Public Lands
Forest Service Releases Off-Road Rule
By Courtney Lowery, 11-02-05
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The U.S. Forest Service has (finally) officially said off-road vehicles will have to stay on designated routes on National Forests and Grasslands.
The agency announced a final rule (which you can read in full here) Wednesday that Forest Service Chief Dale Bosworth said will give individual forests a framework to better designate routes for motorized use.
"We belive that this rule will provide a good, consistent approach to off-road vehicle use on our National Forests," Bosworth said in a call with reporters.
Years ago, Bosworth had named unmanaged recreation as one of the four major threats to Forest Service lands and he reiterated that Wednesday. The popularity of off-road vehicle use has boomed in the past 30 years. The agency estimates that in 1972 there were 5 million off-road vehicle users in the United States and today there are roughly 36 million.
Forest policy has been slow to catch up, leaving land managers with inadequate tools to enforce illegal off-road use, manage legal use and balance differing opinions on who should be able to go where on our public lands.
But now that the agency has come forth with a real tool, many are wondering if it has enough teeth (or funding) to really help the problem.
Jack Troyer, the regional forester for the Intermountain Region was the team leader on developing the rule and he said at the close of the press conference Wednesday that the rule is one that "seems to have really broad support" and he's right. All interests involved had a hand in crafting the rule (he dealt with some 80,000 comments on the draft released last year), but still, critics have concerns that it won't work on the ground because of two main things: lack of funding and lack of a deadline for forests to designate trails.
Both Bosworth and Troyer tried to address these concerns Wednesday.
Bosworth said the agency decided against a strict timeline to try to ensure plenty of time for local discussion and collaboration. A stringent deadline would be a "disincentive for people to engage," he said. He predicts that the forests will be able to get through the process within four years or less.
The money question was brought up several times Wednesday. Some have said that the key to the rule actually working to stop the damage on federal lands will be enforcement, mapping, education and signage -- and all of those things cost money.
Bosworth answered the money for enforcement question by saying "It is my belief that most users want to do the right thing" and that as long as OHV users know where they can and can't go, they will ride accordingly and put pressure on other users to do the same.
But as Kristen Brengel of The Wilderness Society's says, self-policing doesn't always work.
"If you don't have a visible presence out there, people are going to do what they want to do," she said.
The enforcement and the funding for it is "a critical piece that they overlooked in their zeal to get a new rule," Brengel said.
Troyer said right now, the agency spends $15-30 million a year on various aspects of trail management and the budget will likey remain in that ballpark even with the new rule.
However, Troyer said the new rule will allow the agency to better prioritize funds and he said he hopes the rule will make it easier to create partnerships with other agencies and user groups who could help with enforcement, management, mapping and signage.
Bosworth said, "We can use some of our wildlife dollars to do this, we can use soil and water dollars ... we have a broader pool of dollars to choose from."
Critics do say that the new rule gives much-needed attention and priority to the issue and that it is a start. The real work will come when the forests start actually doing the designations and then, there will be a tough balancing act for land managers -- especially when it comes down to what to do with trails that have been carved by users in the past three decades outside of forests' original trail systems.
Depending on who you talk to, these are "illegal" trails, "renegade routes" or as the Forest Service calls them, "user-created" routes.
Brengel says the decisions on these kinds of routes will be the most interesting to watch. Under the new rule, they can be designated as trails or "grandfathered in." This is where the travel planning gets sticky for land managers because on one hand, the trails were technically cut illegally. On the other hand, they might be good, environmentally healthy trails that have been used by off-roaders for decades. Still, it's "unfortunate" Brengel said, that some would even be considered under the new rule.
In the end though, Bosworth says he doesn't expect a big increase in the number of trails designated for off-road vehicle use.
And the rule is just the beginning of an ongoing, and locally-based project.
"Tomorrow, we're not going to wake up and see anything change," Brengel said. It is during the travel planning process that things will start to look different on public lands and then, we might just see "a new world order," she said.
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Comments
It all comes down to law enforcement staffing and funding, both of which are woefully inadequate and unlikely to turn around in an era of mind-blowing federal deficits.
Wyoming has tried to fill the gap with ATV rangers, using funds from ATV licenses. It helps, but is nowhere near what is needed.
If you think about it, the Wyoming State Patrol has a relatively cushy assignment, since they can focus on state highways, which are much less area to patrol that all the official and unofficial trails in the national forests or on BLM lands.
Meanwhile, the damage continues unabated.
We had four ATVers pay $500 fines each for running amuck near Lander.
I've heard, perhaps anecdoteally, that another ATVer had to leave his machine in the wilderness, then dismantle it so he could pack it out.
Even with the added enforcement from the ATV Rangers that Brodie mentions, there is still only one Forest Service law enforcement officer available for the southern part of the Shoshone; he has told me that off-road violations are the worst in the Wind River District than any other district in the entire Forest Service Region. The biggest problem he faces with ORV riders is the attitude of those who commit off-road violations; they simply don't care--they have no respect for the forest nor the land they are damaging.
The enormity of the violations is more than this conscientious officer can deal with, and of course, he has a host of issues to deal with aside from ORV violations. I myself spend a lot of time on the Forest, and I know that off-road violations, particularly the creation of new routes, is a serious, serious problem. These new routes have caused tremendous damage to the land and watersheds of the Forest.
That means that enforcement truly is the central issue; the most rigorous regulation is worthless if it cannot be enforced. For all of us who care about the particular national forest where we live, we need to bring as much pressure as we can onto the ORV industry and agencies to make it easier to enforce the law--more funding for enforcement, more officers, a requirement for full sized licenses on ORVs to make it easier for citizens to report violations, stiffer fines, more confiscation of ORVs, and outright banning of individuals from the Forest. Of course, if those methods don't work either, then simply closing areas of the Forest to ORV traffic altogether is the only alternative.
The onus is clearly on ORV enthusiasts to obey the law and police themselves, and that simply isn't happening now, regardless of what the Blue Ribbon Coalition may say about a few bad apples. In fact, it's a lot of bad apples. Those of us who don't like ORVs anyway don't need much more incentive to work toward banning them altogether if these folks don't get their act together.
Robert Hoskins
President, Dubois Wildlife Association