Flooded With Comments, Officials Plug Their Ears

By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE

ASHINGTON

OVER the last several years, the Interior Department has proposed a number of controversial ideas, like reintroducing wolves in Yellowstone, that have generated lots of mail during a public comment period. But few proposals have flooded the department with more mail — paper and electronic — than the one by the Bush administration to keep snowmobiles in Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks.

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Last week, Interior Department officials said they had received 360,000 comments on the matter, the most ever on any question related to the national parks. The verdict? Ban the machines. Fully 80 percent of the writers wanted snowmobiles barred from the parks, just as the Clinton administration had proposed.

Yet even as officials of the National Park Service acknowledged the results of the comment period, they proposed to do just the opposite. They not only would allow the use of snowmobiles to continue in Yellowstone and Grand Teton and on a part of the John D. Rockefeller Jr. Memorial Parkway that connects them, but they would also allow for a 35 percent increase in the numbers, up to 1,100 a day from an average of 840 a day.

How did such overwhelming opposition to snowmobiles result in such a snowmobile-friendly decision? Officials said that there would be more snowmobiles, but that they would be newer, cleaner and quieter and that therefore any environmental damage would be reduced.

Beyond that, officials say the sheer volume of public comment is not a determining factor. "It was not a vote," said Steve Iobst, assistant superintendent of Grand Teton. The point of the comment period, he said, is to yield substantive, informed letters that alert park officials to something they might have missed in reaching their conclusion.

In fact, the public comment period has become a widely discredited measure of public sentiment because it has been susceptible to what critics call AstroTurf campaigns, the opposite of real grass-roots efforts, in which advocacy groups encourage their members to sign their names on form letters.

This is especially true since the emergence of e-mail. Mr. Iobst said that over the three-day Memorial Day weekend alone, the Park Service received 45,000 e-mail messages on snowmobiles. He said the agency considered those comments in its decision, "but not at face value."

A court decision in 1987 gave officials clearance to ignore mass mailings. The United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, in a ruling written by then Judge Kenneth W. Starr, said that a determination of a clean-water issue should not be based on the number of comments, most urging the Environmental Protection Agency to allow them to discharge pollutants into the water.

"The substantial-evidence standard has never been taken to mean that an agency rule-making is a democratic process by which the majority of commenters prevail by sheer weight of numbers," Judge Starr wrote.

Has a comment period ever truly influenced a decision? Chris Wood, a senior adviser to the Forest Service chief in the Clinton administration, said that typical agency behavior is to "develop the plan you want, announce a public comment period and then do what you want to do."

But, he said, the Forest Service actually relied on public comment when it developed its "roadless rule," intended to protect 58 million acres of undeveloped national forest from most commercial logging and road building. It drew 1.6 million comments, the most ever in the history of federal rule-making. Almost all the comments — 95 percent — supported the protections but wanted the plan to go even further, which it eventually did.

But the Bush administration delayed putting the rule into effect and sought more comments, receiving 726,000. Of those, it said that only 52,000, or 7 percent, were "original," meaning that the administration discounted 93 percent of the comments. The rule is now being challenged in court.

Bush administration officials still say they value public opinion. In a speech in July, John Graham, head of the office of regulatory affairs in the Office of Management and Budget, said he was actively seeking public comment on various regulations and making an electronic comment form available.

Although the snowmobilers won their battle, the groups representing them say that the public comment period should be abolished. "What this outcome shows is that these huge hate-mail campaigns are not effective now and won't be in the future," said Clark Collins, executive director of the Blue Ribbon Coalition, an industry-backed lobbying group based in Idaho.

If the public comment periods ceased, he said, both sides could save a lot of time.