Trump administration plan could bring new roads to pristine woods covering 4% of Wyoming

The Trump administration unveiled a plan Wednesday to build more roads in pristine national forests, releasing figures that show near-term construction of new motorized networks would be possible across almost 4% of Wyoming, an area the size of the entire Shoshone National Forest.

The plan – which rescinds the 2001 National Forest Roadless Rule – would affect 3.2 million acres of national forest roadless areas in the Equality State. That roadless acreage is valued as wildlife habitat and widely used for non-motorized recreation like hunting, fishing, riding, skiing and backpacking.

It’s also the target of the timber industry and advocates of motorized recreation interests that could benefit from overturning the 2001 conservation measure. The Department of Agriculture states that the proposal will pit motorists and industry against others who use federal public lands in national forests.

The construction of new roads “would result in tradeoffs with opportunities for quiet, remote and self-reliant recreation and may increase user conflicts,” the federal notice states, “and result in lost economic benefits.”

Expansion of road networks “is uncertain and anticipated to be limited due to land management plans, budget, and resources,” the plan states.

Conservationists condemned the initiative. Trump’s administration is “hell-bent on breaking our public land heritage,” Land Tawney, co-chair of American Hunters & Anglers said in a statement. The rescission is “a giveaway to the timber industry,” said Kate Groetzinger of the Center for Western Priorities.

The plan will harm “elk country, trout streams, hunting grounds, and backcountry places that define this state,” Julia Stuble, Wyoming state director for The Wilderness Society, said in a statement.

The roadless issue already has become a political hot potato with Democratic U.S. Senate candidate James Byrd blasting Republican opponent U.S. Rep Harriet Hageman over her support for more roads.

He called her an “out-of-touch politician” who is “playing fast and loose with the facts.”

Hageman isn’t representing Wyoming, he stated earlier this year, but is “auditioning for corporate campaign donors.”

‘Environmental catastrophe’

Hageman has been critical of the Roadless Rule. 

“The United States Forest Service Office created an environmental catastrophe when it issued the Roadless Rule in the final days of the Clinton administration,” Hageman said in June. She made her comments at a hearing about forest fires and the upcoming wildfire season where she quizzed Forest Service Chief Tom Schultz.

“It’s definitely increased catastrophic wildfire risk,” Schultz said of the rule. “It inhibits our ability to actively manage the land to protect communities. It limits public access to enjoy their national forest.”

Earlier this year, Hageman introduced a bill to overturn the Roadless Rule. The bill, separate from the administrative rescission, would prevent the rule from ever being adopted again.

Hageman’s bill also would require the construction of new roads across untrammeled forest lands. The Roadless Rule violates the Forest Service’s 1897 Organic Act, the Wilderness Act and National Environmental Policy Act, her office stated.

Hageman’s bill will lead to “improved forest health, reduced wildfire risks, reduced insect infestations, and the creation of jobs in sectors like logging, construction, and maintenance,” her office stated.

Byrd criticized Schultz’s comments as “agency capture,” or the takeover of a department by the industry it is supposed to regulate.

“It is deeply disappointing to see the leadership of the Forest Service capitulate to political pressure,” he said. Fully 99% of comments submitted last year on repealing the Roadless Rule opposed overturning it, he said.

“A democratic government is supposed to listen, not find legislative loopholes to ram a corporate subsidy through Congress,” he stated.

Roads and wildfires 

Both sides fiercely debate the relationship of roads to wildfires. “Forest Service Associate Chief Chris French conceded under questioning that it is a ‘longstanding fact’ that most wildfire ignitions are human-caused and directly tied to where roads are built,” Byrd said.

The Democrat accused Hageman of spreading falsehoods. “She has no problem standing up there and flat out being dishonest and lying,” he said in an interview this week.

Neither Hageman’s campaign nor her Washington office responded to WyoFile’s request for comment on Byrd’s charge.

Republican U.S. House nominee Chuck Gray has also advocated for doing away with the Roadless Rule. He characterized the rule as damaging, not conserving, and called it “a Clinton-driven, left-driven attempt to hurt our public lands.”

Gray said the rule inflated the cost of lumber and housing. “It needs to be rescinded so that we can log, we can reach our full potential, and we can recreate,” he said in a campaign debate.

Local decisions

Elimination of the Roadless Rule would return decision-making on roads to the local level, the Trump administration said. It cited “increasing wildfire risk, the spread of insect and disease infestations, and the need for community protection in the wildland-urban interface,” as some of the reasons to roll back roadless protections.

“Any near-term permanent road additions would be anticipated to occur on lands where current land management plans allow them … totaling about 18.2 million acres, or 45.5 percent of the potentially affected environment,” the Federal Register posting states. “Temporary roads, if proposed, are more likely to occur on lands within 0.5 miles of existing roads—totaling about 11.3 million acres, or 28.3 percent of the potentially affected environment.”

Factoring in those percentages, the affected area where new roads are possible in Wyoming amounts to 2.36 million of Wyoming’s 3.2 million roadless acres. That’s 3,690 square miles or 3.77% of the state, an area larger than Delaware.

Reversing the 2001 Roadless Rule could cost the country’s recreation economy $6.1 million annually, according to the Federal Register filing. It would generate $5.2 million to $11.4 million in federal revenues and $4.6 million to $10.6 million for the timber industry, according to the announcement.

Any economic boon would be tempered by “road costs, maintenance funding gaps, and the $6.9 billion deferred maintenance backlog for roads and bridges,” the federal summary of the plan states.

The 25-year-old national forest Roadless Rule seeks to address “a national asset that should be conserved and managed consistently,” conservation group Defenders of Wildlife said. The existing rule generally prohibits road construction in inventoried areas larger than 5,000 acres but provides exceptions for public safety, floods, fires and pollution emergencies.

The public has until Sept. 21 to comment on the plan to eliminate the Roadless Rule. Hundreds of pages of government documents supporting the rescission include a 333-page draft environmental impact statement.

After spending a day analyzing the documents, the Center for Western Priorities called the plan an effort to spin logging subsidies into a wildfire mitigation strategy.

“The government’s own study shows repealing the Roadless Rule could actually increase wildfire risk as well as have shocking negative impacts on Western communities,” the group’s Communications Director Kate Groetzinger said in a statement. The documents show agency’s own scientists believe rescission will “harm hundreds of species already at risk of extinction, decrease the quality of drinking water in Western communities, cost rural communities millions of tourism dollars, and grow the Forest Service’s already-massive road maintenance backlog,” she said.

WyoFile’s analysis

Here’s how WyoFile analyzed the plan by the U.S. Forest Service to rescind the Roadless Rule.

Across the nation, there are 58.5 million acres of inventoried roadless areas – areas larger than 5,000 acres where roadbuilding has been largely prohibited for 25 years.

In Wyoming’s national forests, roadbuilding has been prohibited across 3.2 million acres, some 5,000 square miles or about 5.1% of Wyoming’s total land area of 97,813 square miles.

The plan to rescind the Roadless Rule states that the Forest Service “anticipates” proposed new near-term permanent or temporary roads would occur on 73.8% of existing roadless areas. If applied to Wyoming, that would pertain to 2.36 million acres of inventoried national forest roadless areas. Terrain, cost and other factors could limit locally where roads could go. 

The affected 2.36 million acres where new roads would be possible amounts to 3,690 square miles or 3.8% of the Equality State. That’s an area almost as large as the 2.4 million acre Shoshone National Forest which stretches from the Montana border to South Pass.

Sources: Federal Register (proposal), Wikipedia (state size); Shoshone National Forest.