Forest Service Final Rule for Motorized Recreation in National Forests and Grasslands

Cool, but #15 has me wondering:

The Final Rule does not require local officials to reconsider previous decisions designating existing roads and trails for motorized recreation. Such reconsideration is at the discretion of the local official after consultation with the public and user community.

Meaning, they could just say "We don't have any roads for OHV use" and be done with it.

But overall, yay!
 
my interpretation on that is squeeky wheel gets the greese.... So 4x4s should make thier voices heard by these local officials...

I for one have NOT been as involved as i could have been this year, So if any other Raleigh area people wish to car pool to meetings let me know...
 
15 means they dont have to reconsider all the trails that have been closed down... It would be a logistical nightmare to go survey and determine why a trail was closed.

Now if you bring it up and a local forum or meeting in a ranger district they would have to reconsider it , at least the way i am reading rule #10

"The Final Rule provides that actual designation of routes shall be the responsibility of the Ranger Districts of the NFS. In other words, Forest Supervisors and District Rangers will be making these determinations after receiving public input."
 
SOunds like to me that 1. you need to be as friendly to the UFS guys as possible. 2. you may get the run around when trying to get an answer or info, because it does not say who exactly or of what title.
But at least it sounds as if there is hope!
 
The bottom line is in the hands of the Forest Supervisor, and it all revolves around how much pressure he's getting from inside, how much pressure from outside, how much money is available in the budget, and how it needs to be spread around to ALL the forest projects and daily operations. Needless to say, daily ops and emergency services needs are fulfilled first, then the remainder is applied to projects. BTW, a "project" is basically anything not in daily ops or emergency service.

A hypothetical example of why some things never seem to happen: you may seem to have plenty of money left over to apply to a given project, say, open new 4x4 trails, but is there also sufficient money to maintain and keep them open for this season, and will there be money to operate next year? Remember, you're not only dealing with the one-time expense of the new project in this year's budget, you're also gonna have to supply money to manage and maintain it for the remainder of this year, and that money's not in this year's ops budget. If there's insufficient additional daily ops money for the new trails in next year's budget, then you can't afford a new trail addition. USFS has to bank money for emergency services (fire ops, etc.), and if that gets depleted during a rough fire season, guess what's first to get cut? That's right, the recreational budget.
 
Back
Top