BHNF management plan largely dormant

We likely won’t be seeing much about the revised management plan for the Black Hills National Forest this year, according to Dru Palmer, consultant to the county commissioners.

She said last week that the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) has pushed back publication of the notice of intent to begin developing the plan to fall or early winter.

This is partly because USFS is also working on its environmental impact statement for old growth forests, she said, and some of the same personnel are involved with both projects.

In the meantime, Palmer told the commission that there are certain areas of the plan that USFS wants to flesh out before the notice of intent is published.

“They’d like to have some special meetings with cooperators to kind of flesh out the issues with these topics before moving into the NEPA process,” she said.

USFS has identified five preliminary topics, according to Palmer: special designations, fire, off-highway vehicles and recreation, timber forestry and invasives.

“Those are the ones I think we’re going to start with,” said Palmer.

The commission and Crook County Natural Resource District will soon be receiving invitations to participate in meetings to discuss these topics, Palmer said.

The Black Hills National Forest’s Land and Resource Management Plan has been going through the update process for the last couple of years. The plan details how the forests will be managed for the next 15 to 20 years.

The process began with resource assessments, which involved evaluating existing information about ecological, economic and social conditions, trends and sustainability. The information was used to provide insight into the relationship between the current plan and the broader landscape and laid the groundwork for the next two phases: developing the plan and monitoring.

The assessment phase ended in December, resulting in 20 forest-wide resource assessments that had been revised according to public comment. Once the notice of intent has been published later this year, the Plan Development phase will begin, which is expected to include public meetings and comment opportunities.