Industry News
*This article is the third article in Civics for Skiers, a series which examines how the ski industry interacts with various parts of our government and how skiers may make their voices heard.
- Civics For Skiers: How Local Governments Help Skiers Talk To Developers
- Civics For Skiers: State Laws Establish Responsibility For Skiers and Ski Areas
A lot of the greatest ski turns anywhere in the world can be found on public land managed by the United States Federal Government. From some of the most iconic ski areas in the country and world-renowned heliski operations to secluded backcountry adventures in breathtaking mountains, the Federal Government, primarily through the U.S. Forest Service, aims to strike a balance between recreation opportunities and timber production in its “working forests.” The National Environmental Protection Act established processes to ensure the Executive Branch considers this balance along with providing direct avenues for public input on land management decisions, but, a lack of direct public accountability for decision makers often leads to unpopular decisions. These decisions occasionally can have ramifications for the ski industry, though the connection between being able to execute the perfect backcountry backie in your local pow stash and the Executive Branch of the Federal Government can be quite opaque.
The primary way ski areas interact with the Executive Branch of the Federal Government is through the Forest Service, and the primary reason ski areas have to interact with the Forest Service is Special Use Permits. All of the ski areas that contain even a small amount of Forest Service land have to obtain a permit allowing operations. These permits will lay out the rules under which the ski area can operate. For example, a permit could specify the season that the ski area is allowed to be open, or specify that certain safety conditions be met, like having lift mechanics that can repair the chairlifts during operating hours. The ski area also pays a permit fee, essentially a rent, for the permission to use the public land. That fee is calculated based on the amount of public land the ski area is using and the amount of revenue the ski area generates from skiing operations. Whereas a business tax would take a cut of food, hotels, rentals, and other ways to spend money at a ski area, permit fees only take into account the revenue that is directly generated from the use of the public land, the skiing.
Those permit fees can actually be a bit of a touchy subject. In 2019, Vail Resorts asked the Forest Service to stop releasing fee amounts for individual ski areas in the White River National Forest. The claim was that since the fees were based on total lift revenue at that ski area, the fee amounts essentially had been giving away skier visit numbers to competitors. The Aspen Times reported that a couple of months later, the White River National Forest decided to release only aggregate fee numbers for how much money from permits the Forest received from all of its ski areas. Shortly after that, the National Ski Area Association put a similar request in to the Forest Service that all National Forests aggregate their fee numbers, not just White River National Forest.
Any time the Executive Branch makes a decision about something, the National Environmental Policy Acts says that the government has to consider the impact on the environment. For decisions on most development projects, like ski area expansions, that consideration takes the form of an environmental review. The part of the government with the decision making authority, usually the Forest Service for the ski industry, prepares an Environmental Impact Statement that provides analysis of all of the potential environmental impacts that either doing a project or not doing a project may have. This technical report considers everything from the available habitat for wildlife or the presence of any endangered species to expected impacts on water quality and even how project might affect the view of a landscape. Environmental review also gives the public a chance to express their opinion of a project or highlight a specific concern they have during a required Public Comment Period that lasts at least 45 days.
With detailed information about a wide range of potential environmental effects a project could have, along with input from the public, who then makes the decision whether or not to approve a project or which version of a project should be approved? That decision usually falls to the District Ranger or the Forest Supervisor, who is an example of a professional bureaucrat. Our professional bureaucracy has its roots in the Pendleton Act of 1883, but the modern system in place today was created by the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978. The core idea of the professional bureaucracy is that bureaucrats should be hired based on merit, and be insulated from political change, so that they can work entire careers in government. Thinking about the Forest Service, the idea behind this structure is that a Forestry Technician or other position could eventually become a District Ranger, and as that ranger or other employee builds experience they may eventually become a Forest Supervisor. When consequential decisions come across the desk of the Forest Supervisor, they very likely have several decades of experience either in that same National Forest or a similar forest, and likely have deep understanding of the evaluations that go into an environmental impact statement.
