Forest Service's Last Minute Effort to Finalize Guidance a Disappointment

If you’re like me and you can’t keep up with all the last-minute policy changes by the Bush Administration, you might not have noticed a new announcement by the Forest Service this week.  Their latest shenanigans will leave us with a lopsided playing field when it comes to recreation.

Managing our national forests is no easy task.  At best it is a balancing act between myriad competing interests.  But in the final countdown to the end of the Bush Administration, any attempt at achieving true balance appears to have been abandoned by the Forest Service.  

In its frantic push to tie up loose ends, the Forest Service is busily finalizing internal agency guidance documents that affect management of both its overburdened transportation system and its network of recreational trails.  

In the recently published (December 9, 2008) final Travel Management Directives, the Forest Service fell wide of the mark by eviscerating one of the goals of  the 2005 Travel Management Rule – to identify and implement a minimum transportation system.  This minimum system would look at where access is needed, where resource damage is occurring, and what roads and motorized routes are poorly designed or under-maintained.  They would then make a determination to either keep the road or motorized route, or take it off the map.  

Unfortunately, in its most recent stab at interpreting how the 2005 Rule should operate, the Forest Service turned its back on common sense and planning for the future and focused instead on how to complete the process as quickly as possible, with as little effort as possible.

Draft directives on travel management procedures, published for public comment in March 2007, provided better guidance than the final directives.  Apparently, it took the Forest Service 21 months to figure out how to wiggle its way out of the commitments it almost made in the draft directives.

In contrast, a separate guidance document, the Trails Classification Directives, (issued in an interim final form in mid-October after over two years of delay), set a generally good tone for future management of recreational trails.  But these directives are closely tied to the final directives released this week, and therefore they also fail to provide protective language.  Instead of providing firm guidance for recreation and travel planners to protect forest resources while still providing opportunities for recreation, the interim final directives sidestep the problem.  

For instance, how does the Forest Service determine which uses are allowed on a trail?  One might assume that they involve the public in these important decisions about where and how we recreate, but that would be wrong.  They have no official system.  Some specific trails might have been formally analyzed in the past, so they might look up and use that data.  Another alternative might be talking to “old timers” in the agency to find out if they remember what use was originally intended on the trail.  Then, without any public involvement or further analysis, they assign an objective for the trail and maintain it to that level.  If trail users don’t agree with that assessment, they’ll just have to speak up and try to get it changed after the fact.

That isn't planning. That's "winging it."

The Forest Service once again is being reactive instead of proactive, avoiding taking a comprehensive and responsible look at recreation and the travel system.

The Forest Service, in both its travel management directives and the new trails classification system, should analyze its network of roads, motorized routes, and recreational trails as a whole, and determine what parts of it are truly needed, what uses are appropriate, and which roads, trails or uses may be causing too much resource damage or too many recreational conflicts.

Sidestepping the issue in a last ditch effort to lock in a one-sided policy does a great disservice to our national forests and national forests visitors.