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Suit filed to halt Hanna Flats project

KEITH KINNAIRD | Hagadone News Network | UPDATED 5 years, 8 months AGO
by KEITH KINNAIRD
News Editor | August 31, 2019 1:00 AM

PRIEST RIVER — The Alliance for the Wild Rockies filed suit in U.S. District Court on Thursday halt the Hanna Flats forest restoration project on the Priest Lake Ranger District.

Jeanne Higgins, the U.S. Forest Service’s Idaho Panhandle National Forests supervisor, issued a decision memo last year approving the project, which is meant to reduce hazardous fuels in the wildland urban interface and address insect and disease concerns. It also includes road maintenance and recreation trail improvements.

“Clear-cutting is not forest restoration,” said Mike Garrity, executive director of the Alliance for the Wild Rockies. “Clear-cutting hurts 95 percent of the native forest species in the area and the upper Priest River area has the largest contiguous area of old-growth cedar, hemlock, and grand fir in the interior western United States.”

The project includes 1,843 acres of commercial logging, 360 acres of pre-commercial logging, and 149 acres of prescribed burning, according to court documents.

Approximately 1,109 acres of the commercial logging is classified as “re-generation harvest,” which the alliance contends is clear-cutting or modified clear-cutting.

The Good Neighbor Authority project was illegally excluded from an analysis under the National Environmental Policy Act, according to the alliance.

“While the Healthy Forest Restoration Act allows exceptions to the requirement for environmental analysis in the Wildland Urban Interface, it also defines the Wildlife Urban Interface — and this area does not meet the legal definition,” Garrity said.

The alliance further alleges that the project violates the Forest Service’s own IPNF Forest Plan amendments for motorized access within the Selkirk and Cabinet-Yaak grizzly bear recovery zones, which limits road densities in grizzly bear habitat because most of the bruins are killed near roads.

There are fewer than 100 grizzlies in the Selkirk recovery zone, court documents indicate. The population is failing to meet its recovery targets and the habitat is already degraded by existing roads, the alliance said in court documents.

“With such high mortality rates and so few bears, the population chronically fails all recovery goals and is threatened by inbreeding due to lack of connectivity to other grizzly bear populations,” Garrity said. “Considering both the logging of dwindling old growth forest and the road impacts on grizzly mortality – as well as excluding the public from the process and ignoring the duty to perform an environmental analysis, we had little choice but to take the Forest Service to court and force it to comply with the law.”

Activities on the Hanna Flats project have not yet commenced, but the Forest Service said advertisements for timber sales are expected in September.

Keith Kinnaird can be reached by email at kkinnaird@bonnercountydailybee.com and follow him on Twitter @KeithDailyBee.

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