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Article Last Updated: Saturday, February 15, 2003 - 5:06:36 AM MST



Alaska rider passes
By SAM BISHOP News-Miner Washington Bureau


WASHINGTON--Rep. Don Young on Thursday was chuckling over the success
of his strategy to protect future logging in the Tongass National
Forest. He had set up a straw man, and environmentalists and their
allies in Congress torched it, he said.

When the smoke cleared, Young still had the provision he wanted all
along, he told reporters Thursday.

The provision, which will soon become law, prevents environmental
groups from suing over a pending U.S. Forest Service decision that
likely will recommend against establishing any more official
wilderness areas in the Tongass. The 17-million-acre national forest
covers much of Southeast Alaska.

Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, was the original sponsor of the language
exempting the wilderness decision from lawsuits. He added it to the
Senate version of an omnibus spending bill covering the current
federal fiscal year.


Young proposed the same amendment in the House, but went a few steps
further. He convinced House negotiators to push as well for language
that would lift a ban on logging and other development in roadless
areas greater than 5,000 acres in Alaska's national forests. Former
President Clinton imposed the "roadless rule" shortly before leaving
office.

Young also proposed to exempt the entire Tongass Land Management Plan,
completed in 1997, from further legal challenge. And he proposed
language that would have forced the Forest Service to sell all the
timber the industry would take.

Environmental groups and Democratic members of Congress spent the past
week trying to keep these Tongass "riders" out of the final version of
the omnibus bill being created by a House-Senate conference committee.

Environmental groups and Democratic members of Congress spent the past
week trying to keep these Tongass "riders" out of the final version of
the omnibus bill being created by a House-Senate conference committee.

In the end, the Forest Service kept its immunity from suit, but the
other riders were gone.

"What we ended up with was what Ted put in," Young said. "We ended up
with what we wanted at first."

He said he would have liked to lift the roadless rule, too, but it
made a fine straw man. The application of the rule to Alaska is being
appealed in court, he noted. The "no more" clause in the Alaska lands
act of 1980 prohibits agencies from proposing new conservation areas
in Alaska without prior approval of Congress, he said.

"We will win that case," he said.

Environmental groups and congressional allies weren't claiming any
great victory for having killed the roadless provision and other
riders, though.

"This harmful Tongass provision rubber stamps a wilderness review on
the Tongass that is not even complete yet, precluding any appeals or
court actions regardless of potentially significant legal violations
and disdain of public comments," according to a news release from
Laurie Cooper, forest issues director of the Alaska Coalition.

Stevens delivered a lengthy speech on the Senate floor Thursday
defending the rider.

The Tongass contains 17 million acres, but the 1997 plan limits the
area available to logging to 667,000 acres on 100- to 120-year
rotations, Stevens said. Timber jobs have dropped from 4,000 down to
850 in Southeast. Yet environmental groups sued and U.S. District
Court Judge James Singleton in 2001 ordered the Forest Service to
review the forest for more potential wilderness areas.

"Judge Singleton's mandate entitled the environmental groups to a
review," Stevens said. "It did not entitle them to a Forest Service
recommendation that is favorable to their position. It did not entitle
them to hold up the use of public resources indefinitely."

The final omnibus bill also carries one other Alaska rider. The rider
declares that the federal government's recent environmental impact
statement on renewal of the trans-Alaska pipeline is "sufficient" to
meet requirements in the National Environmental Policy Act.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski, who sponsored the amendment, issued a news
release Friday defending the action from charges that the legislation
"short-circuits" a constitutional right to sue.

"No provision in the Constitution guarantees the right to sue on
environmental issues," she noted. "Only previous congressional
environmental acts have created that right."

What Congress gives, Congress can take away, which it did in 1973 when
it decided that the pipeline should be exempt from "unnecessary
litigation," Murkowski said.

"Today's effort is a continuation of that policy," she said