To study, educate, speak, and act for preservation and protection of America's National Park System

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03.01.2012 - Days Left to Take Action for Yellowstone Winter Use Issue

Message from Maureen Finnerty, Chair, CNPSR Executive Council

Dear CNPSR Members:

Yellowstone National Park has announced a 30-day comment period on scoping for its intention to prepare a Supplemental EIS for the EIS on winter use published  last year. They did this based on their conclusion that the EIS process had not fully analyzed some of the significant issues involved in preparing a final rule for winter use in Yellowstone. The scoping period is designed to allow the public to tell the winter use planning team what issues should be analyzed during the preparation of the SEIS. The Executive Council believes it is important for Coalition members to participate in the scoping process.

The park will not tally emails or phone calls. Comments must be submitted by regular mail or electronically, using the NPS PEPC system. This is a pretty easy process. Go to www.nps.gov and in the search box, type in PEPC.  Then click on “Planning, Environment and Public Comment”.  This will take you to a page that lists all the plans open for public review and comment.  Scroll down to Yellowstone 2012 Supplemental Winter Use EIS.  Click on “Open for comment” and you will go to a page where you can read the document and make a comment.  We have found it easiest, when commenting, to prepare the comment in your word processing program and then copy and paste it into the space provided for comment.

Click here for a sample letter in Word that was prepared by one of our members. (Here is a PDF file of the text if you prefer to print it out.) If you add an opening paragraph announcing that you are a former NPS employee with a deep interest in the world’s first national park and change the order of the points to be analyzed, the comment will probably not be treated by the park as a bulk letter generated by one of the conservation groups. Comments must be submitted by March 9.

If all this electronic stuff is daunting to you, you can still submit a comment in writing to:

Yellowstone National Park
 Supplemental Winter Use Plan EIS, 
PO Box 168, 
Yellowstone National Park, WY 82190

Thanks very much for doing this.  It is important that the “voices of experience” be heard.