Silver City West Hazardous Fuels Reduction Project to reduce fuels in wildland urban interface
SILVER CITY, NM, July 20, 2023 – The Gila National Forest is seeking public comment on a proposal to conduct vegetation treatments on 31,850 acres of national forest system lands within the Silver City Ranger District. The proposal includes mechanical thinning, hand thinning, herbicide application, and prescribed fire in order to reduce fuels adjacent to the Wildland Urban Interface and reduce catastrophic wildfire risk to communities. A 30-day comment period begins Friday, July 21.
"These treatments would break up the horizontal and vertical continuity of fuels, giving firefighters time and space to take fire suppression actions when wildfires occur," said Silver City District Ranger Elizabeth Toney. "The treatments would also reduce fuel loadings along major ingress and egress corridors and increase resilience to wildfire across portions of the Southern Gila priority landscape."
The Southern Gila priority landscape includes Gila National Forest lands north of Silver City, and the Mimbres valley to Emory Pass, including portions of the southern Gila Wilderness and Aldo Leopold Wilderness. It is one of two priority landscapes where the Gila National Forest is focusing its fuels reduction and forest restoration efforts in order to protect at-risk communities and infrastructure and restore watersheds.
An open house is scheduled for August 3, 2023, from 6:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. at the Grant County Business and Conference Center, located at 3031 US-180, Silver City, New Mexico. Project information and maps will be available for review and staff will be available to discuss the proposal and receive input. The public is encouraged to submit comments, issues, and concerns associated with the proposed action to help focus environmental analysis of effects and to develop the basis upon which an informed decision will be made. Comments will be most useful if received by August 21, 2023.
The proposed action and maps may be downloaded from the forest's website at: https://www.fs.usda.gov/project/gila/?project=64491 . Please note that this project is being proposed under the Healthy Forests Restoration Act (HFRA), for which the Gila National Forest is pursuing an Emergency Authority Determination (EAD) under the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. For the EAD process, this project would not be subject to the pre-decisional objection process. Under this authorization and HFRA, this is the only opportunity to comment and provide input.
Written comments may be mailed to: Gila National Forest; ATTN: Silver City West Project Proposal; 3005 E. Camino del Bosque, Silver City, NM 88061; faxed to 575-388-8222; or electronic comments to: comments-southwestern-gila@usda.gov . For emails, please specify in the subject line: Silver City West Project Proposal. Electronically filed comments may be submitted by email in word (.doc), rich text format (.rtf), portable document format (.pdf), text (.txt), and hypertext markup language (.html).
Comments received in response to this solicitation, including the name and addresses of those who comment, will be considered part of the public record on this proposed action and will be available for public inspection. Comments submitted anonymously will be accepted and considered; however, those who submit anonymous comments will not receive subsequent project information.
Additionally, pursuant to 7 CFR 1.27(d), any person may request the agency to withhold a submission from the public record by showing how the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) allows such confidentiality. Persons requesting such confidentiality should be aware that under the FOIA confidentiality may be granted in only very limited circumstances, such as to protect trade secrets. The Forest Service will inform the requester of the agency's decision regarding the request for confidentiality, and where the request is denied, the agency will return the submission and notify the requester that the comments may be resubmitted with or without name and address within 7 days.
For additional information on this project proposal, contact Elizabeth Toney, District Ranger, elizabeth.toney@usda.gov . If you have questions regarding the NEPA process, contact Lisa Mizuno, Environmental Coordinator, Elisabeth.Mizuno@usda.gov .