BOISE, Idaho – Certain logging projects and other smaller-scale U.S. Forest Service activities would be exempt from a long-standing public comment and appeals process under a provision inserted into a spending bill and approved recently by a key Senate committee.
Sen. Conrad Burns, R-Mont., added the amendment to a multi-agency budget measure that sailed through the Senate Appropriations Committee last month.
No date has been set for a full vote in the Senate; spending bills before the House of Representatives do not contain the rider.
The Burns amendment would overturn a 2005 ruling by a U.S. District Court judge in California that thwarted Forest Service regulations written in 2003. Those regulations would have repealed public comment on so-called “categorical exemptions” – smaller-scale projects the Forest Service says do not require lengthy environmental analysis.
For instance, the measure would allow public comment to be bypassed for proposed burn projects up to 4,500 acres and for fuel-reduction logging projects up to 1,000 acres. The process can last 90 days or more.
Environmentalists hailed the California ruling as a rebuke of the president’s Healthy Forests Initiative, but now are grousing that Bush allies are again seeking to bypass the National Environmental Policy Act.
Marty Hayden, legislative policy director for Earthjustice in Washington, D.C., said Burns’ amendment effectively censors from public view any project deemed harmless by forest supervisors.
“If you’re a logging company, lots of things look harmless,” he said. “But if you are a trout fisherman, a logging project might look more harmful. What Senator Burns is saying is the trout fisherman doesn’t have the right to know.”
Talk to us
> Give us your news tips.
> Send us a letter to the editor.
> More Herald contact information.
