Daily Sitka Sentinel

Sitkans Testify For ‘No Action’ Choice

By GARLAND KENNEDY
Sentinel Staff Writer
    Sitkans made their thoughts public on the proposal for an Alaska Specific Roadless Rule Tuesday night at a U.S. Forest Service meeting on Alaska Roadless Rulemaking.
    All 41 who testified at the subsistence hearing spoke against the Forest Service preferred alternative, which would completely exempt the Tongass National Forest from the 2001 National Roadless Rule.
    The meeting began with the formal USFS presentation, then went into the subsistence hearing, the only part of the program in which public testimony was recorded in the ongoing public comment period, which ends Dec. 17.
    Chad Van Ormer, USFS director of Ecosystem Planning and Budget for Alaska, took the first hour to outline and discuss the process that has put the issue of future management of the Tongass on the table. At the invitation of the state in 2018, the U.S. Department of Agriculture is proposing a special Roadless Rule for the Tongass that would open inventoried roadless areas of old growth to logging and other development.
    Six alternatives have been put forward from which a final selection will be made by Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue. Van Ormer said a decision is expected by summer 2020.
    The six alternatives:
    Alternative One – the “No Action” course. This would leave all 9.2 million acres currently designated as roadless under the 2001 national Roadless Rule under the same management as at present.
    Alternative Two – the “Roaded Roadless” option. This would remove areas which have had previous road development from the area currently covered by the national Roadless Rule and allow development in those areas.
    Alternative Three – labeled  “Logical Extensions.” This would remove 1,202,000 acres from the Roadless designation, but keep a focus on watershed protection designations.
    Alternative Four – “Partial Development LUDs (Land Use Designation).” This would remove 375,000 acres from the Roadless rerstrictions, but maintain certain area-specific protections.
    Alternative Five – “Full Development LUDs,” which would remove 2,290,000 acres from the roadless area.
    Alternative Six – The special Roadless Rule for the Tongass, and the USDA’s preferred alternative.
    “The proposed rule is alternative six in the Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS); it’s called the full exemption,” Van Ormer said, “Basically what that would do, it exempts those 9.2 million acres of Inventoried Roadless Areas on the Tongass from the 2001 Roadless Rule. So basically there would be no regulatory rule managing roadless areas on the Tongass National Forest any longer. The regulatory prohibitions for timber harvest and road construction and reconstruction would no longer exist in regulatory form and the land management activities would then be guided primarily by the 2016 Forest Plan.”
    Van Ormer said the plan “says we’re going to produce an average of 46 million board feet of timber a year, and with or without the roadless regulation we’ll still be producing about 46 million board feet of timber. The one thing that does change with this is the suitability for where you can do timber harvest and timber management activities does change in the forest plan. So with the full exemption, it would be creating about 185,000 acres that would be suitable for timber management activities. Of that 185,00 acres, 165,00 are old growth, about 20,00 acres are young growth.”

Public Testimony
    No one from the audience of about 100 in the Centennial Hall auditorium expressed support for the Forest Service preferred alternative.
    The 41 who came forward to testify spoke strongly about the potential harm they could see from the loss of Roadless Rule protections, to fisheries, tourism, watersheds, wildlife, resource conservation and subsistence in general.
    “The buffers on the streams are not enough,” said Harvey Kitka, chairman of the Sitka Tribe of Alaska Natural Resources Committee. “You’ve got to have some old growth forest for the deer to survive, and all the other animals. Food becomes a real problem for them in the winter time. We need some real controls on how they log, we don’t want to see a complete clear cut anymore.”

Subsistence harvester Harvey Kitka leads off oral public comment Tuesday night at Harrigan Centennial Hall during a subsistence hearing held as part of the USDA Forest Service Alaska specific roadless rule change proposals. About 100 Sitkans attended an information meeting and question-and-answer session about the Roadless Rule-making process held prior to the subsistence hearing. (Sentinel Photo by James Poulson)

