Colorado grapples with roadless area debate

By JoAn Bjarko
North Forty News

A task force with 13 diverse opinions is closing in on recommended guidelines for the management of roadless areas in Colorado. The guidelines could chart the future for 4 million acres of Forest Service land in the state.

Working together for nearly a year, the Roadless Area Review Task Force is scheduled to hold its final discussion via conference call on Aug. 3 and then vote on a recommendation to send to Gov. Bill Owens. Citizens will have an opportunity to comment on the recommendations in August.

The Arapaho-Roosevelt National Forest in northern Colorado has about 360,000 acres designated as "inventoried roadless areas." Roadless is a misnomer, however, because those areas have about 44 miles of roads and motorized trails. The key question for the task force is whether the Forest Service should build new, permanent roads in IRAs.

The road to a Colorado roadless area rule has been long and complex. Until last year, federal employees took the lead in writing guidelines as they developed forest management plans. A combination of federal court decisions and policy changes from the Clinton to Bush administrations, however, set the stage for governors to become active arbiters if they wished.

As a result, Colorado decided to tackle the task of writing guidelines for the governor to submit to the agriculture secretary, who oversees the U.S. Forest Service. The agriculture secretary then has the option to accept or decline the state's petition.

After nine public meetings held throughout the state, the task force on July 19 plodded through accumulated ideas on how to word statewide guidelines. Though no votes were cast, ideas rising to the top included the following.

• Roadless area management should follow a hierarchy that puts no new road building as the chief goal. If work such as wildfire hazard mitigation requires roads, they should be temporary. Permanent roads should be permitted only when no other option exists.
• Community wildfire protection plans should guide road building in roadless areas adjacent to those communities. Examples include plans for reducing wildfire hazards or protecting watersheds.
• Temporary roads should be closed and the land restored immediately after the purpose for the access concludes.
• Livestock grazing permittees should be assured they will have continued reasonable access to their existing rights. Each allotment's management plan should include a description of range improvements and the type of access that will be allowed under the permit.
• Ski areas with permits to use roadless areas should be exempted from the Colorado guidelines. Management decisions would then be based on existing forest plans and permit agreements. That was a compromise suggested in response to the ski industry's request to pull back roadless area boundaries around permitted ski areas.
• Colorado should allow roads to access coal leases for underground coal mining, but the land should be restored when the leasing activity is concluded.

Overall goal

The Colorado task force is not attempting to review and rewrite every forest plan in the state when it comes to roadless area management. Instead, the members are composing guidelines that will set a unified direction for roadless areas in the national forests in Colorado. If the agriculture secretary accepts Colorado's petition, the next step will be for the Forest Service and state to coordinate the writing of specific rules, and that could take a couple of years.

Chaired by Russell George, the executive director of the state Department of Natural Resources, the task force debated several key issues when it met in July.

"I don't like roads in roadless areas," task force member Steve Smith told his peers. Smith is assistant regional director for The Wilderness Society. "To me, a temporary road is a concession," he added. "Once you build a road of any sort, you're creating trouble in roadless areas."

State Rep. Diane Hoppe, R-Sterling, was more conciliatory. "I think we can live with temporary roads if they're needed," she said.

Dave Petersen, representing Trout Unlimited, urged the task force to protect the interiors of roadless areas from any development.

As the task force worked on its list of exceptions that would allow temporary or permanent roads, state Rep. Josh Penry, R-Grand Junction, gave this warning: "If we get too complicated, we've failed because complicated is litigation."

Any disputed parts of the final recommendation will need eight votes to pass.

A brief history

The official use of "roadless area" to describe parts of the national forest system dates back to the early 1970s when the Forest Service evaluated lands that had potential for inclusion in the National Wilderness Preservation System. A second round of review and evaluation--called RARE II--took place in the late '70s. Nationwide, that effort identified 62 million acres in national forests and national grasslands. In Colorado, roadless areas totaled 6.5 million acres at that time. Some of that land has since been designated as wilderness areas.

In 2001, the Clinton administration enacted a rule that put prohibitions on road construction, road reconstruction and timber harvesting in IRAs. Nine lawsuits in federal district courts followed. In one of those cases, the U.S. District Court for the District of Wyoming issued a permanent injunction and set aside the Clinton roadless rule.

In 2005, under the Bush administration, the state petitioning process replaced the 2001 roadless rule, and the Colorado legislature established a task force to represent its citizens. While the state is working on its petition, the Arapaho-Roosevelt National Forest is following its forest plan but postponing any major development in roadless areas.

Those who want to review the task force's final recommendation to the governor and comment on the proposal will be able to find it on the Internet at www.keystone.org/html/roadless_areas_task_force.html. Summaries of all the public meetings, including a March 17 hearing in Fort Collins, are also available at that site.