The Nugget Newspaper - News and Opinion from Sisters, Oregon

Two Forest Service projects designed to reduce wildfire fuels near Sisters have come to a grinding halt due to appeals and litigation.

People living near the McCache Project and the Metolius Basin Project are eager to see the Forest Service push ahead despite any disagreements with how the Forest Service intends to conduct the projects.

The McCache project covers areas bordering Black Butte Ranch and Tollgate. Right before implementation of this project in October of 2003 a lawsuit was filed by the Blue Mountains Biodiversity Project. The plan currently sits dead in the water as fire fuels continue to build.

The Metolius Basin Project seeks to improve "late succession forests" and reduce fire fuels along the Metolius River and around Camp Sherman, near where the B&B Complex Fire raged last summer.

The Blue Mountains Biodiversity Project filed an appeal of this plan early in the fall, which put the project on hold. The appeal was thrown out, but the threat of lawsuit now looms over the project. None of the proposed plan has been implemented.

Many people in the Sisters area have expressed frustration about the stalled fuel reduction effort.

Will the new Healthy Forest Restoration Act save these gridlocked projects? Even those within the agency doubt the effectiveness of the act, despite its promise to streamline the appeals process, reduce frivolous appeals and reduce delays caused by lawsuits.

"There's always the devil in the details," Leslie Weldon, Deschutes National Forest Supervisor said.

Weldon's "devil in the details" of the Healthy Forest Restoration Act is an absence of any definitive time line for lawsuits. Opponents to projects can still file a lawsuit at any point in the planning process, which delays implementation sometimes for years while suits are tied up in court.

According to a report from Sue Zike, Region Six Litigation Coordinator for the Forest Service, there have been 12 projects stopped by litigation in the last three years just on the east side of the Cascade mountain range.

"I don't like them (lawsuits)," Weldon said. "I don't like for our work to get challenged. Especially if the end result is that we've made the right decisions and choices and it just causes a summer-long delay where enough time passes that a fire can get started and burn toward an area that we were looking to protect."

Bill Anthony, Forest Service Ranger for the Sisters District said, "When it's apparent that we're going to start implementation and the closer you get the more likely it is that somebody's going to try and stop you. The Healthy Forests Restoration Act did not change anything about how long after a decision is made can a group file a lawsuit. There's no time limit on that.

"Collectively these initiatives will help us make some progress, but will not solve the problem. It doesn't take much for a group or an individual to file a lawsuit. I don't see any relief."

Despite the urgent view of many people that fuels reduction in local forests is a pressing issue that needs to be addressed with management policies, some still don't trust the Forest Service.

The dominant reason for distrust and opposition toward the agency stems from a past where the Forest Service's management goal was to maximize timber sale profits, not to preserve the ecological integrity of the forests.

Opponents don't necessarily believe that those goals have really changed.

Karen Coulter of the Blue Mountains Biodiversity Project said, "I believe that the people at the Deschutes Forest District have the best intentions of the forest in mind, but are subject to the wayward winds of Washington."

Bill Anthony said, "They (the suspicious) believe the intent of the Healthy Forests Restoration Act in streamlining the planning processes and streamlining the appeals process is going to result in the cutting of old growth.

"I know in my heart that is absolutely not going to happen,"Anthony said. "We're on the right track, but the thing with trust is that it's really hard to get and really easy to lose."