The Crested Butte News Serving the Gunnison Valley since 1999
“Your stakeholders are some of the most involved”
by Crystal Kotowski
Representatives from the United States Forest Service of the Grand Mesa, Uncompahgre, and Gunnison National Forests (USFS GMUG) met with the Gunnison County commissioners on December 20 to share updates from the past year and major work prospects for the coming year, including updating the forest plan. Ideally, the forest plan will help address some of the local challenges being seen in land use. As always, the scarcity of money to fund new ideas will be a major issue with any new revision to the plan.
Increasing recreation, dispersed camping, expanding bark beetle impact, extensive user-growth, oil and gas leasing, coal development, and travel management were among the issues of the USFS in 2016 and will be further addressed as the agency revises the 33-year-old GMUG Plan in 2017.
“It’s going to be a key document. What we’re looking for is key revision topics… All of our areas have seen a sixth straight year in an increase in visitation,” USFS GMUG forest supervisor Scott Armentrout told the Gunnison County commissioners on December 20. “This is going to be a long-term process for all of us. I think the key for me is that we’ve built a lot of the key foundations—it’s just that now we have more and more use.”
Gunnison Forest district ranger John Murphy outlined the priorities for the year, noting again dispersed camping, signage needs, and the spruce beetle infestation as its impacts on “the alpine plateau area has really picked up.”
In early 2017 the GMUG will be initiating the public component of the Forest Plan revision, a process that will shape management and on-the-ground decisions across more than three million acres of public land. Armentrout noted that the Forest Service would start its land use revision this spring, and the National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA) process will take about three years.
A Forest Plan provides a general framework to guide the Forest Service in managing forest resources, goods, and services. The National Forest Management Act of 1976 requires that forest plans be periodically revised. The GMUG’s current forest plan was developed in 1983 with five subsequent amendments in 1991, 1993, 2005, 2007 and 2009.
New guidance in the Forest Service’s 2012 Planning Rule directs forest plans to be science-based and developed with extensive public involvement. Armentrout said Gunnison County “stakeholders are some of the most involved.”
“I think we’d agree that all across the forest the use has changed significantly since the original plan. This is going to be a long-lasting guiding beacon, a North Star for management to see how much we can really address and move forward on some of those issues,” said commissioner Jonathan Houck.
He asked the Forest Service if the plan gives the county the high-level opportunity to talk about dispersed camping and prioritized uses, among other challenges.
“This is a revision. We have guidelines on dispersed camping and it also talks about site conditions classes. We need to modernize those standards for different parts of the forest… It’s a living plan that has been revised numerous times,” Armentrout answered.
The current forest management plan uses the Frissell site condition classes to guide management of dispersed recreation on the Forest. “Current guidelines call for sites that cannot be maintained in certain condition to be closed, while sites that are in condition classes 4 and 5 should be rehabilitated. The intent with this direction is to prevent unacceptable environmental damage from taking place,” Becca Hammargren, assistant forest recreation, wilderness, & trails program manager for USFS GMUG said.
Houck inquired further about the capacity to improve campgrounds, but the Forest Service noted that their capital improvement funds have been dwindling and applying for such funds continues to become more competitive.
Campground improvements are surprisingly expensive, Armentrout said, and the Forest Service has not seen the funding increases that they would like nor do they have much flexibility to invest in infrastructure and field rangers for education. In the GMUG Forests, there are fewer than one officer per one million acres.
“It’s hard to see what the path is toward addressing some of these things,” noted county manager Matthew Birnie, questioning the feasibility of the forthcoming proposals from the updated Forest Plan due to its budget constraints.
“There’s no doubt that it’s challenging, but I think the models are the things we do together, like our roads program,” Armentrout responded.
“My message is again that we have to work together on all of this,” Armentrout concluded.
