forestland development
Missoula County Grills Forest Service, Plum Creek on Road Easement Amendments
Plum Creek and USFS are backing down from their plan to apply a blanket amendment to forest road easements across western Montana that many fear could pave the way for residential development.By Matthew Frank, 9-30-08
Photo by Emily Haas.
Two items of note came out of Monday’s sometimes-heated conversation among Missoula County Commissioners and officials from Plum Creek Timber Co. and the U.S. Forest Service regarding the contentious cost-share road easement amendment proposal: Montana counties that object to the amendment may be able to opt out, and before the amendment is finalized counties will be able to review the specific easements that will be affected, something that Agriculture Undersecretary and Forest Service overseer Mark Rey had previously refused.
Other than that, the meeting offered “virtually nothing” to further explain the need for, and the implications of, amending the road easements, said an exasperated Fred van Valkenburg, Missoula County Attorney. Instead it became a back-and-forth spoken in Forest Service legalese and hypotheticals about what triggers an environmental review.
The meeting was one of several requested by Plum Creek with Western Montana counties to help it “make a decision whether or not to go forward with or drop (the amendment proposal),” said Plum Creek’s Jerry Sorensen. “If this doesn’t go through or if counties don’t want it we’ll go about our business,” he said.
The proposal was privately negotiated between Plum Creek and the Forest Service to clarify the decades-old easements and ensure Plum Creek access across Forest Service for purposes besides resource extraction, namely to access residences. Residential development has become a big part of Plum Creek’s business as the timber industry flounders from the effects of the housing downturn.
But in April word leaked to local government officials and Sen. Jon Tester and they cried foul, demanding their inclusion in the discussions. Their concerns are many: the costs of firefighting in the wildland-urban interface (already, about a quarter of the Forest Service’s $4 billion annual budget is spent on defending homes from wildfires), the costs of road maintenance and stresses on other public services, and the effects on wildlife habitat in remote woodlands bordering public lands.
Tom Suk, the Forest Service’s rights-of-way and cost-share coordinator, was on the hot seat for much of Monday’s meeting. He explained why the amendment was developed in the first place. What’s happened, he said, is that successors in ownership were not party to the original agreements, and now there are a variety of land uses, not just timber management.
“Well, now we have people that are out there that own the easements, have title to the land, but interpret the language of the easements (differently),” Suk said, adding: “What we were trying to do here was rework the contract to make it clearer and more specific.”
Suk said the agency is also trying to protect the public’s right to use the roads, to which Deputy Missoula County Attorney James McCubbin replied, “Is that what you’re trying to sell us?”
The main question, asked by Van Valkenburg, is whether or not amending a road easement would trigger the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and thus an environmental assessment that would consider the environmental effects of more heavily used forest roads. “It’s a significant federal action,” Van Valkenburg said. “If they would specifically say they would do that it would relieve some of our concerns.”
But according to Suk, that won’t likely happen. “The easement amendment in itself does not require the analysis through NEPA or consultation because it’s not changing anything.” He said an environmental review is necessary when the pattern of use changes. The County believes it should happen now.
On the issue of identifying the specific easements that will be affected by the amendment, Suk said his agency is still working on that list, but that it will be made available to the affected counties. Once Plum Creek and the Forest Service agree on the amendment language it will be six months before it can be finalized, Suk estimated, a longer time frame than was put forth by Mark Rey when he came to Missoula in April. It seemed Rey, a former timber industry lobbyist, hoped to finalize the easement before the end of his term under the Bush Administration.
Richard Johnson of the Government Accountability Office was listening in via teleconference, at Tester’s request. He said they’re looking at the legal issues but haven’t begun a full-blown audit. A letter outlining some legal observations will be sent to Tester’s office soon, he said.
Afterward, Commissioner Jean Curtiss said, “At least we got from them that they aren’t going to do the amendment without the list (of affected easements).” She couldn’t say whether Missoula County would want to opt out of the amendment process.
Plum Creek owns 403,000 acres in Missoula County, Sorensen said, and it and the Forest Service co-own 728 miles of road. 485 miles of road—and 230,000 acres of land—will eventually transfer to the Forest Service, state agencies and conservation buyers as part of the Montana Legacy Project.
With the Legacy Project, “A lot of the issues we’ve had with development in the forest off these roads will be taken care of,” Sorensen said.
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If defending a USFS cabin or lookout or back country ranger station is included, this is a BS statement meant to further the author's opinion. Or the author was given false numbers by arson driven NGO subalterns. Or the USFS lied to him, which is not beyond the pale of their manipulations.
The USFS went through their fire budget one and a half times this year "watching" the fires burn in WFU options. Hundreds of millions have been spent letting fire burn at will, until it does begin to threaten structures outside of the undisclosed containment area of their "natural" fire.
Most of the structure protection is provided by state and local apparatus and personnel. Not USFS. The USFS has no structure protection training, no PTS book rating for structure protection specialist. FEMA pays if the governor declares a conflagration or other some such decree, a state of emergency. The disaster area declaration. But, after the fire has grown to tens of thousands of acres, with miles of active fire line, and is now beyond their preferred incineration area, they then have an obligation to start trying to contain the fire. Your forests have no value (the USFS never, ever, lists a value for resources destroyed by WFU--timber, recreation opportunity, scenery, ESA wildlife and plants, ad nauseum), and they have only their costs for incinerating the publics' resources, which they manage to exceed because they are essentially leaderless in a leaderless government from President down through Congress to the Bureaucracy. Or haven't you figured that out already? It does cost a lot more to control huge fires than it does to put out a small fire. And when the fire is out and winter has come, the next year you start to have even more dead and down, more fuel, and the certainty of another fire, even bigger, in the same place. All of which will cost even more to subdue. So good planning means that all should really live in a defensible space in town in a concrete bunker. That is a good place from which to go forth and enjoy the blackened forest, the lifeless rockpiles, the fouled streams..That is the plan.
