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Show Boulder Mtn. Ranchers Pre vail In Charges That Forest Service Used Altered East Slope Data BOULDER Boulder Mountain ranchers will be returning their cattle to the mountain without the nearly 42 percent cut in grazing the Forest Service had planned to impose. For the time being, it's ranching as usual for the small but determined group of cattlemen who had claimed the proposed cuts would force them out of business. After last week's acknowledgment by an independent committee that data used by the Forest Service to arrive at grazing cuts had indeed been altered, the agency withdrew its plans to make the cuts. Now, ranchers will be able to make use of their usual grazing area to the extent they had before the cuts were proposed, at least for the time being. Claiming for many months that the Forest Service had based its decision to impose the cuts on falsified data, the ranchers had gone almost unheard in the general clamor to reduce grazing on public lands. After Dixie National Forest Supervisor Hugh Thompson said recently that cuts would be implemented forthwith, the three-man three-man committee that was impaneled to look at the ranchers' documents containing allegedly falsified data finally met Jan. 30 at the WasatchCache National Forest Office in Salt lake City. At the end of the nearly-all-day meeting, they were forced to acknowledge that there were indeed some serious problems with the statistics. Richfield attorney Marcus Taylor Tay-lor represented the ranchers on the committee, Van Elsbemd the Forest Service and Chuck Canfield, an aide to Orrin Hatch, was the third per- son, selected as an impartial member mem-ber by the first two. The three reviewed data, listening to both Forest Service and rancher representatives. represen-tatives. Final compelling evidence was presented by Joel and Carol Greer of Boulder who had been assisting the ranchers with their efforts to bring the falsified information infor-mation to light. The Dixie National Forest Handbook formula for determining the amount of grazing that can take place on public lands is based upon percentage of proper use of the land. It is computed by dividing the "actual use" by the "proper use". Proper use, as defined by the Forest Service, sets a percentage of forage that may be utilized by the ranchers. If ranchers, in their actual use of the land go beyond the percentage set for proper use, the resulting percentage may exceed 100 percent. The problems come, ranchers have traditionally claimed, because the proper use figure may legally and arbitrarily be changed at any time by the Forest Service, even retroactively, resulting in excessive overall percentages. Ranchers have been accustomed to dealing with the policy, said Carol Greer. "In simple terms, it works like this." she said. "If your mother baked a pie, then told you that you and your sister could each have half, there would probably be no problem unless you consumed more than your share. By 'over-utilizing' 'over-utilizing' the pie, your mother would say that you ate 60 percent where proper eating would have been 50 percent. By dividing your 'actual use' of the pie by the 'proper use' figure she had originally given Mm you (6050), she arrives at 120 percent of proper use. If you had 'actually' eaten 60 percent of the pie but your mother told you she had meant to say proper use of the pie should have been 40 percent for you and 60 percent for sister, she might then accuse you of pigging out on pie to the tune of 150 percent" Fluctuating proper use statistics were nothing new to the ranchers, but when the actual use figures began to bobble, too, they took a deeper look with a little help from the Greers. "Continually fluctuating fluctua-ting proper use figures were one thing," she said, "but there's no way actual use figures can change on the record you ate what you ate!" But change they did, the ranchers had been claiming for many months, and those altered figures, they said, were used to affect grazing cuts proposed for the East Slope. And, on Jan. 30th they were finally able to convince the (See Boulder Mountain Ranchers Prevail On Page 4A) Ranchers Prevail On East Slope From Page 1 committee of three that the records had been altered. Susan Hayman, environmental coordinator for the Dixie National Forest at its Cedar City District Office said Tuesday that she had never seen the ranchers' documents before the Salt Lake City meeting but she believes the ranchers when they say they mailed them to the Forest Service Ogden office in September 1995. That office has maintained that they have never received copies at the Ogden office which the ranchers said they mailed Sept, 1, 1995 The ranchers have receipts, they say, to show when and where they were mailed. "It was a time-consuming task to carefully research the records and extrapolate the data," Greer said, "and it may have been that no one really wanted to go through it all to try to understand what we were saying to them." In its official statement, which Canfield made available to the media, the committee refused to say that intentional changes had been made to influence a pending appeal by ranchers of the proposed grazing cut decision. "However, we have found irregularities and mistakes in critical documents, and of greater import, there are some changes in core figures which seriously erode the credibility of the data which supports the East Slope Cattle Allotment Management Decision. The errors and inconsistencies which appear in some of the data lead us to conclude that original source information may have been compromised, ..." The following morning, Teasdale District Ranger Marvin Turner announced his decision to reduce permitted livestock use on the East Slope Grazing Allotment The original allegations were made in February 1995, and Turner's news release said the agency had conducted extensive reviews of their own data without detecting any changes. "Because the changes were made on our original documents, after the permittees received their copies in 1992, it was virtually impossible to catch this without comparing our documents to theirs. Now that we have their documents, we intend to get to the bottom of why those changes were made." Hayman said the investigation will be conducted by a Forest Service employee who functions independently under a different chain of command, rather than under forest supervisors. "We plan to have the investigation well underway, hopefully completed by the end of two more weeks. We want to expedite this ... and figure out what happened here," she said. In a Forest Service news release, Thompson said, "We remain concerned con-cerned about the resource conditions condi-tions on the East Slope Allotment. We intend to continue cooperating with the grazing permittees in construction of proposed fences and other improvements. We will also proceed with new data collection studies, relying on the professionalism profession-alism of our range conservationists and involvement of the grazing permittees." per-mittees." Hayman reaffirmed Thompson's statement, saying "When the field season starts, we'll be out there collecting data and the permittees will be involved." She said the documents in question are available for review at her office in Cedar City. Former state representative Met Johnson, a co-founder of the Western State Coalition, was not so soft-spoken about the committee's com-mittee's announcement. "This is another example of the arrogance of the federal bureaucracies and agencies to regulate by opinion, not fact; and, in particular, the Dixie National Forest, under the supervision super-vision of Hugh Thompson, was caught red-handed in altering data that would support their decision rather than have a decision supported suppor-ted by data. "The legal ramifications of this are not over yet," he said, "as we have requested an investigation from Janet Reno's office and she has turned it over to the Solicitor General of the Department of Agriculture over the U.S. Forest Service." |