Flathead's road provisions in Moose project favor motorized recreation over grizzly-bear habitat

The Daily Inter Lake

U.S. District Judge Donald Molloy of Missoula has rejected claims in a lawsuit challenging a forest-management project that followed the 2001 Moose Fire.

Molloy's long-awaited ruling, signed Tuesday, upheld the Flathead National Forest's use of "site-specific amendments" to road-management standards aimed at securing habitat for grizzly bears.

Forest planner Rob Carlin said the ruling is an encouraging success for the forest, because the Flathead has used similar site-specific variances to forest-plan standards on other projects that also face legal challenges.

"We've been awaiting his decision because we have been following with similar actions on subsequent projects," Carlin said.

The Swan View Coalition led a group of environmental organizations in suing the Flathead Forest for road-management provisions in the Moose Post Fire Project that followed the wildfire that burned 71,000 acres, including about 35,000 acres of national-forest lands, on the Whitefish Divide during summer 2001. The coalition did not challenge timber-salvage operations that yielded about 11.5 million board-feet of timber.

But it did focus on an amendment that allowed 10 culverts to remain intact on one stretch of road that was slated for decommissioning, and another amendment that allowed a stretch of Forest Road 316 to remain open for six weeks during the summer in violation of forest-plan standards that limit road densities.

Molloy ruled that the Flathead Forest and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service analysis "shows that the negative impacts of the project-specific amendments will be marginal. Consequently, while the choice seems questionable, it is not a violation of the Forest Plan to put the public's desire for motorized recreation over the habitat needs of the grizzly bear."

Keith Hammer, chairman of the Swan View Coalition, said Molloy's ruling expresses concern that the federal government is doing "only the absolute minimum" to protect grizzly bears.

Hammer cites Molloy's comment that it "is troubling that the concerns about the bear seem to be diminishing while concerns for other uses seem to be increasing."

But Carlin points to other comments in the ruling.

"The most troubling issue in this case involves the priority conflicts between the needs of the grizzly bear and other land uses" within prime grizzly-bear habitat, Molloy wrote. "Nonetheless, the Forest Plan provides for the balance of competing land uses so long as the competing uses do not pose a demonstrable and significant biological effect to the grizzly bears or their habitat."

Michelle Dragoo, the Forest Service planner who coordinated the Moose Project, said it's gratifying that it passed legal muster. Salvage logging associated with the project is mostly complete, and she notes that it also called for decommissioning some 58 miles of road and closing an additional 11 miles of road to improve grizzly-bear habitat within the project area.

Nearly all of that road work is done, except on 11 miles of road that would be classified as decommissioned with the disputed 10 culverts left in place to allow for continued snowmobiling access. The routes are considered important elements of the recently approved forest plan amendment that prescribes where snowmobiling is and isn't allowed on the Flathead Forest.

The plaintiffs had argued that the Forest Plan guidelines call for removing all culverts on decommissioned roads because of the potential for them to plug and cause "blowouts" on the road. They cited e-mail correspondence between U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologists who were concerned about that potential, and maintained that the site-specific amendment allowing the culverts to stay ignored those concerns.

But Molloy rejected those claims, saying those concerns were adequately addressed in the final project proposal, which called for strict monitoring and maintenance of the 10 culverts.

The remainder of the roadwork must be finished by 2009, Dragoo said. And under terms of the Moose Project, the contested stretch of Forest Road 316 can be reopened.

Dragoo said the decision to reopen that decommissioned road, despite varying from road-density standards, largely was prompted by public comments about the project.

The bulk of the comments called for reopening Road 316, she said.

Even when the popular road is reopened, it will only be for six weeks, from July 15 through Sept. 14.

The Swan View Coalition is leading another lawsuit against the Flathead Forest that challenges similar site-specific amendments that allow deviations from road-density standards in areas burned by wildfires in 2003.

There are six amendments in the North Fork Flathead's Robert-Wedge post-fire project area and the West Side Reservoir post-fire project area, west of Hungry Horse Reservoir.

Hammer predicts the court will have difficulty ignoring the impacts of multiple deviations from the forest-plan standards.

"While the court has deferred to the government in approving the first exceptions to its Forest Plan standards in the Moose project, we don't think it will be able to ignore the fact that the Forest Service has nowhere examined the cumulative effects of what has no become a long list of such exemptions," Hammer said.

Reporter Jim Mann may be reached at 758-4407 or by e-mail at jmann@dailyinterlake.com