A new wilderness proposal for the Rocky Mountain Front is making the public rounds, but isn't ready for legislation yet.
The plan affects a 300,000-acre strip of public land along the eastern edge of the Bob Marshall Wilderness Complex, where the Lewis and Clark and Helena national forests meet private ranches and farms.
About 86,000 acres would go into six new federal wilderness areas, while the bulk would become a new kind of conservation management area that allows for most existing commercial and recreation uses. The strip would also get special attention for control of noxious weeds.
"We're not trying to place the Rocky Mountain Front under a glass bubble and make it a national park," rancher and coalition member Karl Rapphold said during a Wednesday teleconference. "We want to keep it as a working landscape."
U.S. Forest Service travel plans and roadless rules have been the main guidelines for managing the area in the past. The proposal would take the latest version of those guidelines and make them legislative, not administrative, which would allow for stronger protection.
The area has no oil or gas leases, and commercial logging would not be allowed under the roadless rule protection. However, forest thinning, fuels reduction and other forest treatments with new roads could be allowed. Snowmobile and all-terrain vehicle use would also be preserved where it's currently allowed.
"The conservation package retains what we have today into the future, and makes it permanent," said Rich Clough, a former state Fish, Wildlife and Parks deputy director from Choteau. "It's a little different than wilderness. It allows for grazing and other activity."
Clough said spotted knapweed and leafy spurge were becoming serious problems in the Rocky Mountain Front's wildlife habitat, and the proposal would concentrate money and attention there. It would ask Congress for $200,000 a year for federal land managers, county weed boards and private landowners to fund weed control efforts.
The proposal attracted quick criticism from Alliance for the Wild Rockies director Michael Garrity, who said the region was better protected under current policies.
"The main cause of weed infestation is road building, and they're going to open up the inventoried roadless areas to logging," Garrity said. "Road building for forest health - that's what logging is. Every timber sale they do is for some type of forest health."
Jennifer Ferenstein of the Wilderness Society, one of the coalition supporters, acknowledged that current roadless rules could allow logging as Garrity claimed. But she added that the Rocky Mountain Front has little commercial logging value or old-growth forest that would be at risk.
"This is why people should talk about this, so people can figure it out," Ferenstein said. Public meetings are scheduled in Great Falls, Helena, Augusta and Choteau in the next two months to gather that input.
Coalition member and former Lewis and Clark National Forest supervisor Gloria Flora said the proposal followed many of the same strategies of local landowner involvement that are incorporated in Sen. Jon Tester's Forest Jobs and Restoration Act legislation now before Congress. But the Rocky Mountain Front Heritage Act isn't ready for congressional sponsorship, she added.
"If the senator felt it would be a great addition, we're certainly not going to resist," Flora said. "But we're not reaching for a specific end game except to get this bill before Congress and passed."
Tester spokesman Aaron Murphy said the senator was aware of the proposal, but was not taking an active role in its development.
"There are no plans to add this proposal to the Forest Jobs and Recreation Act," Murphy said. "Jon spent many months working with stakeholders and seeking input on this bill, and he's focused on getting it through Congress."
