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Management plan for Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area to be revised

By Kathie Durbin
Published: April 7, 2011, 12:00am

? Who: The U.S. Forest Service.

? What: A review of the revised management plan for the Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area.

? When: 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. April 14.

? Where: Rock Creek Hegewald Center, 710 S.W. Rock Creek Drive, Stevenson.

A 2004 revised management plan for the Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area will be tweaked again as a result of a settlement of legal challenges filed by Friends of the Columbia Gorge and other environmental groups nearly seven years ago.

The Forest Service will hold a public meeting April 14 in Stevenson to explain the changes it plans to adopt as a result of a 2008 federal appeals court ruling and a 2010 legal settlement with Friends. No public testimony will be taken, but the agency will accept written comments.

Among the changes: No new dwellings of any kind will be allowed on lots smaller than 40 acres in the most visually sensitive part of the scenic area, known as the Special Management Area. The rule applies mainly to one Oregon subdivision, Rowena Dell, which was platted with smaller lots before the scenic area was established in 1986.

? Who: The U.S. Forest Service.

? What: A review of the revised management plan for the Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area.

? When: 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. April 14.

? Where: Rock Creek Hegewald Center, 710 S.W. Rock Creek Drive, Stevenson.

The Columbia River Gorge Commission made its own changes to the management plan last summer as a result of a separate ruling by the Oregon Supreme Court. Among those changes: No expansions of existing industrial uses within the much larger General Management Area are now allowed.

Friends challenged several of the 2004 revisions in federal court and others in the Oregon state court system. In federal court, the group prevailed on just one issue: the 40-acre minimum lot size for new dwellings, including new housing for farm workers.

In settlement talks, the Forest Service also agreed to restrictions on the siting of new RV parks in certain areas designated for recreation, and to language that requires a review of the cumulative impacts of each new development approved in the Special Management Area.

Friends argued successfully in the Oregon courts that the 2004 plan violated the Scenic Area Act because it did not require the commission to address the cumulative impacts of new development on natural resources and cultural resources. The Gorge Commission adopted the cumulative impacts language for the GMA last summer; now the Forest Service has agreed to adopt the same language for the SMA, said Lynn Oliver, landscape architect in the Forest Services’s Scenic Area Office.

Oliver pointed out that only about 13,700 acres of the 292,500-acre National Scenic Area is private land within the SMA that is open to possible development. Seventy percent of the SMA is federal land. “There will be no change in the way the Forest Service will be managing federal land,” he said.

The Friends group still has issues with a new, narrower definition of which “natural resources” must be protected under the Scenic Area Act. A definition that encompasses wetlands, streams, ponds, lakes, riparian areas, wildlife and wildlife habitat, rare plants and natural areas was adopted by the Gorge Commission last year, and now the Forest Service proposes to adopt the same definition, said Friends conservation director Michael Lang.

“They made it too narrow,” Lang said. “They excluded geological features. They took out land, they took out air quality. If the Forest Service is now going to adopt that definition, they are undercutting rules that require protection of air quality.”

Jill Arens, executive director of the Gorge Commission, said the new definition is simply a recognition of the limits of the Gorge Commission’s authority.

“We have a great interest in air quality, but we do not have jurisdiction,” she said. “We are not the (Oregon) Department of Environmental Quality or the Southwest Clean Air Agency. We can’t say everyone has to shut down their wood stoves.”

The commission has not ignored air quality issues. Beginning in 2000, the panel enlisted environmental agencies in both states as well as the Forest Service in a multiyear effort to identify the sources of haze in the Gorge and recommend solutions.

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