August 2007

Dear Reader:

I am inviting you to participate in a planning process that we feel is important to you and your interests. We’re setting the course for the future management of approximately 2.6 million acres of your public lands spread throughout the coastal mountains and on the west slopes of the Cascades in Oregon. Some of these lands may surround your community or may lie within the watershed that supplies your drinking water. These lands provide habitat for wildlife and places for all of us to recreate. And above all, most of these lands were set aside years ago to provide a steady source of forest products and revenue to support the economy of western Oregon and the 18 western Oregon counties. We need your help in deciding their future.

This document is the Bureau of Land Management’s (BLM) Draft Environmental Impact Statement for the revision of the resource management plans of the western Oregon BLM Districts that have provided the management direction for those lands for the past 12 years. We are revising these six plans with this single Draft Environmental Impact Statement. There are three action Alternatives presented in this document.

We have selected Alternative 2 as our preferred alternative because this alternative would best fulfill our statutory mission and responsibilities. We are looking for input on the plan and the analysis of the effects of the alternatives. During the next 90 days, I hope you’ll take the time to review this draft Environmental Impact Statement and send us your ideas and suggestions regarding this proposed revision of our resource management plans; however, please recognize the BLM’s obligation to meet the laws and regulations that we have to follow. Your comments, along with ideas from our cooperators, will help craft our proposed resource management plans that will be analyzed in a Final Environmental Impact Statement.

Examples of comments that would be useful to the BLM in developing the proposed resource management plans are:

• How to increase the fire resiliency of the forests in the Medford District and the Klamath Falls Resource Area of the Lakeview District.
• How to manage the harvestable land base in such a way that will increase the rate of recovery of the northern spotted owl and the marbled murrelet in the short term, while still providing a consistent and stable timber supply.
• How to speed the redevelopment of structurally complex forests after regeneration timber harvesting.
• What management techniques might we use to lessen the effects to special status species?

As you share your interests and suggestions with us, your comments will be most useful to us if they address one or more of the following:

• errors in our analysis;
• new or missing information that would have a bearing on the analysis;
• a definition of a substantive and new alternative. An example would be an alternative composed of parts of the other alternatives that meets all the statutory requirements applicable to the lands managed by the BLM in western Oregon as described.

The end product of this planning process will be six approved resource management plans that will guide the management for the western Oregon BLM Districts for the next 10 to 15 years.

We will accept mailed comments at:

Western Oregon Plan Revisions
P.O. BOX 2965
Portland, OR 97208

You can also make comments online at the following website:http://www.blm.gov/or/plans/wopr

Your comments must be postmarked before December 10, 2007.

If you have questions, please contact Alan Hoffmeister, Western Oregon Plan Revision Public Outreach Coordinator, at (503) 808–6629 or via theQuestions or Requestsform.

Thank you for your interest in the management of BLM-administered lands.

Sincerely,

Edward W. Shepard
State Director