Guys this is very important. What you will find below is an excerpt from an email thread about this topic. Jody is one of the leading advocates for us in this fight. His commentary is well informed, insightful and an excellent overview of the process, where we are within it and what potential outcomes are on the horizon as a function of what is (or is not) done about this. I'll update this thread again after this weekend's extravaganza but in the mean time you won't find a more thorough explanation than what I have pasted below.
*Note* Feel free to disseminate this information at will via Facebook, Twitter, email or whatever.
Wow! Thanks guys, I can not thank you enough. The statistics below are very scary when you really think about it. Now that we have the web page up and running at least folks can go on line and get educated and hopefully involved.
Some of my own thoughts as I look at some of the comments and voting on the different proposals is there is a disproportionate amount of time being spent on mushrooms. I read the final FS report called the Record of Decision and one thing that really stood out is that forest production and mushroom production is secondary to recreation. They seemed to have forgotten that with this process. No matter what, the plantations will be closed due not to mushrooms but to noise buffers and sand control which I do understand but I want to push the issue that mushroom is secondary. With this much 10C closed I feel we must ask for areas that can be opened to compensate. The deflation lands are worthless for us and even animals because of so much standing water so for me that is not compensation unless you destroy the foredunes and that is probably too late even for that to make much of a difference unless there is true salt water let in and out.
Tomorrow and Saturday will be, what I feel, a turning point for us. We either get some traction with the vegetation or they have simply made their decision and we are just part of the process. I can tell you one thing; the Northern Dunes are in big trouble. If you look at the maps and even best case, about half are going to be closed if we do not come up with something. Mark Tilton has his teeth in them. Incinerator Road is on his radar for closure as well as all the plantations down there. It seems they are trying to minimize the area as small and inconsequential. I can tell you why most OHV feel the same is that all the camping is north. So the answer is to close any good camping south? Sounds to me like the easy thing to do right? I can tell you, if you do not want that area close we are going to have to fight. I have not voted on the Northern Dunes because there are too many proposals and the maps we can see are too small but Saturday we will get access to bigger maps. It is just too confusing to really draw any good conclusions.
See you tomorrow and again, thanks, it is your efforts with boots on the ground that will truly get the grass roots momentum going.
Jody
Jody Phillips
Senior Account Executive MBT04
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