Montana Senator Jon Tester’s latest piece of legislation, which would add some 79,000 acres to the state’s wilderness portfolio and designate recreation areas for snowmobile and mountain bike trails, doesn’t even have the word “timber” in it. But when Tester announced he was introducing the bill on June 7, Pyramid Lumber COO Loren Rose was standing next to the senator, offering full-throated support.
That’s because Tester’s bill, the Blackfoot Clearwater Stewardship Act, was crafted over years by a local partnership of loggers, wilderness advocates, snowmobilers, outfitters, mountain bikers, and others. That group, from which the bill derives its name, already secured forest thinning and restoration work in 2010 that created 140 jobs, but the timber partners maintained their support for the rest of the coalition regardless.
“I don’t think [the act] makes a difference for Pyramid,” Rose said over the phone a few days later. “It’s that spirit of collaboration. … If you reach that zone of agreement, lock hands and say we’re going forward, you don’t go back on that.”
Locally driven, bipartisan, multi-interest legislation is rare. The BCSA has received support from organizations, national and local alike, that typically battle each other over policy. Seventy-three percent of Montanans support it, according to a University of Montana poll. But this is the second time Tester, a Democrat, has introduced the bill; last year, it received one subcommittee hearing and then floundered. The fate of this legislation, then, could be a sign of whether local support can cut through the partisan gulfs in Congress.
“This meets all the parameters,” Tester said. “Local collaboration. Three legs of the stool” — conservation, recreation, and timber — “and a Montana solution for a national forest. It’s all right there. The only reason you wouldn’t do that is because you’ve got a political agenda.”
Steve Daines, Montana’s Republican senator and a member of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, would likely need to support the bill for it to receive a vote in the Republican-controlled Senate. In a statement, a Daines spokesperson said the senator “will continue to meet with Blackfoot Clearwater Stewardship stakeholders and looks forward to finding a path forward on this legislation.” But Daines didn’t support Tester’s identical bill last year, leaving those very stakeholders worried the bill won’t advance.
The roots of this particular wilderness bill stretch back to the mid-2000s, when snowmobilers, wilderness advocates, and timber firms around Seeley Lake, Montana, brokered a compromise on forest prescriptions after widespread clear-cuts in the 1980s trashed the surrounding watersheds. The Blackfoot Clearwater Stewardship Project first teamed up with Tester on the 2009 Forest Jobs and Recreation Act, but that bill failed to advance. The partnership was able to secure some logging and restoration work through the Forest Service in 2010, but the wilderness and recreation elements of its plan remained unaddressed.
Tester’s latest bill takes direct aim at those provisions. Additions to the Bob Marshall, Mission Mountains, and Scapegoat wildernesses would protect important headwater streams and habitat for grizzly bears, lynx, and wolverines. Since a wilderness designation would permanently ban bikes and snowmobiles from the area, though, accommodations were made in the form of two recreation areas with trails specifically for those uses.
“The fact that red and blue groups, recreation and industry and advocacy groups all came together right from the start — that’s why this bill contains so many components for everyone, and [is] so successful at building such broad support,” said Erin Clark of the Montana Wilderness Association.
The result, according to Oregon State University political science professor Edward Weber, who has studied land-use politics in Montana’s Blackfoot Valley, is a piece of legislation consistent with the area’s collaborative nature. The support from the timber industry in particular, he says, is notable.
“I was surprised — they’ve already got theirs,” he said, referring to the 2010 logging concessions. “Which tells me that the relationships up there have built trust and the expectation of reciprocity.”
Despite all the local support, nobody seems tremendously optimistic the bill will advance. Recent wilderness additions, like the 1.3 million acres added out West in February, often come in enormous packages that facilitate widespread horse trading. But a standalone bill like this one, Tester said, will require the support of Daines to advance out of committee.
Weber, whose work in Montana began in the mid-1990s, said that’s a sign of changing times. “Why is it that Steve Daines is still sitting on the sidelines? And [Montana Representative Greg] Gianforte?” he asked. “Quite frankly, this is a no-brainer given how Montana politics has always worked. There must be some national pressure on Gianforte and Steve Daines.”
Rose, with Pyramid Lumber, isn’t optimistic all his bipartisan work will make it through Congress. “My biggest worry right now is the toxic nature of everything that’s going on in D.C.,” he said. “I don’t know how much appetite people have for taking on anything other than protecting our president or throwing him in jail.”
Tester and members of the stewardship partnership say that, should this bill fail, they might next try attaching it to a larger piece of legislation like the behemoth that passed in February. But the partnership that crafted the original measure will continue regardless.
“This is a model that’s working across the state from a grassroots and community-based level,” Clark said.
It’s just not one that’s reached Congress quite yet.
