|
December 20, 2005
FOREST
SERVICE WITHDRAWS NEW MANAGEMENT PLAN FOR LOS PADRES, CITING
"TECHNICAL ERRORS"
Agency Will
Re-Release the Plan in January,
Re-Starting the Public Appeal Process
Vallejo, CA - Admitting to
serious errors in the environmental documents, the U.S. Forest
Service announced today that it has withdrawn its decision
approving a new management plan for the Los Padres National
Forest.
The reason for withdrawing the
new plan was that
"public comments on wildlife issues and the agency's responses
were inadvertently omitted from the printed and electronic
documents," according to the agency's official news release.
Regional Forester Bernie
Weingardt, the top Forest Service official in California, says
that the agency will re-issue the plan, along with the
appropriate documents, sometime in January 2006.
Since first releasing the plan
back in September, the agency's new plan has been plagued by
mistakes and missing documents. On September 15, the agency
published a 2-page errata sheet to correct some technical errors
and to explain how to access entire reports that were omitted
from the CD version of the plan.
The agency made a second round
of corrections on October 24, 2005, releasing 22 pages of text
omitted from the final documents. Most of this text was the
agency's written responses to specific public comments. Under
the National Environmental Policy Act, these responses are
required by law to be included in the final documents.
A third round of corrections
was issued three days later, on October 27. Since then, the
agency has posted several new documents on its web site,
including the Scientific Review Team's comments, which were
supposed to be posted on the web site when the plans were first
released three months ago.
This postponement will provide
the public with full access to these documents for the entire
90-day public review period. The agency will not be making any
changes to the plan. According to the agency, "The omitted material was fully considered in the decision-making
process, so the decision itself will remain the same."
Background
On September 20, 2005, the U.S.
Forest Service approved a new land management plan for the four
southern California national forests, including the Los Padres.
The new plan covers all 1.76 million acres of the Los Padres,
and will guide decisions on everything from protecting wildlife
and providing recreation opportunities, to deciding where
potentially damaging development can take place.
The new plan had been in effect
for two months before today's announcement withdrawing the plan.
ForestWatch and other
conservation groups had criticized the plan for not including
enough new wilderness areas, for allowing road construction and
development in 74% of the roadless areas in the Los Padres, for
allowing oil and gas drilling to expand, and for weakening
protections for rare plants and animals. Click here to read our
preliminary summary of the new plan.
Impact
The impact of the agency's
withdrawal is two-fold. First, the effective date of the new
forest plan is now delayed until February 2006 at the earliest.
This means that any projects approved by the agency in the next
month will only have to comply with the outdated standards of
the old 1988 plan.
It also means that the deadline
for the public to file an appeal of the plan is pushed back
until at least April 2006.
Next Steps
The Forest Service will
announce the new deadlines by sending out a postcard to everyone
who is on the Forest Service's mailing list for the forest plan
revision.
ForestWatch will continue to
review the new plan and the hundreds of pages of environmental
documents, and will continue to advocate for more stringent
protections for the wildlife, rivers, wilderness, and scenic
landscapes of the Los Padres.
|
