The Forest Service puts its own best case for scrapping the roadless rule at about $10m a year in timber revenue, and gives the public 30 days to answer

Fifty eight and a half million acres. That is what the 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Rule covers, and the Department of Agriculture has proposed to rescind it.

The proposed rule was filed on Wednesday morning for publication on Thursday. It would remove and reserve subpart B of 36 CFR part 294, which is the whole of the national prohibition on road construction, road reconstruction and timber harvesting inside inventoried roadless areas. The state-specific rules written for Idaho and Colorado are untouched and stay in force. Comments close 30 days after publication.

The Department's stated purpose is to return the decision to the land management planning process at the level of each individual national forest. On its own account, that changes who decides rather than what is decided: the governing forest plan may still restrict roads and harvesting, any project would still need site-specific environmental review, and the document states plainly that the rescission does not mandate timber cutting or road construction.

The agency's own arithmetic

The interesting part of the notice is the section where the Forest Service estimates what rescission would actually be worth.

Roads could be added in the near term on about 18.2 million acres, which is 45.5 percent of the potentially affected environment, being the land where current plans allow roads and only the 2001 rule prohibits them. Temporary roads are likelier within half a mile of existing ones, about 11.3 million acres, or 28.3 percent. On timber, the area where both operability and plan allowances are met comes to about 4.8 million acres, which the agency puts at 16 percent of the forested land inside the affected roadless areas.

Then comes the number. If annual harvest happened across all of that, which the document itself calls unlikely given budgets, operability and markets, it could raise total annual National Forest System sawtimber harvest by 5 to 10 percent, and generate $5.2m to $11.4m a year for the Treasury and the Forest Service, plus $4.6m to $10.6m a year for the timber industry.

That is the upper bound, and the agency reaches it only by assuming something it says will not happen.

The backlog in the same paragraph

Set against those figures, one sentence later, is the constraint the agency names on itself: a $6.9bn deferred maintenance backlog for roads and bridges. Any efficiency gain from better sale design is described as incremental and limited by road costs, maintenance funding gaps and that backlog.

A draft environmental impact statement and a cost benefit analysis are published alongside the proposal. The notice also keeps open the existing route by which a state, a tribe or anyone else may petition for tailored roadless provisions, under the Administrative Procedure Act and the Department's own rules, and it commits to subsistence hearings in Alaska.