By Mike Yarbrough
Executive Vice-President, Keep Sedona Beautiful
(August 18, 2016)
In early 2015 the Forest Service prepared and presented to the public a draft plan for the operation of the Coconino National Forest. Keep Sedona Beautiful provided comprehensive and detailed comments and suggestions to this plan. These comments were developed after several meetings with the Forest Service Plan Team and after extensive review and analysis of the plan.
In May of this year the Forest Service notified key interested parties, including KSB, that a revised draft of the plan was available for review. As a part of that submission KSB was able to review the response of the Forest Service to the earlier comments provided by KSB. In conversations with the Forest Service Plan Team we were advised that the Forest Service would receive and consider additional comments from KSB. Therefore, in early August KSB presented to the Forest Service additional comments and suggestions to the plan.
We wanted to share with you the acknowledgment we received (below) from the Forest Service to these additional comments. The board of KSB believes that the efforts of those preparing and presenting comments to the Forest Service to this plan on behalf of KSB represents an exemplary model for vigorous advocacy for the environment presented in a collaborative and respectful manner. As you can see the Forest Service greatly appreciates the spirit of the KSB submissions and recognizes the substantial effort put into this process by KSB.
Acknowledgement from the Forest Service: “Thank you for the feedback on our draft response to comments that we shared back in May. We will review these suggestions over the next few weeks and see if we can make adjustments to better respond to Keep Sedona Beautiful’s concerns. We appreciate the spirit in which these suggestions have been made. We also appreciate the substantial effort KSB has put into our plan revision process and your ongoing interest.”