Tester, Baucus, promote forest bills in Senate

Montana Sens. Max Baucus and Jon Tester were busy stumping for two big land bills last week.

Baucus pitched his Rocky Mountain Front Heritage Act to the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee.

The act would add about 67,000 acres to the Bob Marshall Wilderness Complex along the Front and would create a 208,000-acre Conservation Management Area, which would limit road building but protect current motorized recreation and public access for hunting, biking, forest thinning and grazing.

“People live here. They grow crops and livestock. They raise haystacks. They raise families,” Baucus testified. ”And they share the simple reason I am here this morning. Montanans want to keep the Front the way it is. It is our heritage.”

But Montana Republican Congressman Steve Daines, whose vote will likely be necessary to pass the bill, hasn’t endorsed the measure. Daines held public meetings on the Heritage Act earlier this year. His spokeswoman, Alee Lockman, said Daines is noncommittal.

“He doesn’t feel like there’s strong consensus either way,” she said.

Meanwhile, Tester was stumping for his Forest Jobs and Recreation Act at a hearing in front of the same Senate committee. Tester’s bill also creates new wilderness in Montana but also mandates logging on about 100,000 acres of timberland.

The Tester bill would create about 564,000 acres of wilderness in the Beaverhead-Deer Lodge National Forest and adjacent Bureau of Land Management lands and an additional 30,000 acres of wilderness at Roderick Mountain on the Kootenai National Forest. It also would add 83,000 acres of wilderness to the Bob Marshall and Mission Mountain wilderness areas.

Tester dropped about 10,000 acres of wilderness from the bill that would have been located in the Pioneer Mountains.