Sen. Jon Tester recently pointed a spotlight at this giveaway that he recognized amounted to a public subsidy of the biggest landowner in Montana. Thanks to Tester’s intervention, last week Undersecretary of Agriculture Mark Rey finally agreed to discuss this issue with county commissioners and other local officials whose ability to undertake their public responsibilities would be affected by the Forest Service’s gift of interpretation about these easements.
Plum Creek owns some 1.2 million acres of land in Montana and much of this land is accessible only from roads that cross Forest Service lands. Plum Creek, of course, is in the process of converting itself from a company that harvests timber to one that makes billions from selling real estate on its rural lands. These lands can be sold for much more if there is guaranteed access to them over Forest Service roads. Plum Creek obtained the easements from the Forest Service so that it could move harvested timber over the Forest Service roads. No one anticipated at the time that these easements would be interpreted in ways that would permit them to be used to facilitate subdivision and development of remote areas.
Tester demanded that the negotiations between Plum Creek and the Forest Service on these easement conversions be open to public participation. This resulted in the meeting last week, but no recognition by Rey that the county commissioners’ concerns would be acknowledged in any meaningful way. Throughout the meeting, Rey insisted that his hands were tied by the wording of the easements. This assertion was repeatedly challenged by the attorneys for the county commissioners and other attorneys present.
If Rey is correct that he has no flexibility, he would be more convincing if he at least put up a fight to protect the public interest rather than throwing in the towel before the first round starts. Ultimately, making such interpretations are what the courts are for. It shouldn’t be a matter up to Rey to just decide. As Tester pointed out in his letter to Rey dated April 11, “The conversion of this land will lead to increased housing density in the wildland-urban interface, leaving local and county governments with higher firefighting costs, fragmented habitat and increased road maintenance and infrastructure costs.” These concerns paralleled those raised by county commissioners across Montana last week who don’t want to be forced to deal with the problems created by uncontrolled development of these former Plum Creek timber lands.
Rey suggested this easement problem was everyone else’s problem and that the Forest Service, which is interpretating the easements, could do nothing. No doubt there are things our state Legislature should be doing to make it easier for Montana’s counties to manage development and sprawl, but that doesn’t mean the Forest Service shouldn’t help out when it can by not giving away the store in secret negotiations. Rey asserted that he had to give away the store in order to protect some crumbs of concessions obtained from Plum Creek, such as an agreement not to sue the Forest Service over losses from fires.
Tester should also take a look at a similar misguided program on Forest Service lands, the Forest Highways Program. This disastrous program is designed to pave the Forest Service’s low-use gravel roads, thereby converting them into high-speed highways. This program uses our tax money to pave roads and do other “improvements” in ways that are destructive to wildlife and inconsistent with the ways our national forests should be managed.
Two such projects are now pending on the Lolo National Forest. The Petty Creek Project would pave 11 miles of road from I-90 to the Idaho border in Missoula County and the Little Joe Project would pave 17 miles in Mineral County from St. Regis to the Idaho border. Both projects are now on the fast track following years of evaluation and the public is being given only a 30-day comment period. This period has already closed for the Petty Creek project. To comment on the Little Joe project, see the Environmental Assessment now on the Web site for the Western Federal Lands Highway Division of the Federal Highway Administration. These projects not only fragment wildlife habitat, they also promote subdivision on private lands adjacent to Forest Service lands and this increases fire fighting costs that are crippling the Forest Service’s budget.
One thing is absolutely clear: Once wild lands are subdivided and forest roads are paved there is no returning either to the wild state where the watersheds we depend on are protected and the wildlife that is part of the Montana lifestyle is preserved.
Sterling Miller of the National Wildlife Federation writes from Missoula.
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