Sen. Mark Udall, D-Colo., on Tuesday urged the head of the U.S. Forest Service and Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack to rework timber sale contracts for logging on federal lands so that three financially struggling Colorado sawmills can stay afloat.

Sen. Mark Udall

Udall points to the more than 4 million acres of dead lodgepole pine trees resulting from an ongoing mountain pine bark beetle epidemic.

“These mills provide hundreds of jobs in Colorado’s rural communities and are irreplaceable parts of the statewide infrastructure we need to reduce wildfire risk to communities and remove millions of hazardous beetle-kill trees adjacent to roads, power lines, trailheads, picnic areas, and campgrounds,” Udall wrote in a letter to Vilsack and USFS chief Tom Tidwell. “I appreciate the role the market must play in timber sales, but at this juncture in Colorado we must maintain an infrastructure to safely and economically dispose of our surplus of dead timber.”

Udall addressed so-called legacy timber sales at a Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee hearing on wildfire management last month, saying time is running short to start dealing with the beetle kill epidemic in an economically viable way. State lawmakers last legislative session passed a bill meant to boost the forest products industry, especially the consumption of dead trees in biomass power plants in order to generate electricity and hot water heat.

But some members of the conservation community have their doubts.

“The whole issue points out the problem of removing beetle kill — the dead lodgepole pine isn’t worth much as a potential commercial product,” Rocky Smith of Colorado Wild told the Colorado Independent. “That is why there are efforts to create a biomass industry, which might allow the use of dead lodgepole pine for heating and electric power generation. Those efforts have only had limited success.”

The ski town of Vail came up short in its bid to build a multi-megawatt biomass power plant that would use the proven process of high-heat wood gasification to cleanly generate power and heat by consuming chipped up wood products. The process is considered carbon-neutral compared to forests biodegrading naturally or being consumed in wildfires.

“We are not against a wood products industry, but we want to make sure that it is sized appropriately and would sunset when the dead material runs out or is no longer available for product use,” Smith said. “It is tempting to think that there is so much dead stuff out there, so we should try to facilitate creation of a large industry that could utilize it. But that could result in industry dictating what land could be harvested.”

Smith also pointed out that the current state of the economy has lowered the demand for wood products.

Colorado Wild’s Ryan Bidwell told the Denver Post that exception opens up far too many acres of roadless public lands to logging.

“We agree that it makes sense to clear trees and brush around peoples’ homes, and the science is clear that cutting trees and brush immediately around homes, the first 200 feet, can be very effective. But we see no reason to allow logging a mile or even further away from communities,” Bidwell said.

The Vail Daily quoted Department of Natural Resources deputy director Mike King saying the exception is needed to mitigate wildfire danger on the rise because of a mountain pine bark beetle outbreak that began in the 1990s and has killed more than 1.5 million acres of Colorado’s national forests.

A recent University of Colorado study gives some credence to Bidwell’s contention that going deep into the forests isn’t necessarily going to reduce the wildfire danger, but Breckenridge recently repealed an ordinance requiring removal of potentially flammable vegetation around homes – buckling to homeowners who said it was too expensive.

In Vail, where the town, Eagle County and the U.S. Forest Service have been working for the past several years to create a defensible zone of a couple of hundred yards around the entire town, firefighters say it’s key to have a space in which to fight the inevitable fires before they move down into town.

Officials there are now working on getting federal funding for a biomass power plant that would generate hot water and electricity by gasifying chipped up beetle-kill trees. Any long-term stewardship contract with the Forest Service, which backs the plan, would likely envision being able to go a little deeper than 200 feet into the forest to provide a sustainable supply of fuel.

Surely there’s a happy median between 200 feet and 1.5 miles, because only the most fringe of environmentalists would actually like to see posh ski resorts like Vail and Aspen go up in flames.

Democratic state lawmakers Christine Scanlan and Dan Gibbs, both of badly infested Summit County, put out a release Tuesday touting state laws they helped pass last session that go into effect Wednesday and should make it easier for mountain towns to form action plans to deal with the epidemic from a wildfire protection standpoint.