    Darby Osborne, a Sitka High School sophomore, said, “I severely doubt that the impact of it (Alternative Six) would be minimal to moderate (as stated in the DEIS). At the end of the day the fact still stands that the entire case for exempting the Tongass from roadless rests of shortsighted and wholly underwhelming economic benefit. And I’m sorry, but I am not willing to trade my future.”
    “The effect would be so long that it would affect our unborn so far,” said Patricia Alexander, a member of the Alaska Native Sisterhood. “I think they have a right to clean water, Native food that they would be able to garner through the forest, and practice their traditional practices. And any elected official who supports a full exemption is disregarding their constituents, and undermining the public process, and ignoring the sovereign tribal governments.”
    Frances Brown a professional woodworker, testified: “What I’d like to offer is something more along the lines of a possible solution to take some of the pressure off. Right now we’re exporting vast numbers of round logs. This is ridiculous. We’re treating our old growth as a mineral, we’re mining it, we’re leaving tailings in the form of clear cuts. This is not sustainable. We need to ban the export of raw logs and almost raw logs. We need to selectively cut, manufacture the timber in-state, keep the jobs in-state. We could make just as much money with a lot less damage.”
    Zach LaPierre, also a woodworker, agreed.
    “I think that we actually can have a future for a small scale timber industry, and I’m strongly in favor of the No (Action)Alternative.”
    Commercial fisherman Douglas Dabrowski said, “I simply don’t find it believable that logging 165,000 acres of old growth will have zero impact on our fisheries. Just not believable. So what I want to know is if the logging companies are going to bail us out when our fish stocks collapse.”
    “Our forest is not a crop of corn,” said Mary Barrett, a nurse at SEARHC. “It is not an agribusiness monoculture, which is the business of the USDA. Rather it is a rich habitat with a diversity of trees, shrubs providing shelter for animals… the word ‘harvest’ does not belong in the Forest Service Vocabulary. It is a business word, and not respectful.”
    Tachi Sopow, a Sitkan originally from British Columbia, said, “I have seen first hand the devastating impact that large-scale forestry and mining that has gone relatively unchecked has on hunting and fishing opportunities,”
    “I believe there are responsible ways to harvest our resources,” said Heather Bauscher, Tongass community organizer with the Sitka Conservation Society, “And I believe we should be investing in pre-commercial thinning and the transition to second growth.” She continued to say, “I’ve heard the justification that there would be no impact to fisheries because there are stream buffers, yet stream buffers don’t replace intact watersheds or ecosystems.”
    University of Alaska Southeast fisheries professor Joel Markis urged the USFS to “not ignore the inevitable impacts that road building and resource extraction will have on fish habitat in these critical fisheries… these impacts have been well documented in the scientific literature.”
    Linda Behnken, a commercial fisherman and executive director of the Alaska Longline Fishermans Association, testified: “Where the Forest Service sees board feet, we see a complex forest ecosystem, in fact the largest temperate rain forest in the world.”
    She said “the FEIS that was done in 2000 (prior to the implementation of the current Roadless Area Conservation Rule) clearly documented the impacts of logging on fish habitat, of increased sediment, degraded water quality, habitat fragmentation, and high temperature regimes.”
    Going back to pre-roadless management will contribute to the continuing habitat loss from those days, Behnken said. “There are currently 1,100 stream crossings, mostly failed culverts that the Forest Service has not been able to repair since those happened, that are currently serving as small dams blocking 250 miles of important salmon spawning habitat.
    “The recent EIS, which informs this decision notes that roads pose the greatest risk to fish resources on the Tongass, then goes on to claim that exempting the Tongass from the Roadless Rule, in all alternatives, would have negligible impact on fish habitat. To my mind, that is a statement that is at best unsubstantiated if not disingenuous.”
    Frederick Olsen Jr. (K’yuuhlgaansii), former president of the Organized Village of Kasaan, said he thought the Preferred Alternative would lead to “one last big boom, one last big payday, and the rest of us have to pay for it for the rest of our lives and our grandchildren’s grandchildren’s lives… are we going to be the Last Frontier, or last new abandoned parking lot?”
    The time period for public comment on the roadless rulemaking process will be open until midnight Dec. 17. Comments may be submitted online at www.regulations.gov, and at www.fs.usda.gov/project/?project=54511. Comments also can be submitted by mail to USDA Forest Service, Attn: Alaska Roadless Rule, P.O. Box 21628, Juneau, Alaska 99802.
    The complete Forest Service Draft Environmental Impact Statement can be found at https://www.fs.usda.gov/nfs/11558/www/nepa/109834_FSPLT3_4876629.pdf. The DEIS includes data and analysis of all six proposed alternatives.
    In addition, the Forest Service plans, with maps, are available at https://arcg.is/1WObPL.