227 



SNEP was to be presented to Congress as a draft report in 1994, 

 and in 1995, a full year later, they were to have the final report 

 done. I think that window would have provided an opportunity for 

 public and political comment with respect to the contents. 



It is somewhat distressing to me at this point in time that we 

 are finding that we are going to have the final report delivered to 

 you in June without having an opportunity to review a draft docu- 

 ment and give you the opportunity to indicate whether or not it 

 met what you needed in terms of policy support. 



We had a similar situation develop with the CASPO guidelines 

 in our State, in that the scientific team developed one alternative 

 for management of California's spotted owl habitat. When you are 

 faced with only one alternative, it doesn't give you very many 

 choices to select from and we have suffered from that for the last 

 3 or 4 years, and it sounds like we could suffer a little longer. 



So it is frustrating to me; being a member of the public and an 

 informed member of the public, I think we have valuable inputs 

 based on both study and experience that we could contribute to the 

 process, but we haven't been able to do that. 



Mrs. Chenoweth. Mr. Chairman, Mr. Snyder, I think we were 

 all shocked by the Supreme Court's decision on Sweethome and yet 

 the Supreme Court probably had a point when Congress was not 

 very, very specific as to how critical habitat would be handled on 

 private lands, but yet we can carry that same reasoning forward 

 here. 



Congress has not only not been specific, but in its lack of specific- 

 ity it ends December 31, 1996, and yet we are building a whole pro- 

 gram on this. At least SNEP existed for the Columbia River Basin 

 Project. 



There isn't even a SNEP in the record. If it wasn't for the tenac- 

 ity of people like you who have operated in spite of a law that is 

 unclear and confusing, and continues to be moving its goalposts, 

 where we can't rely on dates, we can't rely on laws that the Con- 

 gress has passed, like the National Forest Management Practices 

 Act, and the President signed into law, and all the acts that have 

 gone before that, but we are in a day and age now where every- 

 thing is moving, it is a moving target. 



I cannot understand how you can, even a company like Georgia- 

 Pacific can manage in this day and age, and certainly the smaller 

 companies we have seen what has happened to them. I usually like 

 to take the benefit of your being here and ask cogent questions, but 

 I am so unbelievably frustrated with the way this is operating, Mr. 

 Chairman, I would like to yield the balance of my time to Mr. Sny- 

 der to respond. 



Mr. Snyder. I share that. 



I basically worked for a medium-sized company in California that 

 couldn't operate in that climate. The uncertainty was such that ba- 

 sically our corporate owners and stockholders decided that it was 

 best to sell the timberlands to a larger corporation. So I fell victim 

 to that. I felt it personally, from the 200 people who by virtue of 

 that consolidation also lost their jobs. It is a frustrating process 

 and the victims are real people. 



The frustrating thing about it is that there is a significant re- 

 source to be managed on these National Forests. I don't think any- 



