Mr. Hansen. Thanks for your excellent testimony. 



Mr. Herger. Thank you. 



Mr. Hansen. Mr. David Unger, Associate Chief of the Forest 

 Service, who is so accustomed to coming in here, we ought to 

 charge you office space or vice versa. 



Mr. Unger. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I am accompanied today, 

 with your permission, by Susan Yont-Shepherd, our Appeals Coor- 

 dinator in the Washington Office, and Steve Sagovia from our land 

 management planning staff so that they might help answer your 

 questions. 



Mr. Hansen. We seriously appreciate you being here. And I 

 talked to Jim Lyons yesterday, and he said you would be here and 

 be the man that we would turn to for all of these difficult ques- 

 tions. How much time do you need? 



Mr. Unger. Pardon? 



Mr. Hansen. How much time do you need? 10 minutes? 



Mr. Unger. That would be fine. 



Mr. Hansen. OK. We will give you 10. We will turn it to you. 



STATEMENT OF DAVID G. UNGER, ASSOCIATE CHIEF OF THE 

 FOREST SERVICE, U.S. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE 



Mr. Unger. Let me summarize the main features of our state- 

 ment, if the complete statement could be included in the record. I 

 might just mention that our administrative appeal process dates 

 back to the year 1907, before all of the present-day structures of 

 public participation and ability of citizens to enter into litigation 

 with the government, which did not exist at that time, were put 

 in place. So it was the only way that our citizens affected by our 

 actions would have an opportunity to challenge decisions at that 

 time. 



But this has grown over the years, and today the appeal process, 

 I think, serves three basic purposes: one, to continue an oppor- 

 tunity for public involvement in our decisions and to challenge 

 those where there is disagreement; secondly, to help resolve some 

 of those disagreements and hopefully to avoid some of the litigation 

 which is very difficult and costly, as Mr. Herger has just men- 

 tioned; and, thirdly, to provide a system for some quality control 

 for our agency to look at our own decisions and make sure that we 

 are doing a good job in following law and policy. 



I would like to focus most of my remarks today on the project ap- 

 peal process that is found in the regulations in Section 215, but 

 spend also some time, as you indicated, on our process on forest 

 plan appeals and also for permit appeals. Those are found at Sec- 

 tion 217 and Section 215 and at 251 in the regulations. 



We will be using '95 data — fiscal year 1995 data. Although we 

 have the figures for fiscal year '96, they are somewhat skewed by 

 the fact that the Recision Act eliminated administrative appeals for 

 salvage projects, and so they are not directly comparable and would 

 have to be adjusted. So we will concentrate on the '95 figures. 



Just a couple of basic ones. About 20 percent of our decisions 

 were appealed in 1995. We had about 1,000 actual appeals, and of 

 that 1,000, 70 percent were project appeals; not the forest plan ap- 

 peals, not the permits, but projects. And so the large share is 



