300,000 acres in Tongass to open to logging
Administration opens some areas to road building
WASHINGTON - Reversing a Clinton-era policy, the Bush administration on Tuesday opened 300,000 more acres of Southeast Alaska's Tongass National Forest, the nation's largest, to possible logging or other development.
Steve Seley owns Pacific Log and Lumber in Ketchikan, one of the few sawmills still operating in the panhandle. He recently completed a $1.4 million expansion and was counting on the decision to stay in business.
"We had to move ahead and just be confident that this would happen," Seley said. "Like I said, Merry Christmas - this couldn't have come at a better time."
"The Bush administration is just catering to its friends in the timber industry by adopting this rule today," said Tom Waldo, an attorney with Earthjustice.
About 250,000 public comments were filed on the Forest Service proposal to change the roadless rules and 90 percent were opposed to it, Waldo said.
Environmentalists may challenge the rule changes after they are published in the Federal Register, Waldo said.
The administration will allow 3 percent of the forest's 9.3 million acres that were put off-limits to road-building by former President Clinton to have roads built on them and perhaps opened to use by the timber industry. The Tongass comprises 16.8 million acres.
"The people of Alaska benefit," said spokesman Bill Bradshaw of the U.S. Forest Service. "What's behind this is the legal challenge by the state. The main point is that it brought a resolution to the Alaska challenge."
The action builds on the Bush administration's decision in June to settle a lawsuit filed by Alaska that challenged the road-building ban. The administration agreed to exempt the Tongass and Chugach national forests from its planned revisions to the roadless rule.
Mark Rey, the Agriculture Department's undersecretary in charge of forest policy, said 95 percent of the roadless areas in the two national forests would remain off-limits to development.
That's because the administration is reverting to an earlier Clinton plan in 1997 that set special management rules for Alaska forests.
John Passacantando, executive director of Greenpeace USA, accused the Bush administration of "gutting the last pristine temperate rain forest" in the United States.
Sen. Lisa Murkowski, an Alaska Republican, said the decision "paves the way for a resumption of some wood harvest for the Tongass, enough to support the surviving timber industry in southeast Alaska."
There are only about 650 remaining timber related jobs in Southeast Alaska, down from a decade ago, when logging employed about 5,000 people, the administration of Alaska Gov. Frank Murkowski said.
Imposed in January 2001, the roadless rule had sought to block development of 58.5 million acres, or nearly one-third of the national forests. Former Alaska Democratic Gov. Tony Knowles had filed a federal lawsuit in 2001 challenging the rule. Meanwhile, a federal judgeblocked the roadless ban in May 2001, saying it needed to be amended, but that ruling was overturned last year by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The rule again was struck down by a federal judge and is before the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.