USFS Allows Employee Appeals

In response to a whistleblower lawsuit, the U.S. Forest Service plans to drop a regulation that forbids employees from challenging agency actions through the citizen appeal process.

USFS biologist Mary Dalton sued in April after she was suspended and then transferred when she filed an administrative appeal in 1996 challenging a timber sale on Alaska's Tongass National Forest. She claimed that the required environmental impact statement omitted most of her research about potential damages from logging to wildlife habitat.

U.S. District Judge James Robertson last week postponed any ruling in the case, giving the USFS 60 days "to make good on its pledge to formally rescind" the 1989 regulation that bars agency workers from using the appeals process.

But the agency is going ahead with plans to auction off the timber sale that Dalton found questionable, arguing that the period in which to have an administrative appeal heard ended in 1996.

Andy Stahl of the Association for Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics, which is representing Dalton: "It's really a remarkable sleight of hand. First they shot the messenger and now they are blaming her for their own refusal to revive her appeal."

Dalton has asked Phil Janik, the USFS regional boss, to postpone the sale so that her appeal can be considered. And she is fighting her transfer out of Alaska in a separate action through the federal employee system (AP/Ashland Daily Tidings, Nov. 28).