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About East Oregonian : E.O. (Pendleton, OR) 1888-current | View Entire Issue (Aug. 24, 2019)
OREGON Saturday, August 24, 2019 East Oregonian A9 Environmental scrutiny could be reduced for forest projects By JES BURNS Oregon Public Broadcasting ASHLAND — The U.S. Forest Service is proposing to reduce the public’s role in shaping the way it applies federal environmental laws to projects on public lands. The agency says the changes would help land managers “make time- lier decisions based on high quality, science-based analysis.” Environmental groups are calling the proposed changes a giveaway to the timber industry that will allow projects on national forests to be approved with far less involvement from the public. The changes concern how the Forest Service operates under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), the law that pro- vides much of the frame- work for environmental protection in the United States. Under the law, proj- ects on public lands have to go through various lev- els of environmental anal- ysis to ensure that detri- mental impacts are not too great. These environmental analyses can take months or even years to complete and include various levels of public involvement and feedback. Critics of how the For- est Service currently apply NEPA say the process is way too cumbersome, slows projects and permit appli- cations down too much, and has led to backlogs in needed natural resource management. “The paperwork exercise that they have to go through just don’t match the scope and scale of the problem,” said Travis Joseph, presi- dent of the Portland-based American Forest Resource Council, a timber industry trade association. The proposed changes are being framed in terms of reducing the backlog of OPB/EarthFix Photo/Jes Burns, File Thinning, mowing and prescribed fire are used in Ponderosa pine forests to maintain an open forest floor. forest restoration and wild- fire mitigation projects by streamlining the NEPA pro- cess. The Forest Service says the backlog is currently 80 million acres. Joseph explained the goals using a hypothetical restoration project on the Willamette National Forest. “If the Forest Service has come to the conclusion that it needs to do import- ant, time-sensitive work to do a thinning project … that it’s done dozens and doz- ens of times, does it need to take three to five years and write 500 to 1,000 pages and spend a million dollars of taxpayer money to do that project?” he said. “The Forest Service has come to the conclusion that no, that doesn’t make sense.” The new rules would change the level of scru- tiny applied to certain proj- ects. Under NEPA, projects trigger one of three tiers of environmental analy- sis, with “categorical exclu- sions” being the lowest level, involving far less pub- lic involvement and far less scientific analysis of envi- ronmental impacts specific to the project. “Traditionally they were like installing inter- pretive signs at a trailhead or installing a pit toilet or mowing the ranger’s lawn at the ranger station. Very minor activities that have some sort of environmen- tal impact but are so minor so as to be excluded from detailed environmental analysis under NEPA,” said Susan Jane Brown, public lands director for the West- ern Environmental Law Center in Portland. The proposed rules add categorical exclusions to cover more kinds and sizes of projects. One new cate- gory proposed is for “eco- system restoration or resil- ience activities” involving areas as big as 7,300 acres, or about 11.5 square miles. Of that area, timber har- vesting could occur on 6.5 square miles — in forms that could range from com- mercial thinning to clear- cut logging targeted sec- tions of the forest. “That’s a pretty big scope of environmental impact and is really not the type of activity that categorical exclusions were designed to analyze or document,” Brown said. “It really looks a lot like a political stunt to use fire as a justification for something completely dif- ferent — which in this case is an attempt to increase the timber harvest levels off our national forests.” Brown said her group has learned, through Free- dom of Information Act requests, that 80% of For- est Service-managed proj- ects between 2006 and 2016 were approved using cur- rently listed categorical exclusions. Under the new rules, that number would jump to 93%. Brown said the Forest Service has a legitimate interest in making their decision-making processes more efficient. But she said the NEPA regulations are not the main issue. The real problem, she said, is that agencies don’t have the funding and staffing levels needed to get the important work done. To trade association president Travis Joseph, the bureaucracy behind administering federal envi- ronmental law is a major barrier. He applauded the Forest Service for look- ing internally at the way they operate to try to fix the problems. “It is a positive step for- ward of saying, ‘We need to do better. We need to be more efficient with taxpayer money. … How do we do that?’” he said. “And that’s what the Forest Service has done.” Public comment on the USFS’s proposed rules ends on Aug. 26. DOWNLOAD OUR FREE NEWS APP TODAY! 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