Decision on snowmobiles in Yellowstone issued; group files suit

By SCOTT McMILLION, Chronicle Staff Writer

The federal government officially endorsed on Tuesday its continued acceptance of snowmobiling in Yellowstone National Park.

Then, to nobody's surprise, environmental and animal rights groups filed a lawsuit as the ink was still drying.

The National Park Service touted its action as good all the way around.

"Protecting visitor enjoyment, visitor and employee health and safety, air quality, natural soundscapes and wildlife continue to be the goals for winter use," announced Karen Wade, regional director for the Park Service.

She signed a document called a "record of decision" that finalizes the new snowmobiling plan.

Environmentalists hurried to the courthouse while holding their noses.

"This new decision will continue to devastate Yellowstone and its unique wildlife," said Michael Markarian, president of the Fund for Animals, one of the groups that filed suit Wednesday. He called the plan a "fleecing of the American taxpayers."

The others in the suit are the Blue Water Network and The Ecology Center, Walt Farmer of Jackson, Wyo., George Wuerthner of Richmond, Vt., and Philip Knight and Richard Meis of Bozeman.

The plan took more than a decade to formulate and has wound its way through two lawsuits, their settlements, two presidential administrations and national media scrutiny. Environmental groups have found it loathsome while acceptance from snowmobile industry groups has been lukewarm.

It calls for continued snowmobiling in Yellowstone, Grand Teton National Park and in the John D. Rockefeller Memorial Parkway that connects the parks.

After two years it phases in four-stroke snowmobiles, which are cleaner and quieter than traditional two-stroke machines. All riders must be guided or else pass a course that teaches them how to behave in the park. And it imposes limits on the number of sleds, although they are higher than current daily averages.

The Park Service has acknowledged that its plan is not the "environmentally preferred" option.

That one, favored by the Clinton administration, would have booted all recreational snowmobiles and replaced them with snowcoaches.

However, the Bush administration dropped that idea, yielding to the snowmobile industry, which supports the winter economy of West Yellowstone and provides hundreds of jobs around the West.

Green groups maintain the new plan will continue to pollute the park's air, which, they say, will endanger the health of vulnerable people like the young, the old, the pregnant, the asthmatic and those with heart or lung conditions.

They note it will cost an extra $1.3 million a year and they say its faulty analysis underestimates the amount of pollution the new machines will create.

Wade said the new machines "cut pollution by 90 percent," but a medical doctor and public health specialist who studied the Park Service plan said that isn't necessarily so.

"Cutting emissions is not the same as cutting pollution," said Sarah Janssen, a physician from California who co-authored a 29-page analysis of the park's plan, paid for by The Wilderness Society and Women's Voices for the Earth. It was released Monday.

Janssen maintains that, instead of cutting carbon monoxide by 90 percent, the drop may be no more than 26 percent on days when the weather is right.

Yellowstone spokeswoman Marsha Karle said the plan is flexible and if problems develop, changes can be made.

Like a suit the Fund for Animals filed in 1997, the new one maintains that grooming roads for snowmobiles has led 3,500 bison to their death in Montana.

The bison use the roads, but scientists disagree over whether they follow them to the park borders.

It also maintains the new plan breaks a variety of federal laws and policies.

The 1997 suit by the Fund, which was settled, was the trigger for the long and expensive planning process that culminated Wednesday with Wade's signature.

Whether it will be installed on the ground now depends on a Washington, D.C., judge.

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