“This is an aggressive step forward for Colorado,” said Rep. Scanlan. “It’s critical legislation, providing state entities, private landowners and local communities assistance in addressing wildfire threats using innovative strategies. This new law will facilitate market-based solutions to help Colorado effectively combat the bark beetle infestation.”

Got a tip? Freelance story pitch? Send us an e-mail. Follow The Colorado Independent on Twitter. And we’re hiring.

Lost Horse Mill on the Elk Mountain Range's Crystal River near Marble, Colo. (Photo/Rob Lee, Flickr)

This is the Bush administration’s last chance to implement its vision of how to administer pristine forest and park land. While in the Senate, President-elect Obama opposed the Bush administration’s plans for roadless areas.

A top U.S. Department of Agriculture official reportedly told a Nov. 19 meeting of the U.S. Forest Service’s Roadless Area Conservation National Advisory Committee (RACNAC) that the goal is to have a final Colorado roadless ruled published in the Federal Register by Jan. 16.

“We have heard through channels that the Forest Service is trying very hard to get this thing out the door before the end of the Bush administration, which would make it arguably a little harder for [president-elect Barack] Obama to reverse,” said Rocky Smith of the nonprofit conservation group Colorado Wild. “We, of course, want a national rule, and any rule, whether it’s a state rule or a national rule, has to be a hell of a lot better than the draft Colorado rule.”

Smith and others have repeatedly objected to numerous exceptions for logging, oil and gas production and ski-area expansion in the Colorado roadless rule. The rule dictates the management practices for 4.4 million acres of public lands throughout the state that have been designated as essentially pristine and untrammeled by not only roads but development in general.

Environmental groups have been fighting for nearly eight years to reinstate the federal Clinton administration roadless rule that was quickly cast aside by the Bush administration in 2001. The Clinton rule has been batted about in court for years, most recently suffering a setback in a Wyoming district court, which ruled the Clinton administration didn’t conduct proper public scoping while drafting its rule in 2000. That decision is currently under appeal.

Several years after suspending the Clinton rule, which set fairly strict standards for protecting about 50 million acres of roadless public lands nationwide, the Bush administration enacted a process by which states could petition the Forest Service to draft their own rules. Only Idaho and Colorado did so.

In October, Idaho finalized its roadless rule, which more closely parallels the Clinton rule, but the Colorado rule allows for “long-term temporary” roads to be built in areas where more than 100 oil and gas leases were issued after the suspension of the Clinton rule.

The Colorado rule also would permit roads deep into heavily timbered areas to allow logging for wildfire mitigation. Most local governments and environmental groups agree that such work should be done closer to endangered communities.

“There’s a lot of concern that the proposed rule and draft environmental impact statement allows excessive cutting a long ways away from communities, which could potentially impact roadless area characteristics and the experiences that folks have in those places,” said Joel Webster, roadless manager for the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, a coalition of sportsman’s groups that objects to the removal of 520,000 acres from the state’s roadless inventory under the proposed rule. “If we’re going to be protecting communities, we need to do that near communities where people actually live.”

(Image/Southern Rockies Ecosystem Project)

“The real concern is that if this thing is done four days before the inauguration of the next president, there’s going to be a lot of controversy around this process because people are going to think it’s a last-minute land grab,” Webster said.

Smith noted that Obama co-sponsored an unsuccessful bill in the U.S. Senate that would have reinstated the Clinton roadless rule, so the new president appears motivated to protect federal roadless areas.

“It’s very possible, although Obama is going to be very busy with the economy his first 100 days, that a [national roadless] bill could pass the Congress and be signed into law by the president, and it complicates the situation if we have a final Colorado rule out,” Smith said. “So we’re trying hard to ensure that that rule does not become final.”

The state decision to petition the Forest Service for a Colorado rule began under the Republican administration of former Gov. Bill Owens but was continued by the Democratic administration of current Gov. Bill Ritter because of concern that the Clinton roadless rule would ultimately be tossed out and the state would not control its own roadless destiny.

Smith said it’s his understanding that the state’s Department of Natural Resources wants more time to work out the kinks in the Colorado roadless rule before it’s finalized. Mike King, deputy director for the Colorado Department of Natural Resources, did not immediately return a call requesting comment.

