing ground."

County Judge Mark Webb agreed with the Forest Commission that the forests need more active management, not less. He said the proposal is "far too timid."

"It doesn't do near what it needs to ecologically, or sociologically or economically," he said.

But he also urged the Forest Commission to make its case in language that will resonate with the federal officials who make the rules and control the discussion in Washington, D.C. That means talking about healthy forests and forest resiliency, not sawlogs, he said.

If the forest is managed properly for ecological resiliency, he said, a lot of the other needs will fall into place.

"Instead of 'sawlogs,' we need to talk about 'more acres treated in the right way,'" he said, adding that both sawlogs and jobs would result.

Forest Commission members agreed, but still voiced frustration over harvest levels on the Malheur, restrictions on tree size and the risk of losing the remaining infrastructure: the mills and workforce needed to do work in the forests.

They also complained that the Forest Service mission is to manage and protect the resources, but the agency's budgets don't allow that. They said the local forests should be asking for the money they need to manage the forests well, not adjusting their programs based on the level of spending dictated from the top.

Webb said he didn't disagree with the thought, but "I'm not sure that's how it works in D.C."

Webb and Commissioner Boyd Britton also focused on the forest plan in another forum last week, attending a meeting with counterparts from other counties touched by the three forests. The nine-county working group has been tracking the plan revision process, and they met May 13 in John Day to work on a combined response to the Forest Service.

Britton said later that the meeting went well, and participants left feeling better about their stand on behalf of the counties.

A major concern, he said, is that the budget-driven approach is a recipe for failure on the forests. The Forest Service can say it's hitting its targets, but those targets are based on goals that reflect limited dollars, not the actual volume of restoration work needed to bring the forests back to health, he said.

"They're not reaching the real objective - the desired condition," he said.

While the counties are pushing the message that active management creates a healthy forest, several environmental groups are focusing on another area: wilderness and wild and scenic river designation.

Erik Fernandez, wilderness coordinator for Oregon Wild, said the proposed revision is skewed against protecting areas that should qualify for wilderness status.

"Some special places should be protected," he said.

While he has many concerns, he cites as the biggest flaw the fact that out of some 800,000 acres identified by the Forest Service as potential wilderness, the plan recommends only 16,000 acres for wilderness designation. He called that figure "embarrassingly small."

Fernandez said conservation groups did their own inventory of potential wilderness lands, relying on criteria outlined in the Forest Service's materials. He contends the forest revision team used a flawed application of the standards to throw out most of the groups' recommendations.

He said their efforts to be "good collaborators" have been ignored. He said he would expect the Forest Service to differ on some of the area proposed by the conservation groups, but not to disqualify 203 of the 205 areas proposed.

Fernandez and representatives from 11 other organizations pressed their case in a March 1 letter to the Forest Service. Signers included The Wilderness Society, Oregon Natural Desert Association, Cascadia Wildlands, Umpqua Watersheds and others.

The letter focused on the wilderness issue but also criticized the lack of Wild and Scenic river recommendations, particularly on the Malheur.

"The Malheur National Forest hasn't found a river on the entire forest, over 1 million acres, that may have 'outstandingly remarkable values' that would qualify to even be considered for potential Wild and Scenic," they wrote.

The groups cited a number of waterways they feel should be eligible, including stretches of the Middle Fork John Day and several of its tributaries, the South Fork Long Creek, Murderers Creek and the Little Malheur River.