Dear Editor:
The ongoing problem of legal access on County Road 5 could have been solved by the U.S. Forest Service long ago!
In most of the second half of my career in the U.S. Forest Service I was stationed on the Jefferson National Forest in Virginia. Along with acquiring private property through purchase and exchange, I acquired over 200 rights of way that accessed federal land across private landowners. All but three of these right-of-way easements were acquired from willing sellers. Those th...
Dear Editor:
The ongoing problem of legal access on County Road 5 could have been solved by the U.S. Forest Service long ago!
In most of the second half of my career in the U.S. Forest Service I was stationed on the Jefferson National Forest in Virginia. Along with acquiring private property through purchase and exchange, I acquired over 200 rights of way that accessed federal land across private landowners. All but three of these right-of-way easements were acquired from willing sellers. Those three required us to condemn the easement but none even had to go to U.S. District Court because, in all cases, the judge ordered the assistant district attorney and the landowner’s attorney to reach a settlement on compensation out of court. Compensation was the only issue because the right of condemnation by the federal government in unequivocal.
Toward the end of my career I was transferred to the Black Hills which, like Colorado, is in Region 2 and I found this region to not be proactive in purchasing right-of-way easements. I understand that is still a problem today and it should not be! The public has a right to access their national forest lands and it is a real disservice when the Forest Service does not put a high priority on this. The “before and after” approach is used to appraise these rights of way and that often means there in no compensation because of improved road access. There should, therefore, be a willingness to consider negotiating compensation. Region 2 has not been very amenable to that either, and it is one of several reasons they are not successful in acquiring rights of way!
Once the Forest Service has obtained a right-of-way it has it forever and it should be worth paying any reasonable price to afford the public access to their federal lands! The longer the Forest Service delays acquiring rights of way the more complicated it gets! I acquired rights of way on existing roads that had 25 or 30 separate landowners.
When the public does not have access to the federal lands it is almost like the private landowners along a road have their own private “public” land, and as Joe Ryan inferred in his letter of March 3-9 that is not right!
Tom Heffernan
Ridgway