Webster urged the Ritter administration to push the Forest Service to slow down the state’s roadless rule process. A Forest Service public affairs specialist did not immediately provide comment for this story.

(Image/Southern Rockies Ecosystem Project) Click the image to enlarge.

The battle over management of Colorado’s 4.4 million acres has abruptly intensified, after years of federal intervention, state resistance and legal wrangling dating back to the final days of the Clinton administration.

At stake, according to a coalition of environmental groups fighting to protect roadless areas, is whether wide swaths of relatively unscathed national forest will be made more accessible to motorized vehicles, allowing incursion by logging companies, oil and gas drilling, construction of water pipelines and power transmission lines, and expansion by the state’s ski industry.

At stake, according to a coalition of environmental groups fighting to protect roadless areas, is whether wide swaths of relatively unscathed national forest will be made more accessible to logging companies, oil and gas drilling, construction of water pipelines and power transmission lines, and expansion by the state’s ski industry.

“Our strategy is to show the public that this proposed draft Colorado rule isn’t going to protect roadless areas if it becomes final, it just isn’t, because there are very, very broad exceptions to the general prohibitions on road construction and logging,” said Rocky Smith of Durango-based Colorado Wild.

“[The exceptions] are so broad that many hundreds of thousands of acres of roadless areas could be roaded and/or logged,” said Smith, “and I think if the public sees this, as I think they are, they’re going to rebel against this.”

Conservationists argue that the value of Colorado’s roadless areas as wildlife habitat and pristine areas ideal for tourism, hunting and fishing far outweighs their short-term benefit to the so-called extractive industries that do business on the state’s public lands.

(Image/U.S. Forest Service) Click the image to enlarge.

The state’s environmental community is trying to drive home that point before an Oct. 23 deadline to submit public comments on Colorado’s draft roadless rule, while also increasing traffic to various U.S. Forest Service public open houses being conducted around the state — beginning with one tonight in Grand Junction.

The Clinton administration appeared to agree with environmentalists when federal officials protected nearly 50 million acres of roadless public lands nationwide in early 2001. The Bush administration immediately suspended Clinton’s 2001 roadless rules and several years later implemented a policy of allowing states to petition the Forest Service to enact local control.

Only two states did so: Idaho and Colorado under then-Gov. Bill Owens, a Republican who did so at the behest of the Bush administration. A U.S. district judge in San Francisco later ruled against the Bush administration’s suspension of the 2001 rule and in favor of reinstating the Clinton roadless rule.

In the meantime, Owens was term-limited out of office and Democratic Gov. Bill Ritter opted last year to go ahead with the petition for a draft Colorado roadless rule as insurance in the event that another court ruled against the Clinton roadless rule, which is exactly what happened last month.

A district court judge in Wyoming ruled that the Clinton administration did not follow proper National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) procedures for public scoping, and he reportedly did so in language strongly couched in political rancor, which some say may make an appeal more likely to succeed.

But Smith and other conservationists are not counting on the 2001 Clinton rule to ever be reinstated. Instead they are focused on making sure the new draft Colorado roadless rule has all of the protections of the 2001 rule — something he believes Ritter intended all along.

“We would like to have the ’01 rule back, but that’s going to take a while because that’s in front of the court,” Smith said. “So in the meantime, we’re bracing for the fact that there likely will be a final Colorado rule sometime, probably not till next year, and it’s got to be much improved, because the current rule is so bad. It just has so much discretion for the Forest Service that there will just be no protection for roadless areas.”

Smith said the ’01 rule made plenty of exceptions for building roads that serve a critical public need, such as a logging road near a community to remove beetle-kill trees that present a major fire danger. But he adds that the new Colorado rule makes those exceptions far too broad, allowing road-building deep into the forest for a variety of reasons.

Smith is urging people to attend an open house Wednesday night from 5 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. at the Hotel Colorado in Glenwood Springs, or Thursday night from 5 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. at the Lincoln Avenue Community Center in Steamboat Springs.

Or people can send a comment by e-mail to COcomments@fsroadless.org; by fax to (916) 456–6724, or by snail mail to:
Roadless Area Conservation – Colorado
P.O. Box 162909,
Sacramento, CA 95816–2909