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Public Comment on Proposed Rule: Special Areas; Roadless Area Conservation RIN 0596-AD66 | Federal Register Vol. 91, No. 160 | Submitted October 6, 2026 Submitted by: David J. Vance, P.G. (Georgia), Atlanta, Georgia To whom it may concern: I submit this comment in strong opposition to the proposed rescission of the 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Rule and request that USDA withdraw this proposed rule in its entirety. In 2003, I served as a Forest Geologist on the Klamath National Forest in northern California. We were actively decommissioning roads and redesigning drainage structures to reduce sediment delivery to salmonid-bearing streams — driven by science and Endangered Species Act obligations. Roads, particularly poorly maintained ones, are primary vectors of aquatic habitat degradation and not mention wildfire risk. The proposed rescission moves the agency in precisely the wrong direction. My full comment with citations is attached as a PDF. My key points are below: 1. The USFS road maintenance system is in a documented fiscal crisis. The agency receives less than 20% of the annual funding needed to maintain existing roads and carries a $6.9 billion deferred road maintenance backlog. Road appropriations fell from $234M (2004) to $73M (2024). Adding new road miles under these conditions deepens an unfunded public liability. (Source: USFS CBA, August 2026) 2. Road density is a well-established driver of salmonid habitat degradation. The government's own NMFS Biological Assessment identifies sediment loading and road density as primary stressor pathways for 27 ESA-listed salmonid ESUs/DPSs in the action area, including Chinook, coho, steelhead, green sturgeon, eulachon, and Southern Resident killer whale. Rescission is structurally at odds with ESA Section 7 recovery obligations. (Source: USFS Draft BA for NMFS Species, August 2026) 3. The 2001 Roadless Rule already provides the flexibility USDA claims is needed. It includes explicit exceptions for public safety, mineral rights, road realignment, ecological restoration, and wildfire hazard reduction. Land management plans independently restrict road construction on 54.5% and timber harvest on 66.5% of potentially affected IRA acreage. The claimed flexibility gap is overstated. (Source: 36 CFR 294.12-294.13; USFS NMFS BA) A 16% workforce reduction — approximately 6,000 employees lost in 2025 — means the Forest Service lacks the scientific and engineering staff to responsibly evaluate and monitor new road construction in hydrologically sensitive IRA terrain. Expanding development authority without oversight capacity is not responsible management. (Source: Center for Western Priorities, 2026) 4. The economic case for rescission is weak. Timber revenue from IRAs is estimated at just $9.9-$22M/year, while recreation visitor spending in those same areas is estimated at $886M/year, with total consumer surplus exceeding $1.9 billion. The agency's own CBA acknowledges long-term recreation losses under rescission are likely. (Source: USFS Economic Analysis, August 2026) 5. The litigation standstill cycle — in which NEPA-complete, ESA-consulted fuel treatment decisions are enjoined for years while untreated stands accumulate fire load and eventually burn in stand-replacing crown fires — is a structural flaw in ESA Section 7 Biological Opinion requirements. BiOps are not currently required to formally quantify no-action fire risk to listed species. A Comparative Ecological Risk Analysis (CERA) requirement, implementable through rulemaking under 50 C.F.R. Part 402, would close this gap. (Source: 16 U.S.C. § 6516; 50 C.F.R. Part 402) 6. S.1462, the Fix Our Forests Act, addresses judicial review and programmatic ESA consultation and should be enacted. Its Fireshed Registry (Sec. 103) provides the quantitative fire risk data infrastructure CERA requires. S.140, the Wildfire Prevention Act, imposes mandatory treatment volume targets without litigation or ESA reform and would worsen the standstill cycle as a standalone measure. The correct sequence is enactment of S.1462 plus the CERA rulemaking first, then enactment of the S.140 objective accountability second. 7. The correct policy response is for the Secretary of Agriculture to request increased funding for the Forest Service, not deregulation that generates new infrastructure liabilities without new funding resources or new qualified staff. The Secretary and Congress should fully fund road maintenance and where necessary decommissioning, restore scientific and engineering staffing, enact S.1462, and mutually engage the resource agencies (NMFS and USFWS) to implement CERA — and the Secretary should direct USDA to withdraw this proposed rule. I urge USDA to withdraw this proposed rule and pursue the policy changes listed in my comment letter and summarized above. My full comment with citations is provided in the attached PDF document. Sincerely, David J. Vance, PG

