King is a Montrose native who has served as deputy director of the DNR for the past four years and worked for the department since 1999. Before that he served as an assistant attorney general in the natural resources section of the Colorado Attorney General’s Office beginning in 1993.

“From water to wildlife to energy development, the Department of Natural Resources is entrusted with protecting and managing some of Colorado’s most important assets,” King said in a release. “I am deeply grateful to the Governor for his confidence in me, and I am committed to continue working with the myriad groups and individuals who look to DNR for leadership in these critical areas.”

King also worked under DNR executive director Harris Sherman, whom Martin replaced last year. Sherman was another Obama administration call-up, taking over as Undersecretary of Natural Resources and Environment at the U.S. Department of Agriculture – a post that oversees the U.S. Forest Service and the Natural Resources Conservation Service.

Sherman and King worked hard on the controversial Colorado roadless rule, which petitions the federal government to give Colorado more control in managing 4.2 million acres of mostly roadless public lands in the state. Critics say the rule allows too many road-building exemptions for logging, coal mining and ski area expansion, but proponents say it gives Colorado more control and protects more Colorado acreage than federal rules.

King has a journalism degree from the University of Colorado at Boulder, a law degree from the University of Denver, and a master’s in public administration from CU-Denver.

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Sherman earlier this month was confirmed by the U.S. Senate as the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s undersecretary for natural resources and environment, with oversight of the U.S. Forest Service and Natural Resources Conservation Service.

Some conservation groups were critical of Sherman’s selection to oversee the Forest Service given his support for a Colorado roadless rule they feel provides far too many road-building exceptions on national forest land for energy extraction, logging and ski-area expansion.

Martin is the former executive director of Western Resource Advocates, director of the Natural Resources Law Center at the University of Colorado School of Law, and a senior attorney and director of the energy program for Environmental Defense. Also, from 1986 to 1992 he worked for former U.S. Rep. and Sen. Tim Wirth.

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Trees killed off by back beetles, like these in Summit County, scar the landscape across Colorado, ready to go up in flames. (Creative Commons photo by vsmoothe via Flickr)

The blaze was in a roadless area on a steep, densely wooded hillside above two Vail neighborhoods packed with ski lodges, condos and homes in what’s known as the Wildland Urban Interface. And the trees were mostly red and dead lodgepole pines ready to explode into an inferno in the hot summer wind.

Nervous Vail residents feared this was the “Big One” they’ve been dreading — a massive wildfire fueled by the state’s ongoing mountain pine beetle epidemic that is estimated to have killed nearly 2 million acres of trees statewide.

More than 50 firefighters from the U.S. Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management and local fire districts responded on foot, first passing through a 200-yard “defensible space” zone they’ve cleared around town the last several years, then heading up into the parched and mostly dead forest above.

Vail ski area, usually jamming atop the gondola for Friday Afternoon Club, was forced to evacuate the mountain while a helicopter out of Rifle started making bucket drops. Ultimately, though, it was a slurry bomber from Grand Junction that snuffed the fire and kept it to one acre.

Defensible space zones where firefighters at least have elbow room to battle a blaze are critical, said Department of Natural Resources deputy director Mike King, but it’s not enough. And that’s one of the main reasons the state is pushing ahead with its own roadless rule despite mounting pressure on the Obama administration to adopt an overarching national rule for nearly 60 million acres of roadless national forest across the country, including 4.2 million acres in Colorado.

“[Defensible space] by itself in the face of having adjacent to a community standing dead pine trees is not enough to protect the soils and water supplies and community infrastructure in areas like Vail and Eagle County,” King said.

In a revised version of its draft rule first released last year, Colorado is now proposing unfettered temporary road building up to a half mile from communities surrounded by dead and dying trees. From a half mile to a mile and a half, roads must be part of a Community Wildfire Protection Plan (as allowed by state Senate Bill 1, which was approved last session) and determined to be high risk as defined in the Healthy Forest Restoration Act.

That’s simply unacceptable to some in the environmental community. Ryan Bidwell of Colorado Wild, for instance, supports defensible space, but not much more. In previous interviews with The Colorado Independent, he’s said high-value places such as ski areas, parks and mountain communities should be protected, but in more recent interviews he’s said that should not include pushing more than a half mile into the forest.

But Vail and other ski areas want to get more aggressive in thinning and reshaping the existing forest to reduce the fire danger and allow re-vegetation, and now a Connecticut firm is seeking a $30 million Department of Energy grant to establish a biomass power plant in Vail that would convert chipped up dead trees into hot water heat and electricity through a carbon-neutral process called gasification.

