Outdoor Insights: Former U.S. Forest Service Chief Mike Dombeck on why killing the Roadless Rule is bad for hunters, anglers

While outdoors groups devoted big bandwidth to public lands-sales language in Congress last week, the Trump administration announced plans to rescind the 24-year-old Roadless Rule.

The Clinton administration-era rule, which followed an 18-month public review process that accepted 1.8 million comments, prevents new road-building within 58 million acres of the country’s national forest system.

Mike Dombeck led the rulemaking process as chief of the U.S. Forest Service under Clinton. Originally from northwestern Wisconsin, he spent a career in public service, mostly in fisheries, earning multiple degrees, including a masters from the U of M. He also worked in the first Bush administration and was acting director of the Bureau of Land Management in 1994.

Retired and living in Wisconsin, he spoke with me last week while returning from a Canadian fishing trip.

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Tony Dean once wrote in this publication that he was surprised the roadless rule survived the George W. Bush administration. Are you surprised it remains on the books into its sixth administration?

Dombeck: No, but I’m happy that it has. It’s withstood challenges including 11 court cases and Supreme Court review that kept lower court decisions. We did our homework in implementing this rule with more than 600 public hearings. Reviewing 1.8M comments is very labor intensive, and 90% of those comments were supportive of the rule, and in fact most comments wanted more restrictions on roads, not less.

I always viewed the rule as conservative.

It doesn’t cost taxpayers any money. Not building roads means they don’t have to be maintained. That’s expensive out West, with landslides, etc. When we wrote it, the road maintenance backlog was significant and it’s probably still growing.

In justifying the plan to rescind the rule, the administration says we need more roads for fire maintenance. Your impressions?

Dombeck: Humans cause the highest proportion of fire ignition, and the highest rates occur with 500 feet of a road. So the data does not support that. The current roadless rule also has numerous exclusions for things like forest management to reduce fire. It makes me wonder if the folks pushing to rescind this have even read the rule.

When we drafted it, we looked at current accessibility to the system. We looked at the Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest in Wisconsin and found that 78% of that forest was within a quarter-mile of a road. We have 386,000 miles of roads in the national forest system now – more miles than the U.S. Interstate Highway System. It’s a simple question of how many roads do we need?

Safe to say you would not want to see this rule rescinded?

Dombeck: Correct. This is a rule that’s important to sportsmen. The best hunting and fishing is off the beaten path. With public lands, there are no ‘No Trespassing’ signs, and for the guy who can’t afford a guided trip, keeping wild lands wild is key to providing a quality experience. That’s being whittled away acre by acre, minute by minute all across the country. This should cause a massive uproar across the sportsmen’s community.

You’d like to see it become law, not just administrative rule?

Dombeck: The Wilderness Act passed in 1964 by a Senate vote of 98-1 and by a similar margin in the House. That’s how much unity there has been for conservation. There has been language to make this law, and I strongly support it.