County steps up to lead land management discussion

Towns seeking support;  Forest Service watching closely

County commissioners agreed at a board meeting on Tuesday, April 7 to step up and lead a community-wide planning process for over-the-snow vehicles (OSV) and to help expedite the establishment of a winter travel management plan for the Gunnison National Forest. The local Forest Service office isn’t sure if or when they will participate in such a process.

The United States Forest Service (USFS) recently put out a rule that requires local agencies to designate areas of routes that are open to OSV motorized use, but locally there are many competing interests, and the USFS isn’t quite prepared to enter the fray. The purpose of Tuesday’s meeting was not to actually host or engage in dialogue related to OSV travel management, but to discuss the concept of commissioners joining the seemingly independent process.
Commissioner Paula Swenson told the News that the towns of Crested Butte and Mt. Crested Butte had asked the county to take the lead and make sure that all user groups are being heard from. “It’s not the Forest Service’s responsibility to pull together the various user groups. If the community wants to look at it, it’s up to us,” she said.
Surprisingly, almost every public seat in the meeting room was full—but nobody spoke up besides those on the board.
County manager Matthew Birnie says the feds don’t see this as a priority project. “The Forest Service said they don’t want to fund anything,” he said.
The USFS has left it up to the towns to bring together stakeholders and different user groups to get the conversation started. But Crested Butte mayor Aaron Huckstep and Mt. Crested Butte mayor Dave Clayton believe, as stated in a letter to the USFS, that a USFS-facilitated dialogue could result in more productive discussions about the future of area public lands in winter. In the letter, the towns urged the prioritization and support of some sort of detailed planning process.
As the letter stated, “[The towns of Crested Butte and Mt. Crested Butte] would appreciate any guidance or assistance the USFS can provide related to the process and regarding potential funding sources.”
But the USFS is not ready to appoint a facilitator. Aaron Drendel of the USFS Gunnison Ranger District told commissioners, “Currently, the GMUG [Grand Mesa, Uncompahgre and Gunnison] National Forests are doing a review of decisions made in the past. We do know that areas of the Gunnison National Forest have not been analyzed for winter OSV use.” He added that the USFS is conducting an inventory forest-wide and how they tackle this issue hasn’t been decided. “The end goal is to produce an OSV use map, similar to the motorized vehicle use map the USFS hands out to the public in summer. I can’t really give a date of when that will be on the program of work.”
Travel management plans discussed thus far by concerned local user groups have included designating certain drainages for motorized and non-motorized use, an idea recently brought forth by Crested Butte Nordic. New plans could potentially put into place some “guidelines” that were unofficially set by a group of concerned users who called themselves the Gang of Nine in the late 1990s, including a) Officially closing the Slate River Valley to motorized use (no snowmobiling) in winter; b) Officially restricting Kebler Pass (Coal Creek) from non-motorized use (no Nordic skiing, snowshoeing, or backcountry skiing); c), d) and e) Time will tell.
But some believe there is more to the discussion than the issue of motorized versus non-motorized use. “It’s a volume issue,” says commissioner Jonathan Houck. “The volume of Nordic skiers and snowmobilers has gone up. The focus should be how to manage the land and the increasing number of people out there. We have a county that consists of so much public land, yet our users are concentrated in pods.”
“Is everything on the table, or just changes to old regulations?” Houck asked his fellow commissioners and citizens in the meeting room. “I think it’s important to look at the change of use in areas, and not just snowmobiling, but all uses.”
Commissioner Phil Chamberland said that in talking with the USFS, it seems clear that if the community can get together and can create a plan with minimal process, the USFS would be willing to get behind the project.
Gunnison County will now join the discussion and help facilitate some of the planning process. “I think the Forest Service will be willing to expend some resources once they see that it’s something we can work together with,” Chamberland said. “But if we’re going to get into that process, it needs to be an open dialogue. How do we manage this? Who does have rights to which areas? We need to look at some parking issues, visitor counts, and more. I’m willing to be involved, and not just as a commissioner but as an outdoor lover and trail user.”
Drendel added, “Whenever the time comes that we enter into the process, it will be a collaborative process with anyone who has input. The county, Nordic groups, everyone. It’s always easier to have input in process before making decisions.”
Chamberland thinks the board needs to start discussions so that when the USFS is ready to look into it, everyone is ready. “If we can get a lot of the groundwork done ahead of time, I’m game.”
Commissioner Swenson says one of the biggest issues she sees is that great work was put into this issue back in the 1990s with the Gang of Nine, but that work hasn’t really been continued. “We don’t realize things always change and we always have new impacts coming forward. I think it’s a good time for us to reengage in those conversations. It is the role of commissioners to make sure everyone is having that conversation at the table together.”
Swenson made it clear it would be premature to address the USFS because those discussions have not happened yet, but she does think it is important to have a commissioner take the lead on the project and to bring together interest groups from across the valley. “Then we would approach the Forest Service and say, ‘We, as a community, have identified this.’”
Commissioner Jonathan Houck will take the lead. He made one thing clear to the board and citizens in the room: “Being a backcountry user, I’ve accessed quietly and with a snowmobile, and I want to publicly state that my backcountry use covers a lot of the spectrum about what’s up for debate. But I’m happy to take the lead on this. Making sausage is never beautiful, but hopefully the end product is good,” he said.
Houck says his first step will be to take a step back—back to the Gang of Nine. “I’m going to talk to the groups involved in that process and see where they started from, how far away we are from there, and where we’re coming from before we determine where we’re going. What exactly did the Gang of Nine accomplish? How did they set parameters?
“I want to talk to the Forest Service,” continued Houck, “the county attorney’s office, some of the formalized organizations that were involved, and hopefully talk to some of the people who actually put the Gang of Nine together. What has changed substantially that gets us into the acquiring of a new process?
“Anytime there will be time for a public comment or a public meeting, I will make sure those are publicly posted and are set for convenient times,” Houck promised.