project appeals, and that is what I would like to spend most of our 

 time presenting. 



Just about a year ago, I testified before the Senate Subcommittee 

 on Forests and Public Land Management on our experience after 

 one year of the new process that had been established by the Con- 

 gress for project appeals in Public Law 102-381. 



Our final regulations had become effective a year before that in 

 January of '94, and so we had a little more than a year's experi- 

 ence. And I reported to the Senate at that time that we felt that 

 the process was working smoothly and with generally good results. 

 And today I would say that after another year and a half of experi- 

 ence that we would say, in general, the revised appeals process es- 

 tablished by the Congress for project appeals is working well. 



The Congress had established several objectives to be met with 

 this new process: one, to get more public involvement upfront in 

 our decisionmaking process; secondly, to streamline the process to 

 make it work more rapidly and more smoothly once a decision was 

 made; to establish shorter timeframes to assure timely decisions; 

 and to encourage informal resolution of issues through face-to-face 

 meetings during the appeals process. 



We think that it has been largely successful in meeting those ob- 

 jectives. Last year, we had 700 appeals, about 2,350 projects that 

 were subject to appeal, and all but 30 of them were disposed of 

 during the 45 day time limit. Informal resolution was attempted in 

 a number of them and succeeded in 60 cases, about nine percent 

 of the total, and then another 62 appeals were withdrawn by the 

 appellants. 



Of the remaining appeals for which we issued final decisions, 25 

 projects were withdrawn. So we feel that this indicates that there 

 was a good deal of disposition before some of these appeals had to 

 be decided. 



The public is participating in predecisional deliberations to a 

 greater degree, and I think the fact that we disposed of about 95 

 percent of the appeals in the statutory period shows the timeliness 

 improved markedly. 



I might mention a few facts about timber sales. There were 381 

 appeals filed on about 1,900 sales, about 20 percent — the same rate 

 as being challenged in other arenas such as recreation and other 

 projects. And questions had been asked about litigation. Lawsuits 

 have been filed at a rate of about one lawsuit for every 50 appeals 

 so we do feel that we are successful in avoiding litigation for the 

 large majority of contested project decisions. 



Now, for possible changes to the project level appeals process, 

 there has been one rather general criticism and that is that the cri- 

 terion for establishing the right to appeal is overly broad because 

 people aren't required to express any specific concerns during the 

 predecisional project development. 



Some people had recommended that we insist on written com- 

 ments to establish standing, but we found that in actuality only 

 two percent of the appellants do not provide written comment so 

 that particular approach would probably not improve the process 

 significantly. But there are questions that remain about standing. 

 We have not proposed at this time to set forth any changes in this 

 project appeals process. 



