Utah Environmental Congress:
In The News

Protests greet Duck Creek logging project

By Joe Baird
The Salt Lake Tribune

Published May 13, 2005

A pair of environmental groups are protesting a logging operation in the Dixie National Forest under the rules of the Healthy Forest Restoration Act.
   The Utah Environmental Congress and Forest Guardians this week filed an "objection" over the Duck Creek project, which has been described by the Forest Service as a thinning operation around a cluster of vacation homes near Navajo Lake.
   The conservation groups charge that Forest Service officials violated the Healthy Forest Restoration Act by extending the project into old-growth forests nearly two miles away from the homes, and that they invoked the act's rules with little notice in order to limit public involvement in the decision. The project was previously a more conventional timber thinning/sale operation that required an environmental study.
   "Our argument is that this is a public process about a major project, which is why they did the [environmental impact study] in the first place," said UEC Executive Director Kevin Mueller. "If this project had focused on the interface, we would not have objected, in fact we would have supported it. But when it turned into an old-growth logging project in the guise of restoration, we had to object, and we hope it will convince the Forest Service to drop the backcountry aspect of this project."
   Dixie National Forest District Ranger Dayle Flanigan calls the Duck Creek project a legitimate fuels-reduction operation that takes in not only areas around the residential village, but surrounding "crown areas" where a wildfire could leapfrog and put the homes in harm's way.
   "Our concern is that the forest has not had a natural fire occurrence in a long time, so we have many more trees than would normally be there," said Flanigan. "And there has to be a mechanical removal [logging], because the risk of a prescribed fire impacting the community would be too high."
   Citing interagency e-mails, Mueller says Dixie Forest officials rejected recommendations from the regional Forest Service office, which frowned upon the Healthy Forest designation because of the potential for litigation.
   "The regional office raised concerns, many of the same ones we have raised," he said.
   But Flanigan downplayed the office debate, calling it part of the normal decision-making process.
   "We discussed with the regional office the option of using the [act], because as we discussed it, we saw that it fit," he said.
   jbaird@sltrib.com