Groups battle over Bitterroot forest timber

By PERRY BACKUS of the Missoulian (Repost)

The subject of U.S. Forest Service appeals on the Bitterroot National Forest has become a hot topic on Internet blogs, mass e-mails and guest editorials in newspapers over the last month or so.

The controversy flared following statements made by a brand new Bitterroot Valley-based group calling itself the Big Sky Coalition: Environmentalists with Common Sense. The group contends that appeals and litigation are keeping the Forest Service from accomplishing fuel reduction work in the woods.

Their critics, led by Matthew Koehler, executive director of Missoula's WildWest Institute, and fueled by a report by Friends of the Bitterroot, say relatively few timber sales on the Bitterroot National Forest have been appealed in relation to what's been offered.

Gary Milner of Friends of the Bitterroot used information he gained from the Forest Service through a Freedom of Information Act request to put together a report showing 534 timber sales from 1985 to 2002 on the Bitterroot National Forest. Of that number, 29 were appealed.

In a mass e-mail to other environmental groups and the Missoulian, Koehler said those numbers showed that 95 percent of all commercial timber sales went through without any appeal in the 17-year period.

As for litigation, Koehler said there had only been two cases filed against timber sales on the Bitterroot National Forest from 1985 to present.

"Two court challenges out of 500-plus timber sales hardly seems like getting sued ‘almost every time,' " Koehler wrote.

Koehler referred all questions by the Missoulian about the numbers to Friends of the Bitterroot, saying that group did the actual research.

Bitterroot National Forest Service officials say the figures Koehler uses are flawed.

"This stuff is very complicated because the rules are continually changing," said Sue Heald, the Bitterroot National Forest's planning and recreation staff officer. "It's easy to play games with the numbers."

For instance, the two lawsuits filed against the Bitterroot National Forest weren't over individual timber sales, Heald said. Instead, environmental groups, including Koehler's, filed suits against projects that included more than one timber sale.

"In this case, one decision doesn't equate to one timber sale," she said.

The environmental analysis completed on the Bitterroot National Forest's Burned Area Recovery plan included more than 22 separate stewardship timber sales. The Middle East Fork fuel reduction plan included four timber sales.

Friends of the Bitterroot President Jim Miller said when environmental groups challenged those projects in court, they did not include numerous timber sales.

"We weren't challenging 20 different timber sales," Miller said. "We were challenging the entire project."

As far as the number of timber sales on the Bitterroot National Forest, Heald said the agency provided Milner with two different sets of data.

The first set, which Milner used in his report, included every commercial activity that involved cutting trees, including commercial Christmas tree sales, post and pole permits and commercial firewood sales.

Milner said that was what he asked for.

"The key word for me was commercial," Milner said. "If money was generated off the sale, then I wanted it accounted for."

Milner's request for information came after he heard people voice concerns that the Bitterroot National Forest's timber sale program had essentially been shut down because of appeals and litigation.

He wanted to know if that was true.

So Milner sat down with a Forest Service employee with the initial list and crossed off mushroom permits and other activities that didn't have anything to do with timber.

"I felt they (the Forest Service) knew exactly what it was that I wanted," he said.

From there, Milner said he simply counted the number of projects that remained on the list.

Heald said the first set of information the agency provided Milner included hundreds of projects that couldn't be appealed under Forest Service regulations in place at the time.

A second document sent about two months later excluded the smallest offerings, including commercial Christmas trees sales, firewood, boughs and mushroom sales. From 1985 to 2002, the new document indicated there were 155 timber sales on the Bitterroot.

"Even some of these were quite small and would not have been appealable," Heald said. "We were trying to make a totally accurate count, but it was very, very difficult given the data we had to work with."

The second Forest Service report provided to Milner said that between 1998 and 2002, the number of decisions that were subject to appeal that included a timber component was eight. Half of those decisions were appealed.

"We weren't sure why we were going back 15 to 20 years," Heald said. "A lot has changed in 20 years. We thought maybe it was more relevant to look at what happened over the last five years."

Besides, she said the best data available to the agency begins after 1998.

"That was when we really started to get more computerized systems," she said. "We have good records of what was appealed, but we don't have good records of every decision that was appealable."

A 2003 study by Northern Arizona University's Ecological Restoration Institute that analyzed Forest Service appeals supports Heald's contention the agency's data is often incomplete before 1996.

