During the past few years the Applegate Ranger District of the Rogue River National Forest has experimented with improving and expanding its public involvement and collaboration strategy by using the Internet to reach members of a larger "community" and to encourage comments on NEPA documents and decisions. The Rogue River National Forest distributes a quarterly publication called the Rogue River Currents which contains a Schedule of Proposed Actions (SOPA) that outlines the status of propose projects that require environmental analysis and documentation. This publication is mailed to many interested individuals, groups and organizations to share information and involve them in the planning and decision process. Not all interested community members receive or read this document and other sources of public outreach seem too impersonal, such as the Legal Notices published in the Medford Mail Tribune.
The Applegate Ranger District chose to experiment with newer outreach technologies and support the spirit of the Applegate Adaptive Management Area (AMA) objectives of innovation and collaboration by trying a fresh approach in addition to established methods of public participation. One of the many goals of this experimentation was to reach farther out in the community and seek opinions from non-traditional or previously silent forest users. Although emphasis has been placed on the participation of people who are actively involved and live within the Applegate Valley, the interests of people living outside of this "local community" have not been fully appreciated or solicited. The ROD specifically encourages experiments to address increased public awareness and involvement in making agency decisions.
Each of the ten Adaptive Management Areas are located adjacent to one or more communities with economies and culture long associated with utilization of forest resources. As a result, the people have a "sense of place" and desire for involvement. The Applegate AMA is no exception and would like to expand this sense of place to the virtual world and provide creative common-sense approaches to complicated problems not achieved through traditional methods.
For the past few years the Applegate Ranger District has made at least one NEPA process and it's associated documents available on the Internet for pubic review. Starting with the Lower Summit Timber Sale and the Silver Fork Timber Sale in 1997, and the Sturgis Fork Landscape Projects in 1998, public outreach was essentially encouraged without limits. The SOPA has been available on the RRNF Home Page for some time and it seemed a natural extension to include some NEPA documents on the Internet. The first two NEPA planning efforts utilized the Home Page developed by the Applegate Partnership and was located at the following URL (Internet Address): http://id.mind.net/community/app/. The Sturgis Fork Landscape Projects uses the current Internet Home Page located at: http://www.fs.fed.us/r6/rogue/.
Some of the desired outcomes of this experiment are to reduce the amount of paper copies distributed and increase the range of distribution. A side benefit has been the ability to electronically search for individual words or phrases in a document to quickly locate an interest area in lengthy documents. The Internet has been identified as the "Information Super Highway" and can be compared to the saying used for the telephone Yellow Pages, "we never stop selling". Access can be achieved to sites on the Internet 24-hours/day, seven days/week making this an opportunity hard to ignore.
On all three of the experimental Internet accessible NEPA projects, the following documents were made available on the Internet: a cover letter from the District Ranger introducing the Environmental Assessment (EA) and disclosing the 30-day comment period, the EA, a cover letter from the District Ranger introducing the Decision Notice (DN) and disclosing the 45-day appeal period, and the DN. Specialist reports, response to comments during the 30-day comment period and other documents found in the Appendix of the EA were not available on the Internet. Additional information and maps were available by special request by contacting the project leader at the district. E-mail responses were discouraged during the 30-day comment period for the EA in favor of comments written on paper and mailed to the district. Also, due to the appeal regulations contained in 36 CFR 215, written comments must be sent to the Regional Forester Attn.: 1570 Appeals, P. O. Box 3623, Portland, Oregon 97208-3623.
The experimentation and monitoring of the effectiveness for this new strategy and use of technology are continuing. What can be shared at this time are the tangible responses, comments from the public and the demonstrated savings in time, paper and frustrations.
The unscientific/statistically incorrect comments from the public were all very favorable and supportive. Feedback, part of any adaptive learning process, has been informally recorded when received from unsolicited members of the "community". An environmental group as far away as New Mexico has congratulated the Applegate Ranger District for going this extra mile in its attempt to broaden the outreach effort and simplify the process. Many local groups and individuals have also utilized the Internet and have printed additional copies of the available documents for internal distribution.
A Internet access counter was installed on the first two Internet accessible NEPA projects and approximately 55 hits were recorded for the Lower Summit Timber Sale and 66 hits for the Silver Fork Timber Sale were recorded. The Sturgis Fork Landscape Project was located on the RRNF Home Page and no counter was installed because the District did not control this site. It is important to recognize what a "hit" means when referring to a measure of interest for an Internet site. An Internet "hit" simply means the number of times that the site was accessed. The same individual may "hit" the site multiple times during the same visit and give an inaccurate measure of the number of people visiting the site.
So what does the number of hits mean and how could one connect significance to the success or failure of this experiment? It is difficult at this time to reach a conclusion but easy to speculate and formulate an opinion. Some agency employees have questioned the benefits of this experiment and have chosen to think only of the possible downside or risks associated with exposing the agency to greater scrutiny. While those possibilities exist, no evidence was obtained during all of the experiences to support this occurrence. In fact, the number of appeals have definitely increased during the past few years but they have for all NEPA documents, not just for the Internet-accessible ones.
All of the comments from the public were positive and supportive. Presentations made to the Applegate Partnership all met with strong approval even if none of the participants accessed the Internet site. Simply knowing that the Applegate Ranger District is trying new methods and that information is available to people anywhere and at any time seemed reassuring to the Partnership. One comment heard during this experiment was memorable, "This experiment is like the Red Buttes Wilderness, I may never visit it, but it is reassuring to know that it exists."
No new groups or individuals have participated as a result of placing the NEPA documents on the Internet as far as one can determine from the amount of mail received. There seems to be no differences in the amount of comments to the EA or appeals received on the Decision as compared to the "control" NEPA documents and processes that were not available on the Internet during the same timeframe.
The intangible benefits of improving community collaboration and issues of trust are priceless and are difficult to measure. If nothing else during this experiment was obtained, a feeling of at least trying something new at the risk of creating additional work seemed a well calculated and balanced approach to an old criticism.
Tom Lavagnino
December 1998