Temporary logging roads would in all likelihood need to be built into the Wildland Urban Interface to mitigate fire danger and provide a sustainable fuel source for such a green-energy investment, but the more restrictive 2001 Clinton-era roadless rule wouldn’t allow it.

However, that rule was tossed out by the Bush administration and replaced with the state-specific petition process Colorado embarked on in 2005. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in California tossed out the Bush petition process in favor of the 2001 Clinton rule last week, but there are conflicting decisions from 2003 and 2008 in the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which covers Colorado, setting aside the Clinton rule, all of which has led to ongoing legal limbo.

“There is no rule in effect in Colorado right now and our forests are subject to all kinds of development potential because they don’t have a higher level of protection in place, and we’re much closer to getting protection in Colorado than they are on the federal rule,” King said.

Rob Vandermark of the Pew Environment Group disagrees. He said U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack’s May directive that all development decisions on roadless national forest lands must be approved by his office provides adequate protection while the Obama administration hammers out a national rule.

“Secretary Vilsack’s interim directive elevated all decisions on any activity in inventoried roadless areas to his desk,” Vandermark said. “We’d expect that he would make those decisions in keeping with Barack Obama’s stated support of the 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Rule as a U.S. Senator and as a presidential candidate.”

While campaigning for the White House, then-Sen. Obama had this to say on the roadless issue:

“Road construction in national forests can harm fish and wildlife habitats while polluting local lakes, rivers, and streams. The Roadless Area Conservation Rule — which was made on the basis of extensive citizen input — protects 58.5 million acres of national forest from such harmful building. I will be proud to support and defend it.”

Gov. Bill Ritter’s position is that he supports a national roadless rule but wants the Colorado rule incorporated into it. King said there are other considerations such as the economic health of industries dependant on national forest lands, including the state’s ski industry, oil and gas and mining sectors.

“We have 4.2 million acres of roadless, and the [state] task force originally recommended and Gov. Ritter has reaffirmed that 8,200 acres spread among 13 resorts within existing ski area boundaries that were roadless will be taken out and these ski areas will be given the ability to expand within their permits without some of the constraints of roadless area considerations,” King said, although he pointed out that any such expansion would still undergo rigorous National Environmental Policy Act review.

Small chunks of national forest land would be removed from the roadless inventory at Arapahoe Basin (1,050), Aspen Mountain (50), Beaver Creek (510), Breckenridge (150), Buttermilk (50), Copper Mountain (720), Crested Butte (900), Durango Mountain Resort (90), Loveland, (2,990) Snowmass (80), Ski Cooper (560), Steamboat (180) and Vail (900). But conservationists say the state’s resorts don’t need to get bigger with demand for the sport relatively flat, charging such expansions are merely marketing and real estate plays.

Pew Environment Group spokeswoman Elyssa Rosen said such economic imperatives are all the more reason for a uniform national rule such as the 2001 Clinton rule: “Any state, based on pressures from special interests, could argue that they have special circumstances — exactly the reason national policy was developed for these national forests.”

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Areas of Routt National Forest are included in Colorado's roadless areas. (Creative Commons photo by andso via Flickr)

While conservation groups called Wednesday’s federal appeals court decision reinstating the Clinton-era roadless rule a major victory, the state of Colorado contends its own revised rule is still a far more practical way of managing the state’s 4.2 million roadless acres.

Mike King, deputy director of Colorado’s Department of Natural Resources, said Wednesday that the 2001 Clinton rule, which provided sweeping protections against road building on nearly 60 million acres of largely undeveloped public lands nationwide, did not take into consideration wildfire mitigation or other critical economic drivers.

“In Colorado in 2001, we didn’t have a bark-beetle epidemic, and now we find ourselves eight years later with at least 2 million, and maybe more like 2.5 million, acres of dead trees,” King said. “Many of these acres are adjacent to communities, and the risk of catastrophic wildfire has increased exponentially as a result.”

The Bush administration quickly tossed out the Clinton rule in 2001 and four year later allowed states to petition for their own roadless rules. Only Idaho and Colorado went that route, with Idaho adopting its own set of rules late last year.

Colorado’s draft rules, released in 2008, were formed by a task force with extensive public input over a period of two years, but it has been slowed by critics charging that it allows far too many road-building exceptions for energy extraction, water and power infrastructure, logging and ski-area expansion. It was also stalled in the transition between the Bush and Obama administrations.

On Monday, Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter’s administration issued a revised version of its 2008 draft, drawing jeers from environmentalists. But Wednesday, the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals issued a ruling upholding a 2006 U.S. District Court decision that reinstated Clinton’s Roadless Area Conservation Rule and threw out the Bush administration’s State Petitions Rule.

