The Trump administration wants to repeal what’s known as the “Roadless Rule.” The policy prohibits logging and road building on roughly 60 million acres of national forests.
The "Roadless Rule" covers six million acres of forests in Montana. Earlier this summer the Trump Administration proposed to undo it.
A three week public comment period closed last week. The Center for Western Priorities, a regional public lands advocacy group analyzed comments. It found 99.2% of comments opposed changing the rule.
Peter Metcalf with the Glacier Two-Medicine Alliance says those statistics don’t surprise him, but he is disappointed by what he called a short public comment period.
"When the Roadless Rule was first passed, we had over 14 months of really intensive public engagement with meetings in local communities that were associated with every national forest and every national grassland across the country, multi month comment periods," Metcalf says.
With this public comment period over, the Forest Service must now analyze the feedback and conduct an environmental impact statement.
