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Animal rights group agrees to extension for park winter plan LIVINGSTON (AP) - The Fund for Animals has agreed to extend a court deadline for developing a winter-use plan for Yellowstone National Park, allowing surrounding counties more time to submit comments. The animal rights group is suing Yellowstone over snowmobile use in Yellowstone, and the park was under court order to produce a draft winter-use plan by Aug. 1. Yellowstone Superintendent Michael Finley had asked the Fund to agree to a 45-day extension in the deadline. Howard Crystal, a Washington, D.C., attorney for the Fund, told the Livingston Enterprise on Friday the extension was granted on the condition the plan's recommendations could still be implemented by the 2000-2001 winter season. But Crystal said the group still has concerns over allowing state and local governments to act as "cooperating agencies," a legal status allowing them to comment on the plan before it reaches the public. Usually cooperating-agency status is reserved for wildlife experts, not counties trying to protect local businesses, Crystal said. "What's going on now, the Park Service and the cooperating agencies sit down in a room and decide how the EIS is going to look," he said. "It undermines the entire public review of the ... process." "We'd feel a lot better is everyone got the same opportunity to participate," he added. The initial plan circulated to county governments this spring said that at this point, the preferred alternative of the National Park Service would be to plow the road between West Yellowstone and Old Faithful and open it to automobiles and tour buses. Surrounding communities have built a thriving winter industry around snowmobiling in the park, and they say the road-plowing could be devastating. But the time requirements of the lawsuit left them only about a week to prepare formal rebuttal arguments, a time they argued was grossly inadequate. Finley initially said the Park Service tries to accommodate requests for deadline extensions, but could not in this case because of the Aug. 1 deadline. The park would be unable to accept late comments and still meet the deadline itself, he said. Local government officials, backed by members of Congress, responded that the Park Service was five months late providing the 600-page final draft of alternatives, and that was the reason for the tight deadline. Finley then asked the Fund to extend the deadline. The Fund sued in 1997, alleging the Park Service had failed to adequately address the impact increased snowmobile traffic was having on Yellowstone's bison.
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