Idaho Statesman - "Idaho's roadless deal may be final soon"

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Idaho Statesman - "Idaho's roadless deal may be final soon"

Conservationist Rick Johnson and timber lobbyist Jim Riley have spent much of their careers fighting each other over how much to log and preserve of Idaho's 9.3 million acres of roadless national forest.

But Johnson, executive director of the Idaho Conservation League and Riley, president of the Intermountain Forest Association, voiced support Friday for a proposed U.S. Forest Service rule that would protect 8.9 million acres of national forest.

"We cannot let the perfect be the enemy of the good," Johnson said.

The Forest Service recommended the state-drafted plan as its top choice for managing Idaho's federal roadless areas Friday, and some say the collaborative effort can be a model for resolving other tough environmental conflicts. The Forest Service expects its final rule on roadless management in 30 days.

Johnson's group signed onto the roadless plan after the Forest Service reduced the acreage of national forest that would be opened to logging and road building in the plan drafted by then-Gov. Jim Risch and Idaho officials in 2006. Riley stayed a supporter despite the reductions because his clients will get the chance to demonstrate they can log responsibly with temporary roads in roadless areas.

Risch, now Idaho lieutenant governor and a candidate for the U.S. Senate, said he wants to build on the success of the roadless compromise to tackle one of the most intractable resource issues in the West: the Northwest's imperiled salmon runs.

"This roadless rule is an example of the model of the New West, where environmental objectives are accomplished through partnership with natural resource-based industries, rather than at the expense of these industries and the rural communities that depend on them," Riley said.

In addition to Riley and Johnson, Risch had support from the motorized recreation industry, county officials and a national panel of interest group representatives who negotiated with Risch and the Forest Service to broaden support of the rule, which will go into effect 30 days after Agriculture Secretary Edward Schafer approves it.

"The Idaho Roadless Rule represents the first time a state and its citizens had a direct voice in creating a plan for resolving an issue of national importance," Risch said. "I believe the process we used can serve as a model for resolving these difficult natural resource issues in the future."

Now Risch wants to try the same approach with the complicated salmon issue, and he made a commitment Friday to sponsor such a process if he's elected to the Senate. That prompted immediate support from Chris Wood, a member of the national roadless panel and chief operating officer for Trout Unlimited.

The group that has 140,000 anglers as members nationwide - including 3,000 in Idaho - is one of the national groups suing the federal government and calling for breaching four dams on the lower Snake River to aid salmon. Even though the group is among the litigants, Wood said he prefers settling resource issues the way Risch did with the roadless rule.

"The only way we are going to recover these upriver salmon stocks is to create a table big enough for the people of Lewiston, eastern Washington wheat farmers, tribes, recreation and commercial fishermen to be made whole," Wood said. "I think the same thing that happened here can happen for salmon."

Risch's Democratic opponent for Sen. Larry Craig's open Senate seat, Larry LaRocco, praised the rule but said Risch's involvement simply coincided with the culmination of the work on the proposal. He noted his own work on wilderness bills for former Sen. Frank Church and his own wilderness bills proposed in the 1990s.

"Many times, when you sit at the table, they end up in Congress," LaRocco said. "You need someone who can reach across the aisle to get this done."

Not everyone supported the rule. The Wilderness Society is one of the environmental groups that still support the original Clinton bans on logging and road building on 58 million acres of roadless national forest.

"It's ironic that on Labor Day weekend, when many Idahoans head to the state's national forest roadless lands for their tremendous recreation opportunities, the state of Idaho is promoting a policy that would condemn 400,000 acres of those roadless lands - an amount of land about twice the size of the Sawtooth Wilderness - to more roads, more development and certainly more open pit mines," said Craig Gehrke, director of the Wilderness Society's Boise office.

The proposed rule designates 250 roadless areas and establishes five management themes that guide road construction, timber cutting and mineral development. It would supersede the 2001 roadless rule that has spawned 10 lawsuits. The most recent decision by U.S. District Judge Clarence Brimmer, tossed the Clinton rule for the second time.

Risch's draft proposal, written in 2006, would have allowed permanent roads and logging on 609,000 acres of currently roadless lands. The new proposal reduced that to 405,000 acres. The new plan also narrowed the restrictions on logging and road building in the largest designated roadless areas, the 5.3 million-acre backcountry restoration areas. Overall, logging and temporary road building will be restricted to 442,000 acres of "community protection zones" in the 8.9 million acres of roadless lands.

Undersecretary of Agriculture for Natural Resources and the Environment Mark Rey said the plan "does not authorize the building of a single road or the cutting of any trees."

The largely undeveloped roadless lands have been the center of controversy in Idaho since the Wilderness Act was passed 40 years ago, protecting many of the nation's remote areas.

Preservationists have sought to add much of the roadless area to the wilderness system, where logging and motorized use is banned.

Loggers and miners have sought to open some areas to new roads and logging. Others simply want the areas left as they are.

The Forest Service says it has a $660 million backlog of road maintenance and improvement projects in Idaho, where it has 34,000 miles of national forest roads.

Since water quality rules and the Endangered Species Act sharply curtailed timber harvests and road-building in the 1990s, the pressure to log and build roads in these areas has dropped, but not the controversy.

Former Forest Service Chief Dale Bosworth, who went to forestry school with Risch at the University of Idaho, praised his former classmate.

"If you can work out a roadless rule in Idaho, you can work out any Forest Service problem anywhere," Bosworth said.

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