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Copyright 2000
Oregon Live ®

The U.S. Forest Service meeting is the first in the Northwest since the president proposed last month to ban road building

Wednesday, December 1, 1999

Hundreds of people supporting President Clinton's proposed ban on road construction in wilderness areas of federal forests drowned out a handful of opponents Tuesday night in the Oregon Convention Center.

The meeting, held by the U.S. Forest Service, was the first in the Northwest since Clinton's sweeping Oct. 13 announcement that he would propose permanent protection for about 50 million acres in the nation's 154 national forests.

Support for the plan was loud.

"I'd like to encourage that all wilderness areas be protected forever," Morgan Will, a North Portland football coach, said to sustained applause. "As a child, I used to go camping in Forest Service lands all the time. I went to my favorite campsite, and the whole place was logged."

Timber industry representatives called the plan ill-advised. They accused the Forest Service of holding meetings on the plan without releasing adequate information on the economic impact of a road-building ban.

"This process is flawed," said Frank Gladics, president of the Beaverton-based Independent Forest Products Association. "This is more about Clinton's legacy than about managing federal lands."

Another timber industry representative said after the meeting that he saw little point in speaking.

"Most people in the forest products industry feel like it's a rigged event, and why bother," said David Hill, vice president of the Southern Oregon Timber Industries Association, of Medford.

Conservationists, though, were elated. Tiernan Sittenfeld of the Oregon State Public Interest Research Group lauded the plan as the most important wilderness protection since President Theodore Roosevelt created the U.S. Forest Service in 1905.

"The Sierra Club wants to applaud the Clinton administration for coming forward with this proposal," said Andrea Bauch, public education coordinator for the Sierra Club's Portland office.

Tuesday's meeting was the seventh of 10 meetings at regional forest service headquarters across the country to gather public input. About 150 other meetings are being held in small communities near national forests.

All meetings are being held to gather information that the Forest Service will use to design an implementation study of Clinton's proposal. It will be completed late next year and recommend specific measures to achieve Clinton's wilderness preservation.

One question still unresolved, for example, is whether the plan's ban should apply only to roadless areas of 5,000 acres or more, or whether it should include all roadless areas.

If the ban includes only areas greater than 5,000 acres, it will comprise 50 million acres of the 192 million acres of Forest Service lands. Including smaller roadless areas -- which conservationists vigorously support -- will boost the affected area by at least 20 percent, to 60 million acres or more.

Clinton's proposal last month was cast only in the broadest terms. While the president specifically cited road building as a threat to wilderness, he was less clear on whether his plan should include a ban on all logging and whether vehicles should be banned in roadless areas.

"What's at stake here is the rich legacy of our natural heritage," said Paul Ketcham, conservation director of the Audubon Society of Portland. "We have an incredible opportunity here to pass on that legacy to future generations."

Watching from the sidelines Tuesday night was Ken Rait, who as director of the Heritage Forests Campaign directed the effort that persuaded Clinton to propose sweeping conservation. He was pleased by what he saw.

Recently completed polling, Rait said, showed that 51 percent of Oregonians support permanent protection of roadless areas in national forests. The poll, conducted by LGD Insight, Ltd., found 24 percent opposed and 25 percent undecided, Rait said. The margin of error was 4.4 percentage points.

"This turnout legitimizes the polling data," he said. "It shows that this is truly an historic opportunity that people are really ready for."

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