It’s a positive step for Rep. Denny Rehberg to get out in Montana to hear public comment on Sen. Jon Tester’s Forest Jobs and Recreation Act, and we urge the Congressman to pay more attention to his constituents than the fringe groups claiming they had no voice in the development of the fundamentally sound, compromise bill.

Rehberg announced late last week a series of five listening sessions Jan. 4-8 that are free and open to the public to hear people’s thoughts on Tester’s bill, which as of yet, Rehberg has not indicated if he will support. Though he conducted no listening sessions to do so, Sen. Max Baucus is supporting Tester’s bill.

The bill, which had its first Senate subcommittee floor hearing Dec. 17, would create more than 600,000 acres of wilderness in Montana. The last wilderness designation here was more than 25 years ago in 1983. Most of the 600,000 acres would be in southwestern Montana’s Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest. The bill also calls for opening up 70,000 acres in the Beaverhead-Deerlodge to logging over the next decade — a small slice compared to the 4 million acres in that forest.

The aim is to provide a steady source of timber for the state’s ailing logging industry following a string of recent mill closures.
More than 330,000 acres would go to establish new recreation, protective or special management areas. For the most part, they simply protect current motorized use or other recreation.

Tester has promoted the bill as a “compromise” piece of legislation that environmentalists, recreationists and loggers all had a hand in crafting. In the first Senate hearing, Agriculture Department undersecretary Harris Sherman said he was concerned about the bill’s cost and mandates for logging. He said the 70,000 acres in the Beaverhead-Deerlodge are “not reasonable” and may be unachievable.

In a telephone interview with the Independent Record last week, Tester said despite those concerns he was encouraged by the hearing.

“We’re certainly not naive that we still have some work to do,” he said. “It’s a work in progress. We’re talking a 4 million-acre forest ... and we’re talking about going in and logging 70,000 acres. That’s not an extraordinary amount of logging.”

That amount of logging, Tester said, would promote forest health and could potentially offset the nearly $3 billion the Forest Service is using to fight forest fires.

“This bill was made on collaboration,” he said. “It’s all about stewardship.”

When talking about wilderness, “stewardship,” of course, is akin to political purgatory. Since the Wilderness Act of 1964 designated 9.1 million acres in the West as official wilderness, other “projected” wilderness designations have sat in limbo.

Congress has failed to appropriately designate the uses of some 60 million more acres suitable to wilderness. All the while, user groups like ATVers and mountain bikers have grown accustomed to pushing deeper into their boundaries, making it harder to give it up as official wilderness.

In all great compromises, something must be given up for something to be gained. And that’s just what Tester’s bill has the potential to do: unlock a heavyweight wrestling stalemate and potentially establish a new political arena in which to define logging, wilderness and recreation.

Groups on the extreme left and right might never support the bill, or any for that matter, but it appears many mainstream groups do. With Rehberg’s listening tour, he’ll likely hear as much.

“I need to hear from people,’’ Rehberg said Monday in a teleconference with news reporters. “Does this piece of legislation get us to what we want our forests to look like, what we want our Bureau of Land management property to look like, or does it just do more of the same?

“As Montanans, the land we live on is our most valuable resource,” Rehberg said in a news release. “The question isn’t whether it’s worth protecting, but how we can best do that. The one-size-fits-all approach of federal management doesn’t always work, and I want to listen to the folks on the ground before deciding whether I can support any proposal to expand wilderness.”

Just like Tester did.

If Rehberg hears support for the bill — even despite some flaws that need to be ironed out — it’s our hope he will support it and help unlock the political stalemate currently choking off any progress.