A federal advisory panel has recommended, with a few tweaks, approval of Colorado’s petition to keep development off the bulk of about 4 million acres of roadless national forestland in the state.
The recommendation now goes to Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns, who will make the final decision.
U.S. Forest Service spokesman Joe Walsh said Monday that Johanns likely will announce a decision in about a week.
If Johanns accepts the petition, the state and Forest Service will write rules implementing the plan, expected to take about 18 months.
In an Aug. 2 letter to Johanns, the Roadless Area Conservation National Advisory Committee called the Colorado petition, written by a 13-member task force, “a model public process.”
The committee, though, recommended a series of clarifications to ensure that the need for temporary roads for wildfire prevention or other activities is balanced with maintaining “roadless area values and characteristics.”
State officials had asked the federal panel to ensure the language wasn’t too broad, said Mike King, deputy director of the Colorado Department of Natural Resources. “We wanted to make sure the exceptions were narrowly tailored to protect the roadless areas,” King said.
Sen. Josh Penry, R-Fruita, a member of the state roadless task force, said he assumed the petition would be fine-tuned. “Our recommendation was always more a policy statement than a legal document,” Penry said.
Task force member David Petersen said he appreciated the federal panel’s suggestions but wished they went further. He wants Colorado to withdraw its petition because a federal judge has overturned the Bush administration rule that required states to petition to keep logging and other activities off the land.
The ruling by U.S. District Judge Elizabeth Laporte of San Francisco late last year reinstated a 2001 rule passed in the waning days of the Clinton administration. That rule banned new roads on 58.5 million acres of forests nationwide, including 4.1 million acres in Colorado.
Laporte said the Bush administration didn’t conduct the necessary environmental reviews when it approved a policy in 2005 that opened at least some of the land to development.