“Today is a victory for one of the most important land protection measures of the decade,” Jane Danowitz, director of the Pew Environment Group’s U.S. public lands program, said in a statement. “It is now up to President Obama to fulfill his pledge to permanently protect our unspoiled forests by resurrecting the [2001 Clinton] Roadless Rule.”

Colorado had been operating under the notion that the 2001 rule was permanently enjoined in the state and that the U.S. Forest Service could not use it to manage public lands in Colorado.

Rob Vandermark of the Pew Environment Group disagreed with that reading of earlier court decisions, instead arguing that injunctions by lower courts were only in effect pending appeals.

“Today’s decision by the higher court … affirmed [District] Judge Laporte’s ruling that the Bush administration unlawfully repealed the 2001 roadless rule and reinstated the 2001 rule nationwide,” Vandermark said. “Today’s ruling means that the U.S. Forest Service is now bound by the provisions of the 2001 rule on lands it manages in all states — except Idaho and within Alaska’s Tongass National Forest.”

According to a spokeswoman, Pew wants Obama to affirm that the 2001 rule applies in Colorado and suspend the state rulemaking process in favor of a permanent national rule. King said that would be a mistake for a variety of reasons, most of them having to do with states having more knowledge of special circumstances such as wildfire mitigation.

In the 2008 draft Colorado rule, for instance, King said conservationists were concerned that language on logging road exceptions was too broad and could allow local officials to declare an entire county high risk under the Healthy Forest Restoration Act and set up a Community Wildfire Protection Plan in order to land a timber mill in the county.

So in its revised version, the state shored up that language to allow fairly unfettered thinning within a half mile of towns and then public review as part of a Community Wildfire Protection Plan process — as allowed under state Senate Bill 1, which went into effect Wednesday — for public lands between a half mile and 1.5 miles of town.

“I’ve had candid conversations with many environmentalists who say, ‘We know that when the Obama administration takes up this issue at the national level there will have to be some accommodation for fuel treatment because of [the fire] issue in Colorado and other western states,’” King said. “So we think the question of does there need to be some flexibility for fuel treatment is a no-brainer and it’s a foregone conclusion.”

King said two other exceptions for temporary road building include 29,000 acres on the North Fork of the Gunnison River for coal mining and ski-area expansion on roadless areas within existing resort permits — about 8,000 acres spread over 11 existing ski areas.

“Those are two examples of narrowly tailored exceptions that we can do on a state analysis that the national rule would never give you the ability to do,” King said, adding both industries are critical to the economy of the entire state.

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The Pew Environment Group immediately charged that the latest revised plan is even less protective of Colorado’s more than 4 million acres of largely undeveloped public lands than the draft plan the state submitted in 2008 after months of public review and comment.

Pew wants to see the Obama administration throw out Colorado’s plan in favor of the 2001 Clinton administration Roadless Area Conservation Rule, which protected about 58.5 million acres nationwide. The Bush administration quickly tossed that rule aside and later allowed states to petition for their own roadless rules. Only Idaho and Colorado did so, with Idaho adopting a fairly restrictive plan last year.

Colorado’s plan has been more controversial because of exceptions for logging, mining, oil and gas development and ski area expansion. According to the Denver Post, the new, revised rule protects 4,184,000 acres in Colorado, compared to 4,031,000 in the 2008 draft and 4,243,500 under the Clinton rule.

The Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, a coalition of sportsmen’s group, also criticized the revised plan for its broad exceptions that would allow road building for logging, coal mining and water projects in critical wildlife habitat and fisheries.

To get the state’s take, go to the Department of Natural Resources Web site. To comment on the latest plan, e-mail Roadless.Comments@state.co.us or send a written comment to Roadless Rule Comments, Colorado Department Of Natural Resources, 1313 Sherman Street, Room 718, Denver, CO 80203.

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But environmental groups are already casting doubt on the possible pick, questioning Sherman’s role in moving Colorado’s controversial roadless rule forward.

One of only two states to petition for its own roadless rule after the Bush administration set aside the overarching Clinton administration roadless rule in 2001, Colorado’s plan for managing 4.4 million acres of federal roadless lands is viewed by some environmentalists as containing too many road-building exceptions for oil and gas production and logging.

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack late last month issued a memorandum suspending all road building on more than 58 million acres of roadless federal lands around the country, meaning any exceptions would have to be approved by the USDA and whoever lands the undersecretary post.

Sherman is in the running because Mississippi state conservationist Homer Lee Wilkes pulled his name from consideration for family reasons.