BAKER CITY — The U.S. Forest Service has scheduled 10 public open houses across the Blue Mountains over the next few months as the agency restarts its oft-delayed effort to write new management plans for the three national forests in the region.

Each forest will have a separate plan.

The Wallowa-Whitman, Umatilla and Malheur national forests combined cover about 5.5 million acres of public land.

Their current management plans date to 1990.

Forest plans typically are updated every 10 to 15 years. The plans set overall strategies for managing the forests but they don’t include specific projects such as timber sales, livestock grazing allotments or mining areas.

Those site-specific projects are addressed in separate studies, which are also subject to public comment and, potentially, legal challenges.

The Forest Service released a draft version of revised management plans for the three forests in 2014 after about 15 years of work that produced thousands of pages of documents.

But after hearing complaints — from people who believed the plans allowed too little logging, livestock grazing and other uses and from others who argued that the proposals didn’t protect enough land from such uses — Forest Service officials withdrew the draft plans.

The agency released a final environmental impact statement for new plans in 2018, but that also prompted widespread concern about the potential effects on how the forests are managed.

The Forest Service withdrew that proposal as well, in March 2019.

That pause prompted the agency to create the Blues Intergovernmental Council, known as the BIC, which includes representatives from county, federal and Tribal agencies.

Over the past three years the Forest Service has been working with the council to address some of the major concerns residents and groups have expressed about previous forest plan revision proposals, said Shaun McKinney, supervisor of the Wallowa-Whitman, which has its headquarters in Baker City.

Last August the Forest Service announced that it was restarting the forest plan revision process yet again.

The first phase of that process kicked off on Monday, July 31, when the agency published a notice in the Federal Register to start the assessment phase.

That’s the first phase of the process, McKinney said.

During each of the three-hour open houses, Forest Service officials will show maps of the forests and other information, and be available for one-on-one conversations, he said.

Residents can also view the maps and other information online, as well as submit questions and comments.

McKinney said work over the past two decades has yielded quite a lot of data about the general situation on the three national forests, including estimated acreages of certain types of forests.

“We have a good basic idea of what’s out there,” he said. “A lot of really good work has been done, and if we can use it again, we will.”

Forest officials also want to hear from the public, who visit and use the national forests, about any potential gaps in the agency’s databases, as well as their opinions about how the Forest Service should manage certain areas differently, McKinney said.

Gathering that information is one of the main goals of the upcoming open houses, he said.

Forest officials will use the data during the next phase, which is writing alternative strategies for managing each national forest, McKinney said.

The public will have another chance to comment on those alternatives.

The goal is to finish and approve the new plans within about three years, McKinney said.

A 2012 federal planning rule allows the supervisors of each national forest to approve management plans, rather than delegating that responsibility, as in the past, to the Forest Service’s regional forester in Portland, McKinney said.

Before the Forest Service starts putting together alternatives for managing the three forests, the agency will also release to the public a draft version of the assessment as well as a proposed list of sensitive animal and fish species that need special protection, an inventory of possible new wilderness areas and wild and scenic rivers.

Only Congress can designate wilderness and wild and scenic rivers, however — those decisions can’t be made as part of a forest plan.

McKinney said the upcoming open houses, as well as future public meetings during the forest plan revision process, are vital.

“We really want to have people’s opinions,” he said. “How do we best utilize the national forests for public good? Public engagement is just paramount.”

All open houses are scheduled from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m.

Malheur National Forest

• Aug. 22, John Day, Malheur forest headquarters, 431 Patterson Bridge Road

• Sept. 19, Prairie City, Prairie City Ranger District, 327 S.W. Front St.

• Oct. 24, Hines, Emigrant Creek Ranger District, 265 Highway 20 South

Wallowa-Whitman National Forest

• Aug. 17, Baker City, Baker City Event Center, 2600 East St.

• Sept. 13, La Grande, Union County Fairgrounds, 3604 N. Second St.

• Oct. 23, Enterprise, Cloverleaf Hall, 600 N.W. First St.

Umatilla National Forest

• Aug. 23, Pendleton, Umatilla forest headquarters, 72510 Coyote Rd.

• Sept. 21, Heppner, Heppner Ranger District, 117 S. Main St.

• Oct. 17, Dayton, Washington, Columbia County Fairgrounds youth building, 5 N. Pine St.

Zoom meeting

Oct. 10 — https://usfs.zoomgov.com/j/1611024130

More information

https://tinyurl.com/avjjes6n