As more than 20 fires burn in Montana, a debate over how to manage forests to prepare for burns flared up in a Bozeman City Commission meeting Tuesday night. Commissioners narrowly passed a measure to support a controversial logging project.
The commission voted 3-2 to file an amicus brief in support of the decade-and-a-half in the making Bozeman Municipal Watershed Project.The Cottonwood Environmental Law Center sued last summer to stop the project, but a federal judge dismissed the case in December. The environmental organization appealed that decision a couple months later.
The project calls for nearly 5,000 acres of prescribed burns, thinning and logging near Bozeman and Hyalite creeks to protect the city’s water supply in the event of a catastrophic wildfire.
Corey Lewellen is Bozeman District Ranger for the Custer Gallatin National Forest.
“All of these treatments have been specifically and strategically designed to give our firefighters higher opportunity to safely engage a wildfire and trying to minimize the impacts of that wildfire,” Lewellen says.
Kyle Voigtlander also voiced support of the project at the meeting.
“We saw what happened to the Bridgers last year. I’m a firefighter as well, and we do not have the resources to monitor a fire if it comes through,” Voigtlander says.
Two people spoke on behalf of filing the brief to support the Forest Service, and seven voiced comments against it. That’s in addition to 18 written comments, all against the project.
About 650 acres of the scheduled treatment is in old growth forest. Critics say that means logging trees that could store carbon crucial to fighting climate change, and that the plan relies on outdated science, damages ecosystems, and would have little impact if a fire did come through.
John Meyer is with the Cottonwood Environmental Law Center, and Clinton Nagel is with the Gallatin Wildlife Association.
“I’m actually in the area right now. Every tree you’re looking at here is gonna be cut down,” Meyer says.
“To log an old growth forest is about as devastating an act as one could do on our natural world,” Nagel says.
Thinning of small-diameter trees that could ladder fire up into the forest’s canopy is already underway. The Forest Service expects work to continue on the Bozeman Municipal Watershed project through at least December of this year as the appeals process moves forward.