A proposal by the Forest Service to swap lands with Texas lobbyist Stan Schlueter in order to build a 6.8 mile loop trail in exchange for closing a public road that accesses his 497 acre property to vehicular traffic and moving part of that road away from the home has been slid off the table. This was due largely to confusion and dissent surrounding a short section of that road, where officials claim Schlueter's vacation home encroached on a 60-foot public easement held for the road in perpetuity. That encroachment set off eleven years of barking between the Forest Service, conservation groups, lawyers, and even politicians back in the Lone Star State, at the end of which Schlueter still maintained his home didn't encroach on Forest Service road 166B.
While the Forest Service tried to resolve the issue with their April proposal, which would have built a mile and a half of new trail to finish the 6.8 mile loop while closing 166B to vehicular traffic and re-routing a section of the road away from Schlueter's home (see above diagram), of the dissenting comments issued by the public, the majority were entirely focused on the encroachment issue. It's back to the drawing board for the feds, then, and back to Texas for Schlueter, where he lobbies for AT&T, Delta, and Koch Industries, among other companies and cities.
· Public Outcry [Lone Peak Lookout]