How to Make Your Comments Count

For Letters to Newspapers

• Take the high ground and avoid inflammatory statements or angry comments.  Express your point firmly but positively.

• Point out what you think is wrong with the current expansion proposals or the idea of expanding in general.  Destruction of wildlands, rare plant habitat, possible effects to water quality, increased traffic and congestion on the access road, clear-cutting old growth forests, effects to wetlands, possible ski area financial instability as a result of expansion are just some of the issues at hand.

• If you use the ski area, be sure to acknowledge that you do so--it is important to let others know that plenty of people who ski & snowboard don't support expansion or want to limit the extent of expansion.

• Write about any alternatives to expansion that you may have.

• Mount Ashland is community-owned.  Whether or not to expand should be a community decision, not a decision made entirely by the Mount Ashland Association.

• Point out that substantial flaws, errors, and oversights still exit in the Forest Service's analysis of the expansion proposal.

• Remember that once any expansion takes place, there is no undoing the damage of road-building, clear-cutting, and altering the landscape for hundred of years.

• Write persuasively about why this place is so special to you and others.

For the Forest Service Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS)

Until October 23, 2003 the Forest Service had been accepting public comment on the DEIS.  It is too late to formally comment on the DEIS but it is never the wrong time to express your thoughts about the proposed expansion.

Although any comment expressing your opinion--and especially your personal values related to this issue--is worthwhile, the comments that the Forest Service can really use are substantive comments.  These are comments that:

• Provide new information pertaining to any alternative

• Identify a relevant issue or expand upon an existing issue

• Identify a different way (alternative) and/or modify existing alternatives considered

• Develop and evaluate alternatives not previously considered to meet the underlying need

• Identify a specific flaw in the analysis to assist the USFS in making factual corrections, and/or supplement, improve, or modify the analysis

• Ask a specific relevant question that can be meaningfully answered or referenced

• Identify an additional source of credible research, which if utilized, could result in different effect

Some issues that are not adequately addressed in the DEIS that you can include in your comments include the lack of analysis of visual impacts from additional night lighting, lack of analysis of wildlife harassment from additional night ski activities, unreliable estimation of erosion and sedimentation due to extrapolating erosion rates from research in Idaho without on-site data for verification.  The DEIS is also flawed because it ties restoration work needed on the current ski area to expansion projects; no option provides restoration of existing problems without developing additional ski runs.  Read the DEIS carefully and critically and you will find much more to offer substantive comments on.  Because the comment deadline has passed, you will not have standing to appeal any future Record of Decision on this issue.

Get the addresses and phone numbers you'll need for commenting or see some sample letters.