‘You’ve just got to keep pushing’: Huffman reintroduces Northern California wilderness bill

After a promising start for passage of sprawling public lands legislation sputtered in 2022, U.S. Rep. Jared Huffman remains determined to find a way forward for his bill to protect some of Northern California’s wildest zones.

On Thursday, he announced he was reintroducing the Northwest California Wilderness, Recreation, and Working Forests Act, which would designate 257,797 acres of national forest land in Mendocino, Humboldt and Trinity counties as federal wilderness and place 480 miles of river in the region under the nation’s strictest environmental protections for waterways.

“We’re just gonna keep trying,” Huffman told The Press Democrat in an interview. “It is a very well developed bill, a good bill that has had past bipartisan support.”

His bill would designate an additional 49,692 acres as potential wilderness, pending further study. It also designates the Bigfoot Trail, today an unofficial route that winds 360 miles through the Klamath Mountains, as a national recreation trail — joining the ranks of such famed paths as the Pacific Crest Trail.

Huffman’s bill does not create any new federal land but gives vast swaths of several national forests a greater layer of protection under the 1964 Wilderness Act.

Areas designated as wilderness by Congress are off-limits to motorized vehicles and mechanized equipment to preserve their wild character, with some exceptions including combat against dangerous wildfires. Traditional recreational uses, including camping, hunting and fishing, are generally allowed.

Recreation enthusiasts, outfitters, wilderness advocates and many local officials in Humboldt and Mendocino counties back the bill. It generated opposition from some in Trinity County, where the long, painful decline of the timber industry has soured some officials’ taste for more wilderness.

But the bill would open up some forestry work. It carves out 724,007 acres in Trinity and Humboldt counties as a restoration area, much of it overlapping the giant footprint of the 2020 August Complex wildfire and other blazes. In that area, the bill directs the Forest Service to unleash wildfire mitigation work, including treatment through logging on 232,000 acres.

Rep. Salud Carbajal, D-Santa Barbara, and Rep. Judy Chu, D-Monterey Park, also reintroduced bills to designate more wilderness and protect river miles on the Central Coast and San Gabriel Mountains Thursday. The three bills are part of a package in the Senate championed by Sen. Alex Padilla, D-Los Angeles called the Protecting Unique and Beautiful Landscapes by Investing in California (PUBLIC) Lands Act. All told the package would designate nearly 600,000 acres of new wilderness and create more 583 miles of new wild and scenic rivers.

“Our public lands and natural spaces are some of our state’s greatest gifts — from the San Gabriel Mountains to the Carrizo Plain to the Northern California Redwoods,” Padilla said in a statement. “It is incumbent upon us to be thoughtful stewards of these special places.”

For now at least, it’s a smaller package than the ambitious but ultimately unsuccessful effort last Congress.

In the spring of 2021, with their party newly in control of both chambers of Congress and the White House, Democrat lawmakers from California, Washington, Arizona and Colorado saw an opportunity to make the largest addition to the federal wilderness system in a decade and passed a package designating two million new acres of wilderness out of the House.

Proponents hoped to attach the package to the National Defense Authorization Act for 2023, Huffman said. Lawmakers often consider such critical legislation as the best way to pass any laws at all in the current political environment. But Senate Republicans objected to the inclusion of a public lands package in the defense bill, which went to Biden’s desk last December without any wilderness legislation.

“The whole idea just fell apart,” Huffman said, “it ended up not being one of the bargaining chips as the (defense act) came together.”

The conservation bills likely face a tougher path this time around, with a still divided Senate and Democrats in the minority in the House. Though public land protections have often been bipartisan in the past, when the House passed the last package in February 2021 only eight Republicans joined Democrats to vote for the measure.

Huffman described himself as patient but determined to see the measure that has cleared the House three times become law.

“Sometimes you’ve got to just keep pushing (bills) into the conversation year after year, looking for opportunities that might surprise you,” he said. “As I’ve said before, I will attach this to a ham sandwich if that’s what it takes to get it to the president’s desk.“

You can reach Staff Writer Andrew Graham at 707-526-8667 or andrew.graham@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @AndrewGraham88