Governors press Clinton for more input on roadless area decisions

Matt Kelley

Monday, Feb. 28, 2000 | 1:57 a.m.

WASHINGTON - Western governors on Monday urged President Clinton to listen to their concerns about environmental plans such as his proposal to protect up to 50 million roadless acres in national forests.

During a White House meeting sponsored by the National Governors' Association, Idaho Gov. Dirk Kempthorne said western states were left out of the loop on the roadless initiative and other federal land-use plans. Clinton and George Frampton, the president's top adviser on environmental issues, said they would consider the states' concerns, several governors said after the meeting.

"This is a very important issue in the West, access to lands. Sometimes perspective is lost on that by people in the East," said NGA President Mike Leavitt, Utah's Republican governor.

"You take Nevada, for example. Ninety percent of Nevada is owned by the federal government. So if you begin suddenly closing off access, you're closing off access to the entire state."

Clinton announced in October that the National Forest Service was starting an administrative process to ban road-building in up to 50 million acres which currently have no roads. The Forest Service intends to unveil a draft roadless area protection plan in May.

Environmentalists have cheered Clinton's proposal but many Republicans have criticized it, saying it would usurp existing forest management plans and keep all but the hardiest athletes out of large tracts of government-owned forest.

"It's not necessarily practical in the West," said New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson, a Republican.

Some Republicans also have accused the Clinton administration of springing an almost fully formed plan on them with little or no advance warning. Clinton has faced similar criticism of his land-use policies before, particularly over his 1996 creation of the 1.7 million-acre Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in southern Utah.

"We'd like to see more cooperation before these issues are released," said Colorado Republican Gov. Bill Owens.

Clinton told the governors he would talk to his staff about the issue and asked Kempthorne to send a memo on the roadless plan to the White House, Owens and Leavitt said.

"He expressed a willingness to work with the states. It's encouraging," Owens said.