GOP says draft memo shows Clinton forest initiative is biased

John Hughes

Tuesday, March 14, 2000 | 8:57 a.m.

WASHINGTON - The chairwoman of a House subcommittee says a leaked draft memo shows the Forest Service was eager to enlist two environmental groups to help carry out President Clinton's plan to ban development in more than 50 million acres of roadless national forests.

The Forest Service confirmed it is negotiating an agreement with one of the groups, the World Wildlife Fund of Washington, D.C., and that the agreement could involve work on roadless-area issues.

But the agency spokesman, Chris Wood, said "there's nothing untoward" about the proposed deal and that the Forest Service negotiates hundreds of agreements with outside groups for activities on national forest lands.

Wood also said the World Wildlife Fund will not help craft the roadless initiative rule itself.

Rep. Helen Chenoweth-Hage, R-Idaho, said the Jan. 24 memo shows the Forest Service was developing an agreement that would allow two environmental groups to set a process for mapping and assessing up to 60 million acres of roadless forests.

"We've known for quite some time that the leadership within the Forest Service agrees philosophically with the more extreme environmentalists," Chenoweth-Hage said in a statement released Monday, "but we didn't know until recently that the agency was letting environmentalists set its policies and do its work."

Chenoweth's forests and forest health subcommittee obtained an 11-page document that she says is the draft of a proposal from the Wildlife Fund and the Conservation Biology Institute to The David and Lucile Packard Foundation.

The authors of the document ask Packard for $650,000 for "roadless area mapping and related policy support" for the southern part of a region that includes Alaska, Washington state, Oregon and California.

A World Wildlife Fund official said the grant request has since been pared down to $400,000.

The Jan. 24 memo said the Forest Service was eager to sign an agreement that would have the agency and the two groups "work together to create a sound, science-based roadless areas assessment," and that at the Forest Service's urging, the agreement "will be national in scope."

The document's authors tell Packard that, "We have a huge opportunity to influence the Forest Service and perhaps other agencies to move progressively on the roadless areas issue and perhaps others."

Dominick DellaSalla, director of the Klamath-Siskiyou regional program for the World Wildlife Fund, said working on roadless areas is only a part of the group's proposed agreement with the Forest Service.

He said he believes the proposal also includes a pilot project in southwestern Oregon on adaptive forest management and other types of projects, although he could not name the other projects that would be covered.

DellaSalla said group members were "exaggerating for the purpose of trying to get a foundation grant" went they wrote in a draft memo to the Packard Foundation that the essence of the proposed agreement was to help the Forest Service create a sound, science-based roadless areas assessment.

A Conservation Biology Institute official did not return a telephone call.

Doug Crandall, the chief of staff for Chenoweth's committee, said the roadless assessment is a process the Forest Service must undertake to define roadless areas and determine whether they should be protected under Clinton's proposal.

"To work with these groups to develop the process is amazing," he said. "These are definitely advocacy groups."

Scott Rehmus, an associate program manager at Packard, to whom the draft memo was addressed, confirmed Monday that the two groups did submit a proposal to Packard.

But the Los Altos, Calif.-based foundation has made no decision on the request, he said, and he declined to say when the foundation would make a decision.

Rehmus said the foundation was impressed with the groups' proposal because "it looks at science as the main focus."

Wood, who viewed the memo Monday, said he did not want to comment because he could not determine the authenticity of the document.

Wood did say, however, that the Wildlife Fund submitted a proposed Memorandum of Understanding with the Forest Service that he did not have a chance to review.

Even if he had reviewed it, he said he would not share it with The Associated Press because the document is a draft that hasn't been finalized.

Wood said the agency crafts "memoranda of understanding" with all kinds of groups, including off-road vehicle user groups.

He said he believed the Wildlife Fund's proposed agreement could cover issues such as education, mapping technology and roadless areas.

"If they have information that is valuable in helping ... to better understand the values of roadless areas, then we will avail ourselves of this information," he said.

Chenoweth-Hage planned to question Forest Service officials about the memo.

Clinton has launched a process - hailed by conservationists as one of the great environmental acts of the 20th century - to craft a regulation that would permanently protect 50 million acres or more of already roadless federal forests from development.

The regulation is expected to be complete near the end of the year, before Clinton leaves office.

GOP Congress members, recreation groups and the timber industry have been assailing Clinton's initiative almost from the day last October it was announced.

The GOP critics say environmentalists were given too large a role in crafting the plan, and that the administration violated laws for public disclosure and administrative procedures in crafting the proposal.

GOP members of Chenoweth-Hage's subcommittee also sponsored a hearing on what she called the undue influence of foundations on Clinton's roadless proposal.

The criticisms are expected to lay the groundwork for GOP proposals later this year to delay or scrap Clinton's plan.