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Forest Service
Off-Road Vehicles
Policy
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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.
