BC Roads Legislation Lacking in Stop Signs

Please comment on Natural Resource Roads Act 

http://www.for.gov.bc.ca/mof/nrra/

The Natural Resource Road Act is intended to consolidate resource road legislation into a single act that will:

• provide common requirements and responsibilities for construction, maintenance and use of resource roads,
• consider the public interest, and
• Protect the environment.

These are important goals, but the legislative process has a biased start that makes environmental protection and citizens’ concerns very unlikely outcomes.

Roads provide some of the greatest threats to wildlife and water quality. This is potentially a great opportunity to change the way government manages BC’s vast roads network.

Roads are assets and liabilities:

• BC currently has between 500,000km and 700,000km of resource roads, nobody knows for sure.  Resource roads provide access to resources, recreation, and homes and businesses, but they also deliver sediment to creeks degrading water quality and increasing treatment costs, increase landslide frequency, and have been identified as a key threat to the well-being of fish and wildlife in BC. 
• Climate change will bring increased frequency and intensity of extreme weather events leading to increased sedimentation and landslide risk from resource roads and increases in associated environmental damage.
• The threat to fish and wildlife of even the best-built roads is not acknowledged in the Discussion Paper.  This was a major finding of the comprehensive report "Taking Nature's Pulse" by Biodiversity BC.
• The NRRA Discussion Paper indicates government intends to allow more roads to remain open for public use but does not provide assurance that either public or environmental values will be considered in such decision-making:
  • The State of our Forests 2010 report clearly documents the dramatic loss of unroaded areas in BC over the last decade.  BC's globally-unique ability to offer a 'wilderness' experience and the value of this to our society must be recognized.
  • Government’s piecemeal planning approach as suggested is inadequate to deal with the landscape-level impacts of roads
  • A government “decision-maker” will decide the fate of roads; no mechanism for public or scientific input is indicated.  This will create more uncertainty and conflict.
  • Unnecessary road construction reduces provincial revenue from stumpage payments
  • Roads chew up massive amounts of productive public land and wildlife habitat; a long term loss of public value.  We should strive to build the minimum road necessary to meet access objectives; the Discussion Paper ignores this obvious objective. 
  • Most importantly the cumulative impacts of roads are not considered.

Tell government that the NRRA requires road management decisions be informed by a public access planning process and cumulative effects analysis that assures protection of water, wildlife  and all environmental values impacted by roads. 

http://www.for.gov.bc.ca/mof/nrra/