The Draft EIS states, at page 141 and again at page 168, that "[w]ithin the potentially affected environment there are 79 final or proposed critical habitats designated under the Endangered Species Act for species managed by USFWS and 19 critical habitats designated for species evolutionarily significant units or distinct population segments managed by NMFS." At page 168 the Draft EIS attributes these figures to the draft Biological Assessments: "These analyses are detailed in the USFWS and NMFS Biological Assessments." Neither figure appears in either Biological Assessment. The count of 79 appears nowhere in the draft USFWS Biological Assessment, and the count of 19 appears nowhere in the draft NMFS Biological Assessment. The cross-reference at page 168 points to documents that do not contain the numbers it attributes to them, and no reader can reproduce either count from the incorporated analysis. What the Biological Assessments do disclose makes the gap sharper rather than closing it. The USFWS Biological Assessment states, at page 25, that "[a] shapefile of IRA boundaries by administrative unit were imported into IPaC to compile the list of species under FWS's jurisdiction." No IPaC consultation code and no list-generation date is given. An IPaC official species list is generated on a stated date and expires; without that date the count of 79 cannot be checked against the designations in force at any point in time. The NMFS Biological Assessment states, at page 22, that "[s]pecies critical habitat shapefiles were uploaded from NOAA Fisheries National ESA Critical Habitat Mapper," then overlaid with Forest Service administrative boundaries and the affected environment with a two-mile buffer. No access date is given. The same page states that Southern Oregon/Northern California coho salmon critical habitat is "not included in the NOAA's Critical Habitat Mapper" and that mapping used by the Rogue River-Siskiyou National Forest during ESA consultation was substituted. By the agency's own account the source of the count of 19 omits at least one designation, and neither the Draft EIS nor the Biological Assessment says whether the 19 includes the SONCC coho designation. The Biological Assessments record only that species lists "were sent to the Services in September and October 2025 for review" (USFWS BA p. 25) and that "[s]pecies lists and critical habitat were reviewed by the National Marine Fisheries Service in September and October 2025" (NMFS BA p. 22). A review window is not a query date. Critical habitat is designated, revised, and removed by rule throughout a year, and a count with no query date cannot be reconciled against the designations in force when the Final EIS issues. This is not a formatting objection. The count bounds the set of critical habitats whose exposure to road construction and timber activity the effects analysis addresses; an unreproducible count means the exposure analysis is bounded by a set no one can verify. The same data is what the Forest Service must supply to the consulting agencies. Under 50 CFR 402.14(d), "[t]he Federal agency requesting formal consultation shall provide the Service with the best scientific and commercial data available or which can be obtained during the consultation for an adequate review of the effects that an action may have upon listed species or critical habitat." A critical-habitat baseline that cannot be traced to a dated query, that is not enumerated in the Assessments to which the Draft EIS attributes it, and whose NMFS source the agency concedes is incomplete, has not been shown to meet that standard. The Draft EIS states at page 166 that the agency "anticipate[s] initiating consultation under Section 7(a)(2)," so this is curable now rather than after the fact. The Forest Service should, in the Final EIS: (1) state the IPaC consultation code and list-generation date underlying the USFWS count, and the date on which the NOAA Fisheries National ESA Critical Habitat Mapper was queried for the NMFS count; (2) state whether the count of 19 includes Southern Oregon/Northern California coho salmon critical habitat, given the Biological Assessment's statement that the designation is absent from the Mapper; (3) reconcile both figures against the critical habitat designations in force at the date of the Final EIS and correct them where designations have been added, revised, or removed since the query; and (4) present in the Biological Assessments the enumeration of critical habitats from which each count is derived, so that the cross-reference at Draft EIS page 168 resolves to the figures it attributes to those documents.