By design, this type of decision maker stands in stark contrast to an elected official, who carries with them a mandate from the voters who elected them and the interests of the constituency they serve. If an elected official makes a decision contrary to the will of the people, they face losing reelection during the next election cycle. However, a bureaucrat does not face this kind of direct accountability. Both elected officials and civil servants are entrusted to serve the public faithfully, but our system places more trust in the bureaucracy.
One of the biggest benefits of the professional bureaucracy is in prudent implementation of new policies. If all of our Forest Supervisors were elected positions, or could be reappointed every time a new administration comes in, then policies for things like logging and other resource extraction would see huge, destabilizing swings. A pro-logging administration would likely support logging operations in more heavily used recreational areas, destroying many of the aspects of the National Forest System that the public enjoys. In a few years, a new administration completely opposed to logging could cease all tree cutting in the country, leading to a collapse in the domestic logging industry. Instead, in our current system, Forest Supervisors take directives like more or less logging and weigh them against the current inventory of proposed projects in their jurisdictions. Public comment on logging in a new part of the forest might draw support from sawmill operators describing the need for more input timber products to stay open and keep jobs in the region, and the same project might also draw criticism from environmental groups or recreational groups upset about the proximity or size of a logging project in relation to conservation or recreation areas.
While both logging and environmental groups make simple cases about the benefits of their position, either cut down more trees or don’t, the economics of the timber industry are far more complicated. First, the price of building new housing is strongly linked to the price of timber. Increases in the price of timber from severely restricting the domestic supply of timber could lead to a huge slowdown in new housing construction, further exacerbating the housing affordability crisis, keenly felt in ski towns across the country. However, around 30% of the softwood lumber used to build houses in the U.S. is imported, mostly from Canada. The construction industry imports most of this wood because Canada keeps their exported timber prices low, undercutting U.S. suppliers. To make matters even more complicated, the U.S. exports about half of the amount of timber that it imports every year, mainly to Canada, China, and Mexico. The last piece to the economic puzzle is that more than 90% of the timber the U.S. produces each year comes from private land. This delicate, globalized timber economy means it is not straightforward to make any prediction about what producing more or less timber will mean for the U.S. economy.
Under the guise of spurring domestic timber production, the Trump Administration announced in in June 2025 that it was rescinding the Roadless Rule, which has protected nearly 30% of the National Forest System from the creation of new roads. First proposed in 2001 in the last weeks of the Clinton Administration, the Roadless Rule sought to expand protections for public lands by preventing critical access to resource extraction projects. No need to consider if a mining or timber harvesting project might be a good idea if it is illegal to build the road needed to get to the site. Prior to the Roadless Rule, sweeping protections for public lands were typically only obtained through an act of Congress, establishing a new wilderness area, national park, wildlife refuge, or conservation area. The Roadless Rule was initially seen by pro-timber groups as a sidestepping of Congress, and took more than ten years to litigate.
Parts of the Roadless Rule change have never fully been resolved, including the Tongass National Forest in Alaska, which is the largest National Forest in the country. In the waning days of the first Trump Administration, the Roadless Rule was cancelled for Tongass National Forest, but was reinstated on the first day of the Biden Administration, and then repealed again on the first day of the second Trump Administration. Then, in June, the Trump Administration followed up with the proposed rule change for the rest of the National Forest System.
Federal Rule changes, like the proposed change to the Roadless Rule, have to go through environmental review just like a decision on a development project. That process began when the Federal Register published the proposed rule change in late August 2025 and took public comment until mid September 2025. The Guardian reported that 99% of the public comments were against the rule change. The Forest Service will now prepare a Draft Environmental Impact Statement, expected in March 2026, exploring the potential impacts either adopting or not adopting the rule change would have. The public will have a chance to comment on that draft and then the Forest Service will prepare a Final Environmental Impact Statement and issue an official decision, expected by the end of 2026.
