Roadless Rule discussed in CVB meeting

The Roadless Rule is legislation from 2001 designed to keep roadless areas of the country off-limits from future development. According to the Forest Service's website, this legislation prohibits road construction, reconstruction, or timber harvesting on over 58 million acres of "inventoried roadless areas" in National Forest System lands. The Tongass National Forest, and the Chugach further north, are protected by the Roadless Rule. However, according to an Oct. 15 press release from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, this protection may soon disappear.

"The U.S. Department of Agriculture is seeking public comment on a draft environmental impact statement offering a range of alternatives to roadless management and a proposed Alaska Roadless Rule," the press release reads. "If adopted, the proposed rule would exempt the Tongass National Forest from the 2001 Roadless Rule."

The Wrangell Convention and Visitor Bureau met to discuss this draft EIS. Brenda Schwartz-Yeager, bureau member, said that she wanted a discussion on the topic because it could potentially have an impact on local tourism. She wanted the bureau to determine their opinion on the subject so they could give the borough assembly a recommendation on what stance they should take.

"Our economy is being more and more upheld by the visitor industry and, in my mind, if this process continues to go the way it is that would mean kind of a big change to our local landscape, potentially, which would be, I think, somewhat incompatible with our current visitor industry," she said.

The draft EIS offers six proposed alternatives to the current state of affairs. Alternative one is simply to leave the Roadless Rule in place and keep everything as it currently is. Alternative six, the "preferred alternative," fully exempts the Tongass from the Roadless Rule. This removes 9.2 million acres of inventoried "roadless" land from their protected status. It also converts 165,000 acres of old-growth and 20,000 acres of young growth timber lands to potential harvesting. Alternative six also mentions that this will only apply to the Tongass. The Chugach National Forest would remain under the federal Roadless Rule. In between alternatives one and six are several other proposals, each with varying degrees of protections and concessions. There were aspects of each alternative that bureau members said that they liked and disliked.

"Alternative four 'restricts harvest and road-building activities in scenic viewsheds,'" said Chris Hatton. "Why are we not talking about scenic viewsheds in these ones [other alternatives] when that can drastically impact?"

Opening up national forest lands to development could have some benefits, Bureau Member Brooke Leslie said. She mentioned that with proper maintenance, Wrangell could get a road looping around the entire island. That could be a benefit to the community, she said, and would also be a draw for tourists wanting to go around the whole island.

Carol Rushmore, economic development director, added that the CVB did not have to pick any single alternative listed to support. They could recommend certain aspects of each one, or point out parts of others that they were against.

The meeting continued for some time, with discussion ranging from how this could change the tourism industry, whether or not this would bring back the timber industry, and how some areas of the Tongass were simply impossible to develop because of the geography of the area. After a while, the bureau agreed that they simply did not have enough information to come to a firm opinion on the draft EIS. They decided to table the discussion until after the Forest Service held a public meeting in Wrangell, scheduled for Nov. 6.