The task force determining which national forest roadless areas in Colorado should be preserved began its efforts in earnest Friday, but multiple layers of political reviews stand between what citizens want and what they’ll get.
After a series of public hearings, the 13-member task force will make recommendations to Gov. Bill Owens, who will submit a final state proposal to a national review committee, which then will forward its suggestions to the U.S. secretary of agriculture, who will make a final decision on which lands will be protected. The process will take several years.
“We want to see if we can’t come to some consensus decisions,” said chairman Russell George, executive director of the Colorado Department of Natural Resources. “But it’s a huge task. Every time I talk to my friends in the Forest Service, I walk away more depressed than ever about the enormity of the task.”
The group, which includes representatives from government, conservation groups, recreation interests and a cattle rancher, has taken on the contentious task of recommending which of the millions of acres of federal forest lands in the state should be given special protection from road-building associated with mining, logging, and oil and gas exploration.
The issue has a 30-year track record of controversy, dating back to the Forest Service’s two Roadless Area Review and Evaluations of the 1970s, known at RARE I and RARE II.
Earlier this year, the Bush administration issued a new directive: Each state’s governor could submit a petition asking for specific lands to be set aside as roadless areas, and the secretary of agriculture then would make a final determination of which lands should be protected.
Threat from roads looms
Of the 4.4 million acres of designated roadless areas in Colorado’s 11 national forests, nearly half could be opened to roads under current regulations.
State Rep. Josh Penry, R-Grand Junction, a sponsor of the legislation establishing the task force and a member of the group, noted that some of the participants don’t agree with the Bush administration rule but expressed hope that they could reach a compromise.
“All we’re getting now is the whipsaw effect. One administration instates it and the next one takes it out,” he said, calling the decision “arguably the most important issue of federal land management since the Homestead Act.”
Colorado’s approach – using a task force to advise the governor – is novel among the states and one of the first to get off the ground, said regional forester Rick Cables.
He said he is not worried that the many layers of review will pare down the lands that the state wants to protect.
“Given the composition of this group, I think that they’ll come up with some really balanced notions of how to move forward, and I think that … (it) is going to carry a lot of weight when it gets to the national level,” he said.
Public backs protection
The issue of how to manage the nation’s 58 million acres of roadless areas has long been contentious because of the Forest Service’s conflicted mission to accommodate “many uses,” including natural-resource extraction, recreational uses such as off-road vehicles and environmental stewardship.
Roadless protection generally elicits strong public support: In Colorado, more than 90 percent of nearly 100,000 public comments about the Clinton-era road less rule were in favor of preservation.
At the four-hour meeting Friday, the group raised questions about everything from how to collect public comments to specifics about what land is involved.
Task force member Steve Smith, an assistant regional director for The Wilderness Society, questioned whether the Forest Service would change the way the lands are managed – potentially destroying their roadless characteristics – during the years-long process of establishing the roadless protection.
“We know how much passion there is around roadless” areas, Cables said. “We know the values that pertain to roadless (areas), and we don’t want to do things in the interim until we get some final resolution.”
The task force plans to have public meetings in communities around each of the forests, starting Nov. 2 in Delta, before making its final recommendations to Owens in September 2006.
Noting the years of debate over protecting roadless areas, George said: “It needs to be the one last time we have to do this.”
