DENVER-
Lawmakers are giving Democratic Gov. Bill Ritter and his administration some time to decide how 4.1 million acres of roadless forest land in Colorado should be managed while several groups are lobbying officials on a plan endorsed by the former administration.
Sen. Josh Penry, R-Grand Junction and Sen. Jim Isgar, D-Hesperus, said they’ll delay introducing a resolution asking Ritter to adopt the plan to give him and new state natural resources chief Harris Sherman time to talk to the groups.
But the legislators want Ritter to leave intact the plan written by a task force and approved by Owens before he left office in January.
Owens, a Republican who couldn’t run again because of term limits, sent the petition seeking protection for most of the 4.1 million acres of forest land to federal officials. In 2005, Owens criticized a Clinton-era road-building ban on 58.5 million acres of forests nationwide as creating wilderness outside the congressional process.
“We want this administration to stick to the consensus that the broad, bipartisan task force created,” Penry said. “I think there is a lot of frustration with environmentalists (at the state Capitol) that they are not sticking with this agreement.”
The petition, written by a 13-member panel appointed by the Democratic-controlled Legislature and Owens, was considered a palatable, if not entirely satisfying, compromise by a diverse group of people.
But even some task force members who supported the plan think Colorado should withdraw the petition now that a federal judge in San Francisco has reinstated the rule passed by the Clinton administration in 2001.
Last fall, U.S. District Judge Elizabeth Laporte in San Francisco overturned a 2005 Bush administration rule that potentially opened the land to road building and other development, saying the necessary environmental analysis wasn’t done.
After approving the rule, the Bush administration told governors they could petition the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which oversees the Forest Service, to protect the land. Some states are continuing that process, and the administration is waiting to see what Ritter wants to do.
Task force member Steve Smith, a regional assistant director of The Wilderness Society, said he thinks Colorado shouldn’t pursue its own roadless plan and just apply the reinstated road ban.
“We did our best to try to make the plan as strong as possible, but it wasn’t as strong as the 2001 rule,” Smith said.
Smith conceded that the rule’s future is uncertain because legal challenges are expected to the reinstatement of the road-building ban.
Mike King, deputy director of the state Department of Natural Resources, said the state has three options: let the original petition stand with no changes; resubmit the petition with changes; or don’t submit anything and follow the Clinton-era rule.
“We’re just wrestling with that spectrum, but it’s not going to be something that languishes,” King said.
Sherman, King’s boss, is meeting with state officials, environmentalists and others as he develops recommendations.
Ritter has asked Forest Service officials for interim protection for the land while any petition is considered.
Advocates who turned out for the roadless task force meetings are gearing up again. The Idaho-based BlueRibbon Coalition, which advocates for motorized recreation on public lands, sent members e-mails last week warning that access to Colorado roadless areas is threatened by “radical environmentalists.”
“The No. 1 thing that irritated us so badly is that we all engaged, we all participated in good faith, and then to see the environmental community toss all that public work out,” said Brian Hawthorne, the coalition’s public lands director.
Off-road groups fear that banning new roads on the 4.1 million acres is an attempt to create new wilderness areas.
Some of the areas protected as roadless have trails and roads, but generally are prized for their pristine qualities and are considered important as wildlife habitat, watersheds, scenic and recreation areas.
Eddie Kochman, a task force member and retired state fisheries manager, said no existing roads and trails will be closed if the areas are designated as roadless. He said he wishes Colorado would withdraw its petition because the Clinton-era rule provides much stronger protection for wildlife, but believes it might be tough for Ritter to do that.
Kochman said the next best thing is to improve the plan before resubmitting it. He said a big improvement would be a thorough analysis of the effects on wildlife of exemptions from road-building bans.
A proposed exemption that has riled conservationists and hunters and anglers would remove about 10,000 acres of forest land leased by ski areas from the inventory of roadless areas. Another would lift restrictions on 80,000 acres used by the North Fork Valley Mine in western Colorado for the life of the mine.
The 2001 road-building ban was passed in the waning days of the Clinton administration after more than two years of public hearings and 1.6 million comments. About a third of the country’s 192 million acres of national forest lands was affected.
