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To: Senators

From: Jeff Brown, Executive Director, Minnesotans for Responsible Recreation and MRR’s 800 Members

Re: 5 Reasons Environmental and Public Review is Required for a Sustainable ATV Trail System

Date: May 13, 2003

Minnesotans for Responsible Recreation, MRR, urges you to pass comprehensive ATV legislation this session that contains each of four basic elements of an effective ATV management system. We are deeply concerned that SF 850, which is up for your consideration, lacks the very foundation of an effective ATV management system and will not provide for environmentally sustainable and publicly approved use of these machines in Minnesota. Missing in each of the current proposals is environmental and public review as provided under the Minnesota Protection Act.

Since release of our documentary report, Off-Highway Vehicles in Minnesota in 1999, MRR has advocated for four basic elements to adequately manage ATVs, dirt-bike motorcycles, and four-wheel drive trucks. It is our belief that a comprehensive management system including each of these elements is required for any individual element to be effective. These four elements are:

• Environmental and Public Review to select where ATVs, dirt-bike motorcycles, and four wheel drive trucks may travel
• A "designated routes only" policy requiring machines to stay on these selected routes
• Adequate enforcement to keep riders on these routes
• Repair & restoration of public & private land damaged by publicly sanctioned use in the past

MRR’s findings were corroborated January, 2003, with release, by the Minnesota Office of the Legislative Auditor (OLA), of its Program Evaluation Report: State-Funded Trails for Motorized Recreation. Primary, in the OLA’s "major findings" and "key recommendations" is that:

• "efforts by the Department of Natural Resources (DNR) to plan and off-highway vehicle (OHV) trail system have been inadequate. DNR was slow to initiate a planning process, and once started , the process lacked key elements (p. 19 of the full report)" and that

• "the legislature should require that Environmental Assessment Worksheets be prepared for many types of OHV projects (p. 30)".

1. Environmental and public review is essential because our DNR has a poor track record in siting trails away from sensitive and residential areas, parks and quiet trails. The number one major finding of the OLA audit is that the DNR puts trail development ahead of environmental protection and public concern. DNR proposals require environmental and public review to protect our state from the unwanted impacts of these machines.

Current proposals in DNR "Off-highway Vehicle System Plans" for DNR Regions 1, 2, and 3 (NW, NE, and Central Minnesota) route off-highway vehicles through wetlands and adjacent to residential areas, and quiet hiking trails. Many of the worst examples are currently being implemented and include:

• "White Earth Off-Highway Motorcycle Trail around Long Lost Lake in Clearwater County
• Taft ATV Trail through wetlands in the Cloquet Valley State Forest, South St. Louis County
• Matttilla Shelter ATV trail and Picket Lake Four-wheel Drive Truck challenge area adjacent to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area, North St. Louis County
• ATV trails on the banks of the Snake River, Kannebec County.
• "Conversion" of the Munger, North Shore, Taconite, Arrowhead, and other state hiking trails to ATV use
• Even development of the DNR’s "prototype ATV trail", the Moosewalk/Mooserun ATV trail, which connects trails in the Findland State Forest to Tettegouche State Park, has already resulted in major damage to wetlands at 30 unauthorized locations.

1. Environmental and public review is essential because the DNR does not use existing legally required criteria in proposing of OHV trails. Some say the DNR will "use mandated criteria" in the "fast track" designation of ATV trails. While MRR went before Administrative Judge Klein in 1998 to actively support criteria now identified in "Rules Relating to Public Use of Recreational Areas, Part 6100.1950, Subpart 2, in our five years of monitoring DNR trail planning and policy making MRR has not encountered a single trail proposal where mandated criteria have been used. Nor have we encountered a single DNR field employee who had been directed by the DNR headquarters to implement these criteria.
2. Environmental and public review is essential because it is citizens’ one and only mandated right to challenge DNR proposed ATV trails sited in their back yards or special places.

• Over the past three years citizens have petitioned for environmental review and challenged DNR projects in court because the poor quality of the projects described above and based on substantial evidence that these projects have the "potential for significant environmental effect" (Minnesota Environmental Protection Act).

• Current proposals attempt to silence public opposition to below standard proposals by taking away this right
• Current proposals only reinforce the DNR’s "big brother/off-highway vehicle attitude" that the errant agency can site OHV routes when, where, and how it wants regardless of public opposition

1. Suspending or exempting environmental and public review in the siting of off-highway vehicle routes on public land is taxation without representation.

• All Minnesotans own our state forests and parks, our roadways, and other public lands in common. Many generations of Minnesotans have paid for these lands for the future enjoyment of generations to follow.
• All Minnesotans pay into accounts for motorized recreation via taxes paid on every gallon of gas we purchase under Minnesota Statute 29a.18.

1. Environmental and public review is essential to hold the DNR accountable to a higher standard, go beyond current "business as usual", and implement audit reforms.

• The Office of the Legislative Auditor finds that the DNR puts OHV trail development ahead of environmental and public concerns. While the DNR has a promising new commissioner, staff who plan, fund, and implement motorized recreation programs remain largely unchanged.
• The DNR and other proposers of legislation want to exempt the agency from environmental and public review because of lack of confidence that the agency can develop ATV, dirt-bike motorcycle, and four-wheel drive truck trails that meet environmental standards. In the Dorer State Forest in Southeast Minnesota, where the state’s first "experimental" ATV trails where mandated over ten years ago, monitoring was promised in the legislation that created these first trails. When after ten years, local MRR members requested an interdisciplinary inspection of extensive erosion in the area, it was discovered that no one on the DNR team knew how to monitor soil loss. It was a MRR member who instructed the staff about use of a "trail transect" to monitor such soil loss. Current proposal would eliminate the input of such citizens and allow the DNR to move blindly ahead in siting new OHV routes
• MRR believes that the richly funded gas-tax subsidization of off-highway vehicles has created a "culture of obligation" within the DNR’s Trails and Waterways Division and a "culture of entitlement" among the motorized advocacy groups and industry lobby who view these public funds as their own private accounts. The current funding mechanism of the "more gas you burn, the more trail you earn" which pays the salaries of DNR staff has created an obligation within this division to provide access to the motorized lobby in return.

By exempting or suspending environmental and public review, current legislative proposals fail to provide the most essential first step in creating a sustainable OHV system. In doing so these proposals also fail to address the most difficult question of where these machines will and will not go. In doing so these proposals require us to continue to live in a state of denial that ATVs, dirt-bike motorcycles, and four-wheel drive trucks have inherent unwanted environmental and social impacts. That we must suspend the very laws and standards we have chosen to protect our environment and quality of life from these impacts should sound an alarm that we have yet to address this most important fact.

Minnesotans for Responsible Recreation urges you to delete any provision in legislation before you that would restrict, suspend, or exempt ATV, dirt-bike motorcycle, and four-wheel drive truck trails from environmental and public review. Only through environmental and public review can we create a sustainable off-highway vehicle system.