The proposed rule change published in the Federal Register very specifically mentions that there is no required roads to be built, or required logging projects associated with any potential road. This obfuscation is designed very intentionally to make the environmental review process easier. The question at hand is whether lands are better managed by local foresters or by a sweeping national rule. This allows the project proponents to make arguments about local management and local understanding of forest health and not have to explain the potential impacts of building new roads or selling new timber permits. This strategy was on full display during the recent U.S. Supreme Court Case, Seven County County Infrastructure Coalition vs. Eagle County, where the majority opinion held that the environmental review of a new railroad to be used solely for transporting crude oil from the Uinta Basin in Utah to ports and refineries did not have to consider the impacts that could come from extracting the oil or burning it later on, just the impacts that come from the railway itself. This significant narrowing of environmental protections means that there are less legal avenues to challenge the change to the Roadless Rule this time around.
More than 600,000 people commented in opposition of the Roadless Rule change, along with former Forest Service Chiefs, Attorneys General, scientists, tribal elders, almost 400 different advocacy groups, and 55 members of Congress. Yet, with all that opposition, the rule change is likely to go into effect. Why? Because there is almost zero public accountability for the Chief of the Forest Service, the Secretary of Agriculture, or any of the other decision makers. The ultimate accountability for the President and the Executive Branch, under which the Department of Agriculture falls, is reelection, but decisions related to public land never come to the forefront in a general election. Whatever happens with the Roadless Rule change, voters will be thinking about a host of other issues the next time they go to vote for President.
Public land issues are more likely to become important in elections for the Senate or House of Representatives, but these bodies are restricted in their influence over the Forest Service and Federal Rule changes. In theory, an Act of Congress banning new roads in parts of the National Forest System or establishing new Wilderness Areas or other protections are both more democratic and more effective than Federal Rule changes. Lawmakers voting on these issues are far more likely to be swayed on issues by their constituencies, especially on issues that do not make as much of a splash in general elections. Acts of Congress also must be repealed by another Act of Congress, a much heavier lift than a new administration deciding to pursue another rule change. Looking at the Roadless Rule history, pretty much every Presidential Administration has either unwound or rewound some aspect of the Roadless Rule, and been met with subsequent litigation.
Whatever the theoretical benefits of congressional action over executive action, the fact is that Congress passes a small fraction of the number of laws it used to. Increasing political polarization and a reluctance for bipartisan collaboration on anything has led to a precipitous drop in the amount of legislating Congress does, culminating in Congress passing just 27 bills last year. The average number of bills per year between 1975 and 1995 is almost 600, and even during the early aughts the average was at least 400 bills per year. As Congress has become less and less effective, the Executive Branch has steadily grown in power, and the amount that can be accomplished through executive order or Federal Rule change both has risen substantially. Legislative paralysis is on full display right now as the government shutdown nears one month.
With 12,744 workers out of the 32,390 current employees of the Forest Service furloughed, many of the Forest Service’s normal operations are either nonexistent or severely hampered. These operations include things like working on environmental reviews, and issuing special use permits for the ski industry. Proper management of public lands allows for skiing and other recreation alongside sustainable timber production, but political polarization and a concentration of power in the Executive Branch has allowed the Trump Administration to take extreme steps to roll back environmental regulation and open huge swaths of public land up to unrestrained resource extraction. But, public backlash over the sale of millions of acres of public land in the Big Beautiful Bill causing its withdrawal is an important reminder that advocacy for the preservation of public lands can be an effective check on a Federal Government intent on maximizing profits from our public lands.
More from Zach Armstrong:
- Sierra Nevada Resiliency Team Enters Second Season Supporting Ski Patroller Mental Health Across California and Nevada
- History with SnowBrains: The Incredible Notes from a Swiss Avalanche Researcher’s Travels to Western USA in 1949
- Why Ski Patrollers at Park City Initiated The Biggest Ski Patrol Strike In History
- The Battle Over The Future Of Palisades Tahoe
- How Eldora, CO, Ski Patrollers Finally Got Their Union
