>>829655(1/3)
>The problem I have is how the decisions are made sometimes there are public comment periods that no one seems to know about other times land is just closed in limbo due to threat of environmental law suit.The management process is a huge pain for everyone involved. I've worked on a few management plans and the documents can reach into the hundreds of pages, can require tons of references, and take months or years to craft just the initial document. You describe the problem, the goals, options to solve it (one is always "do nothing"), a rubric on how each option should be evaluated, thresholds for action, predict the outcomes of each option, predict any impacts from those actions, describe how you would mitigate those impacts, then you have to choose one and talk about why. This whole thing gets sent off and comes back with a bunch of notes. You send it off again with changes till it gets the OK. Then it goes to public comment and you have to sift through pages and pages of letters and emails, which, depending on the issue can get very contentious. Distill all that down, refine the plan further, and send it off again. Then you can actually get to work and implement it, if nobody complains loud enough.
You also hope and pray for no lawsuits to come up, because that's a whole other monster and requires finding pages of documentation and having everything you've ever done questioned.
To give you an idea of the work put into these things, I once added information on tularemia to a park's integrated pest management plan (we had a sudden outbreak in the park) and ended up making the entire document about 10 pages longer. In the meantime, we were trying to keep visitors safe (despite their best efforts to contract the disease), three staffers were exposed and got sick, and the CDC showed up and started testing everyone's blood.
