MISSOULA — The draft environmental study of the next version of the Lolo National Forest management plan will be delayed until fall 2025 to allow the Lolo revision team to adjust to some new national requirements.
On Wednesday, the Lolo National Forest hosted an online meeting to give an update on what is happening with the Lolo Forest plan revision. Lolo Forest Supervisor Carolyn Upton told the 40 people who logged on that she’d decided to push back the release of the draft environmental impact study to fall 2025 instead of spring.
The main reason is the Lolo plan revision team is waiting for final guidance from Washington, D.C., on several issues, including management of old-growth forests and a plan to establish a grizzly bear population in the Bitterroot ecosystem. Both could affect how the revision team crafts the proposed alternatives for the Lolo plan.
But Upton said she also wanted to find a convenient time for the 90-day comment period so people weren’t using summer vacation or the winter holidays to write up their suggestions for the environmental impact statement.
“There are several things coming in at us that we need to be responsive to. But at the same time, we can’t wait for everything to get settled externally or we would never get going again,” Upton said. “We did some timeline work and we determined that we’ll have a better product if we take some time over the summer and put the product out in the fall. The comment period that we’re aiming for is around September-October-November of 2025.”
Forest management plans are comprehensive documents that guide each national forest in its decisions about how to manage lands of various categories, such as wilderness or recreational areas. The original intent was to update forest management plans every 15 to 20 years to keep up with science and forest policy. However, the current Lolo Forest plan was written almost 40 years ago.
Upton started this most recent effort to revise the 1987 forest plan in January 2023, and the next 12 months were full of informational and scoping meetings. This February, the Lolo Forest released its preliminary draft management plan to allow the public to provide input, which is being incorporated into the draft environmental impact statement. Following that 60-day comment period, the revision team was busy working so there hasn’t been much interaction with the public during 2024.
Upton said Wednesday that she didn’t want to let another year lapse without a few more chances for the public to engage with the revision team. So she wanted to know what the public was interested in.
Based on questions during the meeting, many were curious about what the alternatives would be and what kind of indicators and measures would be used to evaluate forest conditions.
Because of public comments received on the preliminary plan, the team added connectivity to the list of issues that each alternative should address, said Amanda Milburn, Lolo Plan Revision Team leader. The other three issues are vegetation management, sustainable recreation and recommended wilderness.
The draft environmental impact statement will present four to five alternatives, including Alternative A, the “no action” alternative, which would leave the 1987 plan unchanged.
Alternative B, the preferred action, would “modernize” the 1987 plan with recent science and policies and it might fold in parts of a plan considered 20 years ago, Milburn said. In 2006, the Lolo Forest tried to write a new plan, but it was drafted under a 2005 Forest Service planning rule that gave forest managers more discretion to approve mining, logging, and other commercial projects without environmental review. Two years later, the courts struck the 2005 rule down, so the Lolo revision was halted.
Alternative C would emphasize more primitive values such as more recommended wilderness and more nonmotorized backcountry opportunities. Alternative D would focus on vegetation management projects and the wildfire crisis strategy, increasing the pace and scale of those projects. Finally, Alternative E would further increase the pace and scale of management projects and encourage more motorized and “front-country” opportunities, Milburn said.
Milburn said the various alternatives aren’t exclusive. The preferred alternative often ends up being a blend of the different alternatives, depending on issue and location.
The Flathead-Lolo-Bitterroot Task Force submitted a citizen’s alternative, and some people asked why it wasn’t included. Upton said it wouldn’t be proposed as a stand-alone alternative because it doesn’t address all the issues a forest plan is required to include. But elements of the citizen’s alternative would be included in the official alternatives.
“I have spent a lot of time with the citizen’s alternative and we have incorporated elements of it,” Upton said. “We’ll be able to show you, when we come out with the full range of alternatives, where those things slotted in. The message is that we took it very seriously, and we had to incorporate it into our whole complexity of alternative analysis development.”
Milburn couldn’t provide much information on what indicators and measures would be associated with each alternative because the team is just starting to flesh those out. Connectivity would be considered in each alternative, but the team was still delineating the key linkage areas, which could vary by alternative. Commenter Jim Burchfield suggested that a future meeting might let people know what the indicators and measures are and allow feedback before the team writes them into the draft environmental impact statement.
Some questions were related to management of old-growth, but Milburn said she couldn’t give answers until the national old-growth amendment is finalized, which is expected by December. In April 2022, President Joe Biden issued an executive order to conserve and restore old-growth forests, the ecosystems they support and the climate change benefits they provide. Also, the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act allocated $50,000,000 for old-growth protection.
Contact reporter Laura Lundquist at lundquist@missoulacurrent.com.
