Blue Mountains Forest Revision Plan meetings continue

Published 10:30 am Tuesday, October 27, 2015

Discussions about the Blue Mountains Forest Plan Revision have been scheduled for other counties in the first two weeks of November. The content and presentation of these discussions will be the same as the discussion held in Wallowa County on July 20. The Forest Service is simply picking up where it left off during the summer, said Maura Laverty, Range Program Manager for the Wallowa-Whitman and Umatilla Zone.

“Fire season interrupted our outreach,” Laverty said. “We’re picking it up again to try and reach Union and Baker counties now. The information we gathered in Wallowa County has not been acted on yet. We will wait until we have finished gathering all of the information from other counties.”

Tom Montoya, Wallowa-Whitman National Forest supervisor, Sabrina Stabler, team leader for the Blue Mountains Forest Plan Revision, and Laverty met with more than two dozen Wallowa County grazing permittees July 20 in Enterprise. That meeting also was attended by Oregon House District 58 Rep. Greg Barreto, county commissioners Susan Roberts and Mike Hayward, and members of the county’s National Resource Advisory Committee (NRAC).

At that meeting Laverty assured Wallowa County permittees that some “wordsmithing” would be done to change the tone of the document to better reflect how grazing practices and science related to it had changed over the past 20 years.

“(NRAC member and OSU Extension Agent) John Williams and I will be doing that wordsmithing with a small group of policy writers this winter,” Laverty said.

The new meetings are divided into impact groups:

• 6-9 p.m. Nov. 2 at the Armory in La Grande: Discussions of access and wilderness on the Wallowa-Whitman National Forest

• 6-9 p.m. Nov. 4 at Heppner City Hall: Livestock grazing on the Umatilla

• 6-9 p.m. Nov. 9 at the Armory in Baker City: Blue Mountains Forest Plan, Baker County and Wallowa-Whitman

• 6-9 p.m. Nov. 10 at North Fork John Day Ranger District in Ukiah: Grazing on the Umatilla and Malheur

• 6-9 p.m. Nov. 12 at the Armory in La Grande: Scale of restoration on the Wallowa-Whitman and Umatilla