The Wasatch-Cache National Forest - Utah's most popular and controversial - has a plan.
But that plan at best is flawed, at worst a dismal failure, according to a panel of experts assembled Tuesday night at the Wasatch Front Forum.Forest officials not long ago decided it was time to revise the 10-year general management plan, which was adopted in 1985 and guides everything from resource and recreation development to wildlife and watershed management on the 1.1-million-acre Wasatch-Cache. The forest includes the Wasatch Mountains and the northern half of the Uinta Mountains.
In what was the first major public meeting on the revision process, citizens learned that the revised plan will be quite different than the current one.
"The first round of forest-planning failed to meet everyone's high expectations," said Wasatch-Cache Forest Supervisor Susan Giannettino. "We learned you can't do everything for everybody on every acre."
The Forest Service also learned that the 1985 plan had some fundamental problems: Resource inventories were outdated; proposals for building and maintaining recreation facilities were lacking; riparian management and bio-di-vers-ity were not addressed; and sustainable levels of timber production were overestimated.
"There's no question that there was a very strong timber bias," Giannettino said in response to criticism by the Utah Wilderness Association that the 1985 plan favored "output forestry" over environmental preservation.
"This plan looked at the land literally as a commodity," said UWA coordinator Dick Carter, arguing that the forest plan must get out of the "output mode."
"We need to talk more about what is on the ground rather than what we can take off the ground," said Carter, who indicted the current plan as lacking vision and failing to consider environmental impacts.
Without speculating how the new plan will address levels of commodity production - mineral extraction, timber harvesting, grazing - Giannettino promised that such production will be the result - rather than the driving force - of the new management objectives.
"We're going to try to decide what (the forest) is going to look like first," she said, introducing many in the audience to a new acronym, DFC, which means "desired future condition," an idea that will guide the plan's revision.
The DFCs will be influenced largely by the concept of "ecosystem management," a mandate issued by the chief of the Forest Service just over a year ago.
"We're beginning to shift our focus from an agricultural production view to an ecosystem management view," said David Holland, ecosystem management coordinator for the Forest Service.
Holland said the shift is from the concept of multiple use to the concepts of biodiversity and ecosystem sustainability, looking at the forest as a whole rather than at its parts.
The secret to success, Holland said, is going to be getting the opposing sides to collaborate toward that goal and end the divisiveness that has characterized the forest debate for years.
Gale Dick, of the Citizens Committee to Save Our Canyons, said much of the problem lies with the Forest Service, which he characterized as being "beyond the reach of the ordinary citizens."
He questioned the public process that the Wasatch-Cache was going to follow in revising its plan and wondered how seriously the forest would consider public comment.
"I realize that every citizens group will not get its way. But they should sometimes prevail," Dick said.
Giannettino said that during the next 10 months the Wasatch-Cache will be gathering data and comments for the preparation of a draft environmental impact statement on the revised plan. That draft EIS will then be subject to the lengthy public-comment process required by the National Environmental Policy Act. In short, the plan is currently two to three years away from being revised.
The audience, composed primarily of conservation-oriented individuals, expressed concern for development along the foothills in Salt Lake County, helicopter skiing, whether the plan would reflect the priorities of the Clinton administration, and whether it would be compatible with the other forests that manage land in the Uinta Mountains.
Dean Richardson, president of the Utah Federation of Gem and Mineralogical Societies, said he hopes the plan reflects the human element of the ecosystem.