Wrangell Sentinel - the oldest continuously published paper in Alaska.

USFS, Assembly disagree over proposed road closures

Jessica Wacker

United States Forest Service (USFS) District Ranger Bob Dalrymple will be moving forward with the Access and Travel Management Plan put forth by previous District Ranger Mark Hummel.

There will be both physical road closures and administered road closures. The announcement has brought fire from both the public and the Borough.

The Borough is hoping to see more public process and a better clarification made in regards to what was behind the decision. The Assembly voted to create an official objection to the plan on February 23, which will go directly to the US Department of Agriculture. The objection, among other things, will ask that more clarification be brought to the reasons behind the closures and that local use, both recreational and subsistence, be taken into further consideration.

While many national groups had a voice during the planning process, local participation was low, noted Dalrymple. Still, a collaboration has been happening throughout the creation of the Access and Travel Management Plan and Environmental Assessment.

Dalrymple speculated the controversy is due in part to the three years the plan was out of the limelight. “We’ve been through the process now since 2005. [Hummel] made a decision back in 2007. We had a lot of public meetings about that. I think one of the problems is we didn’t move fast enough on the map. It’s been three years with nobody hearing about it, and all the sudden we finally implement it through the map.”

The plan, which is a densely written overview of charts and statistics, burdened with legal language, doesn’t bring accessible clarification to the process or reasons behind the closures, explained Dalrymple.

Dalrymple is hoping to take the plan, amongst other data, and create a document in laymen’s terms that will help the public to understand the logic behind the plan.

Mayor Don McConachie took issue with the fact that the Borough hadn’t been able to fully collaborate on the closures. “When we became a borough it became apparent to us that we stepped into a different realm as far as being able to deal with the federal government,” explained McConachie. “We found out that there was a provision within the [USFS’s] own rules that they needed to have some sort of collaboration between us as a Borough and them.”

“I want [those collaborations] to be holistic and talk about everything we do,” noted Dalrymple, who sees his role in the community as balancing the interest of the community and the federal government. “That’s the challenge…but it doesn’t mean we can ignore federal law.”

“One of the key elements in this Travel Management rule is that it’s adaptive. It requires us to do this every year which requires us to look at it every year…that’s a pretty powerful thing for the public,” added Dalrymple. “What I hope to do here is to roll this out, get the map out to the public, have them use it, look at it, think about it. Then we’ll be asking—not right away because I want to try it out for a while—what do we need to change on it.”

McConachie explained that the Borough Assembly was most concerned with the contrast the USFS plan has compared to the Borough’s comprehensive plan in regards to satisfying local input.

For the USFS, the potential impacts of roads on resources and the budgetary requirements of maintaining a road to USFS standards were the primary factors in determining access, explained Dalrymple “It forced us to go through a process where we evaluated each road to determine whether the value of keeping it open and being used by the public was worth the investment of keeping it safe and keeping it in a condition where it doesn’t cause environmental degradation.”

In regards to the Borough’s comprehensive plan being affected by the closures, McConachie noted, “You have to be flexible. You need to satisfy the letter of the law, the spirit of the law, and the wishes of the people.”

“Travel Management in my experience is the biggest issue everywhere in the National Forest. This is not unique,” Dalrymple observed. “I think [Hummel] made a sound decision.”