Special Areas; Roadless Area Conservation; Applicability to the Tongass National Forest, Alaska

The Department of Agriculture is adopting this final rule to amend regulations concerning the Roadless Area Conservation Rule (hereinafter, referred to as the roadless rule) to temporarily exempt the Tongass National Forest (hereinafter, referred to as the Tongass) from prohibitions against timber harvest, road construction, and reconstruction in inventoried roadless areas. This temporary exemption of the Tongass will be in effect until the Department promulgates a subsequent final rule concerning the application of the roadless rule within the State of Alaska, as announced in the agency's second advance notice of proposed rulemaking published on July 15, 2003 (68 FR 41864). In State of Alaska v. USDA, the State of Alaska and other plaintiffs alleged that the roadless rule violated a number of Federal statutes, including the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act of 1980 (ANILCA). Passed overwhelmingly by Congress in 1980, ANILCA sets aside millions of acres in Alaska for the National Park Service, Forest Service, National Monuments, National Wildlife Refuges, and Wilderness Areas with the understanding that sufficient protection and balance would be ensured between protected areas established by the act and multiple-use managed areas. The Alaska lawsuit alleged that USDA violated ANILCA by applying the requirements of the roadless rule to Alaska's national forests. USDA settled the lawsuit by agreeing to publish a proposed rule which, if adopted, would temporarily exempt the Tongass from the application of the roadless rule (July 15, 2003, 68 FR 41865), and to publish a separate advance notice of proposed rulemaking (July 15, 2003, 68 FR 41864) requesting comment on whether to permanently exempt the Tongass and the Chugach National Forests in Alaska from the application of the roadless rule. Under this final rule, the vast majority of the Tongass remains off limits to development as specified in the 1997 Tongass Forest Plan. Commercial timber harvest will