RSSFire district files suit over road use
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ELLENSBURG, Wash. -- A Kittitas County fire district has sued the Forest Service over a three-year-old dispute about whether firefighters should be able to plow a road reserved for snowmobilers in the winter.
The road reaches a Fire District 8 station that is used to provide emergency service on Interstate 90. The fire district serves a 13-mile stretch of I-90, east of Snoqualmie Pass.
Bob Angrisano, chairman of the commission overseeing the fire district, said he hopes a judge will resolve the disagreement before the Forest Service closes the road to vehicle traffic this winter.
For the past three years, firefighters had used a bypass route, but Angrisano said the Forest Service bulldozed its portion of that route this fall for reasons that are unclear.
A government attorney in Portland said she could not discuss the issue, and a Forest Service spokesman could not be reached on Thursday afternoon.
After a series of meetings over the years with the Forest Service, fire commissioners say they decided to ask a U.S. District Court judge in Yakima to interpret the 1994 closure order that the Forest Service has relied on to close the road.
They're hoping the judge will stop the Forest Service from refusing to let the road be plowed regularly. The request for review was filed late last week, and a hearing has not been scheduled.
Forest Service officials and a snowmobile group say regularly mixing emergency and recreational traffic on the narrow road would be unsafe. Fire officials have proposed plowing half of the road, and leaving the other half for snowmobilers, skiiers and others.
Opponents counter that the resulting "ditch" would be hazardous.
The Forest Service interprets the closure order to mean that the fire district could plow the quarter-mile stretch of road, which runs south from the Crystal Springs Sno-Park, once an emergency call comes in.
Fire officials say that's unreasonable and would delay critical care in situations where minutes mean the difference between life and death.
Four medics live near the station at the center of the dispute. They either have to drive to the district's other station, several miles away, or rely on other volunteers, many of whom don't live in the area full-time, Angrisano said.
The fire district had explored building a station on leased state land at the Sno-Park, but they have since learned that the state funding source for the property won't allow that, Angrisano said.
*Mark Morey can be reached at 509-577-7671 or mmorey@yakimaherald.com.
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