05/11/05 N.E.P.A. reform?, Part Two

There have been concerns expressed that the National Environmental Policy Act, N.E.P.A., has become an overburdening regulation. N.E.P.A. was designed to determine environmental impacts to federal projects or when permits for such projects were issued. And it was designed to rely on information that would consist of six to eight pages at best. Today, overseers of projects required to follow N.E.P.A. must submit environmental impact statements with pages, in some cases, in the thousands. And that is one reason why a House Resources Committee task force is holding a series of nationwide field hearings to determine what improvements if any were needed to streamline N.E.P.A. The first hearing took place recently in Spokane. So what were some of the comments? For one, too much paralysis by analysis when making land management and federal project decisions. At least that is the point of view of Duane Vaagen, President of Vaagen Brothers Lumber in Colville Washington. VAAGEN: The founder of the U.S. Forest Service said that the cornerstone of conservation was to prevent waste of forest resources. We are now wasting our resources because of an environmental analysis process that can't recognize a dying forest from the dead trees. Vaagen says there are several steps that can be taken to streamline N.E.P.A. and improve its decision making processes. Among those is allowing expedited salvage and rehabilitation of fire or pest damaged forested areas within a six month time frame, encourage small, local community forest thinning projects, and promote long term, large scale stewardship programs for national forests among other things. VAAGEN: Require federal agencies to consider the environmental impacts of not taking action on a specific project. Require our land managers to treat and manage our dying forests which will help insure that the current infrastructure and capacity of our industry will remain. One of the more expressed concerns about N.E.P.A. has been how environmentalists have successfully used it to slow down if not halt completely projects. Many of those have had potential economic benefits for rural communities. William Kennedy of the Family Farm Alliance agrees with that complaint but then adds another & that N.E.P.A. has been selectively enforced. KENNEDY: We also have a very few situations where the N.E.P.A. has not been adhered to, to the detriment of agriculture and especially to the detriment of irrigated agriculture in the western United States. More on that, and why a consensus believes N.E.P.A. needs to be reformed not repealed, is covered in our next program.