BOISE -- Gov. Dirk Kempthorne is expected to announce Thursday whether he'll nominate portions of the state's 9.3 million acres of roadless forest areas for continued federal protection from mining, logging and energy development.
The Republican governor isn't saying how far he'll go in exercising the new role in forest management that was granted to governors last month by the Bush administration when it overturned a Clinton administration rule that had barred development in roadless areas.
Idaho has more pristine forest lands under federal management than any other state in the lower 48.
"We'll send a signal soon," Kempthorne said Tuesday. "It's all in how it's done."
Some western governors have chosen to let the U.S. Forest Service's existing management plans determine the future of forest planning in their states rather than enter the costly, complicated new roadless petition process.
"Governor Kempthorne was one of the biggest advocates for this, but now what we are seeing around the West is the recognition this petition process is very onerous and costly to states," said Robert Vandermark, director of the Heritage Forest Campaign in Washington, D.C. "And in the end, there's no guarantee it will be accepted at all by this administration."
Conservationists say Kempthorne's decision about how Idaho will proceed could be a bellwether for the future of the Bush administration's rule change. Kempthorne helped trigger the policy switch when he and the state filed suit against the Forest Service's Clinton-era roadless rule in 2001, arguing the federal government did not include states as partners in the process.
"We're certainly interested to see what he does with this," said Jonathan Oppenheimer of the Boise-based Idaho Conservation League. "If I were a governor faced with dealing with education or budgetary issues, this one would fall pretty low on the list."
James Caswell, a former national forest supervisor who now heads Kempthorne's species conservation office, said he has met with interest groups to formulate the forthcoming plan for the state's roadless areas.
"We've used that feedback to develop various options that were presented to the governor and he's looked at those and made his decision," Caswell said.
If Kempthorne decides to let the existing Forest Service planning process decide the fate of Idaho's roadless areas, it would mean 5.66 million acres in Idaho potentially opened up to development.
The forest plans, most of which were drafted in the mid-1980s, also call for protecting 1.37 million acres as federally protected wilderness and prohibit road-building on another 2.28 million acres.
"The forest planning process of the 1980s highlighted the need to have a national roadless area rule because it was clear the Forest Service wasn't going to protect much on their own," said Craig Gehrke of The Wilderness Society in Boise. "If Governor Kempthorne just goes back to the forest plan, that highlights the need for the Clinton administration rule that the Bush administration overturned."
