Sen. Lisa Murkowski said Tuesday she could begin rolling back another of the Obama administration’s midnight regulations that sought to limit industrial activity and renewable energy development in the Tongass National Forest in Alaska.
Murkowski, who is the Republican chairwoman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, had asked the Government Accountability Office, the government’s federal watchdog group, to determine if the Obama administration’s amendment to the Tongass federal management plan could be defined as a regulation and thereby subject to congressional repeal.
The GAO confirmed to Murkowski late Monday that the amendment is indeed a rulemaking and subject to the Congressional Review Act.
“While this rule can be improved administratively or legislatively, disapproving it entirely is now another option that we will consider in the days ahead,” Murkowski said Tuesday.
“Every sector of the Southeast Alaska economy needs greater access to the Tongass, but this rule failed to provide it,” she said. “Most concerning was the Forest Service’s decision to accelerate a transition to young-growth timber harvesting, even though it never completed an inventory to ensure it would be carried out successfully.”
The Tongass spans 16.7 million acres, covering most of Southeast Alaska, and is the largest national forest in the United States. Yet, despite its size, the Forest Service has restricted access for timber, mining, transportation, renewable energy and recreation, according to the energy committee.
“Those restrictions increased when the Obama administration finalized the [Tongass management plan] Amendment on its way out of office in December 2016, which was finalized without completing a comprehensive inventory of young growth, a key recommendation of the Tongass Advisory Committee, and largely dismissed more than 1,000 objections,” the committee said.
The timber industry had objected that the Obama administration plan called for the rapid transition from logging older trees to harvesting smaller, young trees, which is a key goal of a number of environmental groups that had taken the federal government to court over the issue. Environmental groups argued that too many areas of old-growth trees are left in the plan to be harvested.
