By the late 1980s, forest planning was far from complete. As of 1987, eight years after the Forest Service published its final planning rules, more than half the plans were still unfinished. Still, the process was winding down, as reflected by the number of forest plan reviews I did each year. As near as I can tell, I had reviewed some 20 plans in 1985, but only eight each in 1986 and 1987, seven in 1988, and one a year for the next couple of years after that.
After considering appeals and do-overs resulting from those appeals, the planning process was taking a lot longer than originally projected. The plans were also a lot more expensive. Though Chief McGuire had guessed in 1976 that each plan would cost about a million dollars, Northern Arizona University forestry professor Richard Behan estimated that the actual cost was well over $10 million per plan.
One of the plans I reviewed in 1987 was for Ohio’s Wayne National Forest. Since the Wayne and the Hoosier were both only about a hundred thousand acres each, compared to western forests that were typically close to a million acres, both the Indiana and Ohio forests were managed out of the same supervisor’s office in Bedford, Indiana.
