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Bush's
Yellowstone Snowmobile Plan Stalls
WASHINGTON (AP) - The National Park Service must revive a plan scrapped by
the Bush administration to ban snowmobiles from Yellowstone and Grand Teton
national parks, a federal judge ordered Tuesday.
U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan said the Bush administration should not have
set aside a Clinton administration plan that would have banned snowmobiles in
favor of mass-transit snow coaches, which would reduce pollution in the parks.
The administration dropped that plan and decided to instead allow limited
snowmobiling to continue under rules that only allowed snowmobiles with quieter
and less-polluting engines.
The Park Service had said the cleaner snowmobiles and limited entries would
protect the park, even though the earlier snow coach plan was the best way to
protect the parks' natural resources.
Sullivan said the Park Service did not adequately explain the switch.
``Indeed, there is evidence in the record that there isn't an explanation for
the change, and that the (study that led to the new rules) was completely
politically driven and result oriented,'' he wrote.
The Park Service was set to start operating under the Bush rules Wednesday.
Sullivan's ruling does not close the parks to snowmobiling.
Instead, he ordered the Park Service to follow the older rules that will
eventually allow only snow coaches - which carry groups of winter visitors - in
areas where individual snowmobilers once rode.
A limited number of snowmobilers will be allowed to enter this winter - about
490 per day in Yellowstone and 50 per day in Grand Teton.
The Bush administration plan would have allowed 950 snowmobilers a day in
Yellowstone and a total of 400 in Grand Teton and on the John D. Rockefeller
Parkway that connects the parks.
The Park Service called the latest administration plan a balance between its
duty to protect the park and its responsibility to allow the public to visit and
enjoy it.
In a lawsuit, the Greater Yellowstone Coalition of Bozeman, Mont., argued that
the Park Service had ignored its own studies that show a ban on snowmobiles and
the use of snow coaches would best protect the park's natural resources.
The group argued that unacceptable pollution and health risks to workers would
have continued even with the new emission and entry limits on snowmobiles.
The Park Service had argued that the new plan was based on a generation of
cleaner snowmobile engines that weren't considered when the earlier ban was
drafted.
Sullivan rejected that argument.
``The prospect of new technology is not 'new,''' the judge wrote, noting that
less-polluting machines were considered and rejected when the Clinton
administration was deciding how to reduce the harmful effects of snowmobiling.
In separate claims, the Fund for Animals and other environmental groups
challenged the practice of grooming snow-covered roads for snowmobile and snow
coach use.
Those groups claimed the Park Service dismissed studies indicating groomed roads
harm bison by creating unnatural corridors for them to move within and outside
of Yellowstone.
Bison that leave Yellowstone in winter can be rounded up or killed under certain
circumstances because many carry a disease ranchers fear could be spread to
their cattle.
The Fund for Animals wanted Sullivan to order the Park Service to stop grooming
most of the roads in Yellowstone - a ban that would effectively stop
snowmobiling in those areas.
Sullivan did not do so. Instead, he ordered the Park Service to answer a 1999
petition filed by one of the groups, the Bluewater Network, that sought rules
prohibiting trail grooming in all national parks.
The judge did not direct a particular answer, although he said the Park Service
must respond to the petition by Feb. 17.
On the Net:
Yellowstone National Park: http://www.nps.gov/yell
Greater Yellowstone Coalition: http://www.greateryellowstone.org
International Snowmobile Manufacturers Association: http://www.snowmobile.org/
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