Posted: September 27th, 2005

By Kimm Groshong and Shirley Hsu, Staff Writers
San Gabriel Valley Tribune

ANGELES NATIONAL FOREST — The Forest Service on Friday released its new land management plan, designed to guide the four Southern California national forests through the next 10 to 15 years.
Environmental groups immediately attacked it, saying the plan fails to adequately protect those forests.

It is the first updated usage plan since the mid-1980s and recommends designating as wilderness an additional 87,000 acres of forest lands, including 13,000 in the Angeles National Forest. It zones all 3.5 million acres of the Angeles, Cleveland, Los Padres and San Bernardino national forests into ”appropriate uses,” with an emphasis on striking a balance between the forests’ millions of recreational users and maintaining forest health.

Ron Pugh, the forest planner for the four Southern California forests, said the plan allows the Forest Service to ”manage toward a healthy forest situation.” He said its priority is to provide protection for the communities that interface with the forest through increased education and collaboration in the development of community fire defense plans.

”Lives and property are our highest priority,” Pugh said. ”We’re not going to ignore wildlife needs, but if there is a trade-off, we’re going to give the nod to people.”

The public document is more than 1,000 pages long and few have had the opportunity to fully read through it. But the Sierra Club, the Center for Law in the Public Interest and the Center for Biological Diversity released a coordinated statement Friday saying ”the final land management plans for the four national forests of Southern California fail to protect the forests from new and rapidly growing threats and do not serve most forest visitors.”

Bill Corcoran, senior regional representative for the Sierra Club, said the Forest Service isn’t providing leadership in restoring the forest. ”We would have preferred to have seen the Forest Service use the designations and resources available to it to strongly defend the forests from development and harmful uses,” he said.

Don Bremner, chairman of the Pasadena area Sierra Club, said he was disappointed that more land wasn’t recommended for protection through wilderness designation. An earlier draft of the report identified six alternative plans with specific themes. The plan that the Sierra Club favored recommended more than 16 percent of the Angeles for new wilderness designation. Chris Hicks, policy director for the Center for Law in the Public Interest, said the plan doesn’t do enough to address forest access for minorities and low-income families.

”These are the most urban forests in the country, and there’s really no good way to reach them through public transportation,” Hicks said.

While the 2000 census found 31 percent of Los Angeles County residents were non-Hispanic whites, Forest Service data showed whites made up 79 percent of visitors to the Angeles National Forest that year; Latinos made up 11 percent of visitors.

Hicks blamed the disparity on the lack of public transportation, along with cuts to educational programs geared toward teaching children from low-income families about the environment, and said the forest plan contained only ”platitudes” about these issues.

Corcoran added that ”this plan continues to be confusing and vague so that it is very hard for the public to understand what the Forest Service plans to do and how they plan to measure their success and failures.”

Forest planner Pugh said the plan incorporates an increased emphasis on monitoring that should increase the Forest Service’s accountability and public trust. ”The monitoring will give us a good, strong indication if we’re doing it right and if we’re doing it wrong.”

In the new plan, which should go into effect at the end of October, zoning will allow for longer rides through the forest for off-road vehicles.

”The Forest Service is responding to the off-road vehicles lobby rather than spending the majority of its time and resources on the approximately 95 percent of visitors who don’t use off road-vehicles,” Corcoran said.

Mike Bishop, president of the Azusa Canyon Off Road Association, said he didn’t think the plan provided for the opening of any new off-road vehicle areas.

He said the onus is on users to help maintain trails and manage the areas. His club of volunteers has been trying to mitigate the impact of off-highway use by erecting barriers to prevent illegal stream crossings, and is trying to apply for a $95,000 grant to put in boulders to protect the San Gabriel River, he said.

”Nobody wants to see the forest abused — our natural resources get all torn up,” he said. The plan doesn’t do enough to improve the situation in some heavily used areas such as the East Fork of the San Gabriel River, where conditions are ”appalling” Hicks said.

”It seems the Forest Service can find all sorts of ways to accommodate off-road vehicles but they can’t provide walkways to rivers,” he said.

Corcoran said as far as he’s concerned, ”the planning process starts over tomorrow. The public hasn’t been served.”

Forest Service personnel will hold public open houses to discuss details of the new forest plan beginning in mid-October. The schedule:

Los Angeles: Oct. 22, 9 to 11 a.m., Glassell Park, 3650 Verdugo Road. Los Angeles: Oct. 22, 2 to 4 p.m., Watts Community Center, 10950 S. Central Ave. West Covina: Oct. 24, 6 to 8 p.m., West Covina Senior Center, 2501 E. Cortez St. The plans are available on the Internet at www.fs.fed.us/r5/scfpr and will be available at public libraries by the end of September. Kimm Groshong can be reached at (626) 578-6300, Ext. 4451, or by e-mail at kimm.groshong@sgvn.com. Shirley Hsu can be reached at (626) 962-8811, Ext. 2306, or by e-mail at shirley.hsu@sgvn.com.