DENVER-
The fate of a management plan for national grasslands in Colorado, the first in the country written under new federal rules, is in question now that a court has thrown out those rules.
Environmentalists are calling on the U.S. Forest Service to withdraw the plan for the Cimarron and Comanche National Grasslands in southern Colorado and western Kansas after last week’s ruling by U.S. District Court Judge Phyllis Hamilton in San Francisco.
“Thankfully, Judge Hamilton’s order should force the Forest Service to scrap the Cimarron and Comanche plan and go back to the drawing board,” said Lauren McCain of Forest Guardians in Denver.
Forest Service officials are studying the court ruling to decide what to do next.
“Attorneys, in earnest, are poring over the court document and trying to see what it means,” said Forest Service spokesman Joe Walsh in Washington.
While waiting to hear from Washington, the regional Forest Service office in Denver is fielding objections to the grasslands plan, spokeswoman Janelle Smith said.
Issued last month, the plan covers a total of 1.4 million acres of federal land, including archaeological sites and canyons with ancient rock drawings, dinosaur tracks, the Santa Fe Trail and wide expanses of grasslands. It looks at juggling such uses as livestock grazing, recreation and protection of wildlife and plants.
The revised rules were also used to develop a preliminary plan for western Colorado’s Grand Mesa-Uncompahgre-Gunnison National Forest released last month.
Forest Service officials have said the new rules, announced last year by the Bush administration, were intended to make writing forest plans more efficient and responsive to the public. Plans are supposed to be updated every 15 or 20 years.
Bolstered by a U.S. Supreme Court decision, the Forest Service said formal environmental impact statements for long-term management plans weren’t needed because plans don’t make decisions that affect the land or wildlife. Officials said environmental reviews can be done when individual projects envisioned in the plan are considered.
Critics, though, said the rules violate environmental laws. They contend that forest management plans went from fundamental blueprints for decisions on land use, water quality and wildlife habitat to documents that mean little.
In her May 6 decision, Hamilton said the Bush administration erred when it approved the rules without considering their environmental impact. She also said the federal government didn’t get proper public input.
“A lot of forests moved very hastily to try to get new planning done under these new regulations,” said Tim Preso, a Bozeman, Mont.-based attorney with Earthjustice, which represents environmental groups. “They better start getting out their erasers.”
Preso said there’s sympathy for the Forest Service’s concern that going through the environmental impact statement process consumes a lot of time and money that could be better spent.
“But you don’t need to turn the plans into meaningless documents to remedy that problem,” Preso said.