A 1999 court settlement required the agency to maintain an electronic database available to the public on all administrative appeal final decisions.

The study suggested there's a lot the Forest Service doesn't know or understand about the impacts of administrative appeals, including ecological, social, economic and administrative costs.

"There's no way of tracking the financial costs of processing Forest Service appeals within the current budget structure," the study said. "People can only guess."

A shrinking workforce and a requirement to do more costly and time-consuming analysis have resulted in fewer projects being offered each year, Heald said.

"That additional analysis isn't about appeals, it's about litigation," Heald said. "The courts keep setting the bar higher and higher for our analysis."

Where in 1990 an environmental analysis might be 30 pages long, the analysis for the controversial Middle East Fork fuel reduction project was two volumes of 250 pages each.

"We're talking inches here," she said. "Over the years, this cumulative additional analysis combined with the reduction of our work force has meant longer time frames to complete projects."

It's a challenge the Forest Service faces across the West.

According to an October 2007 Northern Region report, 314 million board feet of timber is tied up in either appeals or litigation.

Amounts vary from forest to forest.

On the Bitterroot National Forest, the figures are relatively small. About 2.4 million board feet on two timber sales included in the Middle East Fork fuel reduction project await a decision by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

On the Kootenai National Forest, more than 80 million board feet are tied up in appeals and litigation, according to the report. The Lolo National Forest has more than 21 million board feet either in litigation or on appeal.

"The Kootenai normally offers about 50 million board feet every year," said Gary Dickerson, the Northern Region's acting assistant director of timber management. "So 80 million board feet equals about 1.6 years of that forest's total timber program that's tied up in appeals or litigation."

The WildWest Institute and Ecology Center are involved in five lawsuits on the Kootenai National Forest, four on the Lolo National Forest and one each on the Bitterroot, Beaverhead-Deerlodge and Helena national forests, according the regional report.

The regional office began putting together the report on appeals and litigation three years ago after people expressed concerns over the time and money being spent to complete all the additional analysis, Dickerson said.

"With a tight workforce and tight budgets, people working on appeals and litigation aren't able to work on other projects to get more acres treated," he said. "It's a real dilemma for us."

At the high point in the summer of 2006, 528 million board feet of timber sales were tied up in appeals and litigation.

"It's way more than some people would have you think," Dickerson said. "It's a big deal. This isn't small potatoes."

Heald doesn't see anything in the near future that will change that course.

"The process is not designed to resolve conflict," Heald said. "If there was less controversy, then there would probably be less appeals. Appeals are just the process. They're not causing the controversy.

"Underlying philosophical differences lead to appeals."

Friends of the Bitterroot President Jim Miller sees administrative appeals as a form of democracy.

"Appeals are not a dirty word," Miller said. "Appeals are a safety valve put in by the Forest Service to ensure that projects that move ahead are good projects. � The American public has a right to stand up and say no when something isn't right."

Miller became president of the grassroots organization in 2001. Since then, he said Friends of the Bitterroot have been involved in "a handful" of appeals - "maybe four or five."

In comparison, the Ecology Center, which merged with the Native Forest Network in 2006 to become WildWest Institute, filed 236 appeals from 1997 through 2002, according to the Ecological Restoration Institute's report.

Most of those appeals - 204 - were filed in the Forest Service's Northern Region.

Miller said Friends of the Bitterroot carefully analyze proposed projects to see if they meet a variety of standards, including those established by the National Forest Management Act and the Endangered Species Act.

In some cases, Miller said the Forest Service has made changes upfront to address issues raised by Friends of the Bitterroot. And there have been cases where the group didn't find anything to comment on and the sale was completed, he said.

The challenge for the Bitterroot National Forest is in its history, Miller said.

In the 1960s, '70s and into the '80s, "a huge amount of timber was cut in an unsustainable manner," Miller said. That left a legacy of compacted soils, sedimentation problems from logging roads and impacted streams on the Bitterroot forest, he said.

"A large part of the forest is still suffering from that industrial logging era," Miller said.

Miller said it seems like a lot is being made over little litigation on the Bitterroot National Forest.

"The bottom line is three lawsuits have been filed on the Bitterroot National Forest in 20 years (one was dropped before it made it to court)," Miller said. "That just doesn't seem like a whole heck of a lot."

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