Conservation Group Turns Back On Gore 2000 Candidacy Group Angry Over Denial Of Appeal To Stop Logging

The Idaho Sporting Congress, at odds for years with President Clinton over administration forest management, accused Vice President Al Gore on Friday of complicity in further undermining trust in public resource policy.

At the same time, the organization turned its back on Gore’s potential presidential bid in 2000, suggesting he is betraying those hoping to assure at least some of America’s natural beauty can be enjoyed by future generations.

Executive Director Ron Mitchell decried the administration’s denial of the organization’s appeal to abandon planned logging of old-growth and roadless area trees in central Idaho’s Deadwood River region.

Clinton referred the appeal to Michael Dombeck, the administration’s new Forest Service chief who simply cited the Sporting Congress lawsuit objecting to the logging plan and said, “I am confident that the issues will be appropriately addressed by the courts.”

Mitchell cited the checkered history of attempts to log the Deadwood area, highlighted by the withdrawn effort under the so-called Savage Rider that waived laws protecting fish and wildlife - a history Dombeck seemed ready to reverse six weeks ago when he told Congress the Forest Service had to avoid logging old growth and roadless areas until public trust has been restored.

“Dombeck has reversed himself in spades,” Mitchell said.

The refusal to intervene, Mitchell said, “speaks volumes about Dombeck’s sincerity and what a future Gore administration would be like on the forest issue.”

Although Gore called the Salvage Rider the administrations’ biggest first-term mistake, allowing the Deadwood area to be logged only underscores the hypocrisy of those earlier statements, he said.

“This decision not to stop the project and punish outlaw Forest Service officials tells me we would expect more of the same under a Gore administration,” he said. “The Gore/Clinton administration is all duplicitous mouth and no reform.”

Boise National Forest spokesman Frank Carroll contended that Dombeck’s comments, both spoken and in the response to the Sporting Congress, reflected the philosophical view of the administration but were not intended to suggest that established forest management plans would be jettisoned.

“Our forest plan doesn’t recognize Deadwood as wilderness, so we treat it as multiple use,” Carroll said.