The Feds are now beyond their capabilities to manage anything, including the economy. That is proven daily. They can't manage forests, so are burning them down. Congressional oversight is an oxymoron. Or the blatant truth: they look right over the problems to see the dollars they can grab in acts of self aggrandizement.
And, urban experts seem to be able to expound on things they have never done, have never experienced, and seem to pursue illogical ends to prove their prowess. Every home built on the edge of town is either on ag land or wildland from the year before. The edge of town will always be "interfaced" with rural land uses. Homes on the edge of town are every much as at risk as homes in the forest or on the range. Watch in the spring when fires run across the short grass prairie and burn homes in Texas and Oklahoma, Kansas. Or in the fall in Los Angeles county and the surrounding area. The USFS is not spending their money to suppress those fires. The States and FEMA are.
The USFS fire budget and road easements are a bogus point of conjecture. The real issue should be county land use planning that demands a level of fuels reductions in areas of homes and out buildings. Mandated fuel reduction. Public money spent to assist in fuel reduction. And, if you live in a single wide surrounded by junk and piles of wood and abandoned chicken coops and what have you, there does come a time when your net worth is not worth that of fire fighter lives and all will be lost. That is what insurance and the Red Cross are for. You have to help yourself in order to earn public help. Somehow, if you are worried about McMansions in the forest wildland interface areas, those folks will be insured, or they won't get the mortgage. Wait. They probably won't get the mortgage for a few years, anyway. Until the Wall Street fire sales are over. This is all a moot argument.
In its release, Headwaters cites the stats from the Office of Inspector General claiming that protecting private property from forest fires consumes at least 50 percent and sometimes up to 95 percent of firefighting budgets. “The cost to U.S. taxpayers of protecting privately owned properties in the wildland urban interface has been estimated by Forest Service managers to be as high as $1 billion each year,” the release stated.
Your contention that "Watching is not fighting" isn't part of the math.
Sonoran has a track record miles long and all in the left lane. The reason it costs to fight fires around homes is because the fires get huge, run for miles and show up on doorsteps. That one graphic in the "study" showing x-dollars per mile is a manipulative misrepresentation of the larger reality that it wouldn't matter if the border with USFS is a mile away or two miles...if the agency managed its vegetation.
As for the road easement "problem" -- Missoula County is setting itself up to spend lots of money on lawyers. But PCL is richer, and will be five hundred million bucks richer than it should be thanks to the brilliant Max Sieben Baucus. I thought Democrats hated corporate welfare and bribery.
That Headwaters/Sonoran study Matthew cited isn't making numbers up, it's citing another study — one done by none other than the United States Forest Service.
Don't listen to me though, read it for yourself...
It begins by saying:
"Forest Service’s (FS) wildfire suppression costs have exceeded $1 billion in 3 of the past 6 years. FS’ escalating cost to fight fires is largely due to its efforts to protect private property in the wildland urban interface (WUI) 1 bordering FS lands...."
Since this website won't let me paste url links, please Google "Forest Service firefighting budget" and read through the first handful of links, including the Audit Budget of the USFS.
Warning: Fact-based answers might be detrimental to partisan chivalry
Not homes, or subdivisions, or super markets. Private property. The land the U.S. does not own. They have to stop the fires when it leaves their land. It is their FRIGGING job!!!!!!
The issue, then, is either to not have the Feds own land, or let there be no private property, because there will always be private property against the Federal land. And the lines are not drawn by fire fighters, but by surveyors. You can't capitalize a will o' the wisp, or land without title or description, which is most Federal land, for any bank. That is why we have some private property. So that there might be a credit system to run an economy. I know that is not important to the socialists and the communists who believe in the dominion of the Feds and that it is they who should call all the shots, but this is, you know, the United States of America, and we have property rights, and private property. People have the right to demand their government does not burn them out. And it has this summer in many places. And last year, and the year before........
Parsing words, of course, this emphasis on "private property", but it is still a bullshit argument that their expenses don't have any relationship to a failed husbandry of the resources in their management. And the public should understand that the crux of the argument is that they can burn public land and resources without penalty, without oversight, without a care in the world.....until is crosses onto private land. It is there that they have to protect private interests. Ask the people up the Boulder how it went when Derby and then Jungle threatened the Brokaw ranch. The Piss Fir Uncle by God Sam forces put on the Reallllly Beeeeeg Sheeeew for the media and Tom. They did not want to be on the evening news having burned out a news icon. Ooooh. and that all costs money.
If that private land issue is a problem, then the Feds should build a mile wide fuel free fire line between them and the private estate, on public land. Just like a power line right of way. No trees, little fuel. It would put some timber in the pipeline, create some jobs in dire times, and would save the government lots of money because their fires could be easily contained on their land, and the interface bogus bullshit could be mitigated. And then let them burn the rest to mineral soil and the Big W wilderness people can whoop and holler and dance the "Black is beautiful dance" to their heart's content.
That mile wide low fuel area would be very easy to deal with annually. Just light the fusee and torch it. Right from the property line. If they lost it in the interior of the public lands, it could be watched for a long time. But only if there was anything left to burn on public lands.