April 2nd, 2007

Federal judge tosses out new rules governing national forests

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
By PAUL ELIAS, The Associated Press
Mar 30, 2007 7:16 PM

SAN FRANCISCO -

U.S. District Court Judge Phyllis Hamilton ruled that the administration failed to adequately consider the environmental effects the new rules would have and neglected to properly gather public comment on the issue.

Hamilton said in her written ruling that the government "appears to have charted a new path and adopted a new policy approach regarding programmatic changes to environmental regulations."

Hamilton ruled that the government couldn't institute the new rules until proper environmental reviews were conducted, but she declined to specify how the nation's 155 national forests should be managed until then.

The ruling overturns a key administration environmental rule that governs all
192 million acres of national parks and stops pro-business plans in the parks under way for more than two years.

"These regulations were designed by a former timber industry lobbyist," said Sean Cosgrove of the Sierra Club, one of the 15 environmental groups who sued. "They would have silenced the voices of citizens in local forest planning and allowed destructive projects to move forward with little oversight."

The Bush administration environmental setback came the day after an internal Interior Department investigation found that deputy assistant secretary Julie MacDonald released information that was not supposed to be made public to organizations such as the California Farm Bureau Federation and Pacific Legal Foundation.

"I think people who love wildlife and care for our public forest should be elated by this decision," said Peter Frost, an attorney with the Western Environmental Law Center, one of the environmental groups that brought a pair of lawsuits challenging the new rules. Hamilton issued a single ruling for both cases.

Frost said that if Hamilton upheld the new rules, "it would have likely meant the loss of species." Frost said the new rules could have made it much easier for new projects such as logging, mining, livestock grazing and road building in 192 million acres of public land.

U.S. Forest Service spokesman Joe Walsh said the government was reviewing the decision and noted it differs from rulings on similar cases in two other federal courts, including the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver.

DOJ spokeswoman Cynthia Magnuson said government lawyers are still reviewing the decision and have not decided whether to appeal.

When government officials announced the first new rules since the 1970s, they said changes would allow forest managers to respond more quickly to wildfires and other threats such as invasive species.

Forest managers and industry officials have complained that without the new rules they must conduct studies that can [take] up to seven years to complete. The new rules would have allowed for forest plan revisions to be completed in two years to three years, officials said.

"Unfortunately, our national forests are no better off today than they were before this ruling," said Chris West of the American Forest Resource Council, which joined the federal government in defending against the lawsuits. "A San Francisco judge is requiring a federal agency to waste the taxpayers money conducting meaningless procedural analyses instead of having foresters and biologists studying the actual impacts of land management projects."