The Forest Service is revising the Tongass National Forest management plan, and will use community input as guidance on how they will manage the forest for the next 10 years or so.
Delilah Brigham, a planning officer for the Tongass, gave a presentation of suggestions to a room of about 20 people in the Southeast Alaska Discovery Center on Wednesday.
“In order for us to make sure that we are providing the lifestyle and recreational opportunities that they want from their public land, we have to have that feedback from the public in order to incorporate it into a plan revision,” Brigham said.
Brigham says when they’ve asked communities about their visions for the Tongass, there’s been emphasis on recreation opportunities, sustainable timber management and protection of existing ecosystems.
The National Forest Management Act recommends management plans be updated every 10 to 15 years. The management plan for the Tongass was last updated in 2016. Brigham says when getting feedback from people in Southeast, there’s been a lot of interest in balancing recreation use for tourists and locals. The current iteration of the plan, she said, doesn’t touch on tourism much.
The Forest Service has been getting input from people across the country. But Brigham, who lives on Prince of Wales, says the local input is crucial.
“These communities in which we’re having the workshops, people are living and working and are in the National Forest every single day,” Brigham said. “People who are living here are more affected by our management activities than somebody who lives in West Virginia. They want us to really look at our management of the Tongass National Forest, because it’s important to them as well, but our management activities aren’t impacting them directly, like it does here with these communities.”
Brigham specified that the document presented is not an official draft plan, but an engagement document of suggestions for community members to build on. She said public feedback is essential to providing a robust forest plan — and she’s not worried about contradictory directives coming from Washington, D.C. She said they will have to adhere to the plan no matter what comes from the White House.
“The plan gives the vision of what we want to accomplish on the Tongass,” Brigham said. “Executive orders and other direction that comes from Washington D.C. gives more on, ‘this is what we want you to focus on,’ but our plan is the guiding document, and actually how we implement it.”
Jeff DeFreest is with the Recreational Aviation Foundation, a nonprofit that advocates for protecting access to the backcountry. He lives in Ketchikan. He showed up to the event because he’s specifically interested in protecting the Forest Service cabins in the Tongass. Some of those cabins are fly-in only. He wants the cabins to be specifically addressed in the plan.
“When it comes down to congressional funding, they’ll make priorities and it’ll be, you know, ‘do this, do that, build a trail,’” DeFreest said. “But the cabins could really easily fall through the cracks in funding and delegation of congressional dollars.”
He wants to make sure that doesn’t happen.
“Some of these cabins that are not getting as much use, or they’ve been neglected because of lowered budgets, and so basically being allowed to decay, and, you know, with deferred maintenance on them, and then it’s too expensive for the Forest Service to fix them.”
Forest Service staff provided feedback forms for attendees to fill out and specify their interests and concerns. Submittals are welcome until May 6. The Forest Service will then synthesize the community input to draft plan content and release the draft environmental impact statement this fall. The final plan is expected next summer.
In the next several weeks, there are in-person feedback sessions being held across Southeast, including in Craig, Hydaburg, Naukati Bay, Kasaan and Thorne Bay.
