A September 21 article in The Gazette of Colorado Springs reporting on U.S. Magistrate Judge Elizabeth Laporte's September 19 decision reinstating President Clinton's “roadless rule” uncritically repeated Gov. Bill Owens's (R) false claim that the rule was “established hastily without public input during the waning days of the Clinton administration.” In fact, while the rule was finalized in the “waning days” of the Clinton administration, the Associated Press reported September 21 that the rule, which restricted road construction, drilling, and logging on almost 60 million acres of roadless national forests, “was crafted with more than 1 million public comments and 600 public meetings over three years.”

From The Gazette's September 21 article titled “Judge overturns Bush roadless rules, brings back Clinton-era ban,” which noted that "USA Today, The Associated Press and the Los Angeles Times contributed to this report":

Colorado's Gov. Bill Owens criticized the ruling Wednesday in a statement:

“It would be very unfortunate if we were to revert back to a rule established hastily without public input during the waning days of the Clinton administration. We simply should not have a federal magistrate in San Francisco unilaterally dictating natural resource policy for the entire country.”

Laporte's ruling does not apply to about 9.3 million acres of Alaska's Tongass National Forest, which is governed by a separate rule on development. The Tongass had been included in the Clinton ban.

A September 21 article by AP writer Terence Chea also uncritically repeated Owens's claim:

Colorado Gov. Bill Owens criticized the ruling, saying a task force that takes citizens' input is the right way to manage the state's wilderness.

“It would be very unfortunate if we were to revert back to a rule established hastily without public input during the waning days of the Clinton administration,” Owens said. “We simply should not have a federal magistrate in San Francisco unilaterally dictating natural resource policy for the entire country.”

However, a separate September 21 AP article reported that Clinton's roadless rule “was crafted with more than 1 million public comments and 600 public meetings over three years”:

In a statement Wednesday, Owens said Colorado's use of the bipartisan task force accepting input from citizens is the right way to manage the state's wilderness.

“It would be very unfortunate if we were to revert back to a rule established hastily without public input during the waning days of the Clinton administration,” Owens said. “We simply should not have a federal magistrate in San Francisco unilaterally dictating natural resource policy for the entire country.”

Clinton issued the Roadless Area Conservation Rule just days before he left office in January 2001. It was crafted with more than 1 million public comments and 600 public meetings over three years.

Similarly, a March 17, 2001, AP article explaining the history of Clinton's roadless rule stated: “Published on Jan. 12, eight days before Clinton left office, [the roadless rule] was two years in the making, after the government solicited 1.6 million public comments and held 600 public hearings.”

According to a report prepared by the Democratic staff of the Committee on Governmental Affairs of the U.S. Senate and published October 24, 2002, the first preliminary action pertaining to the roadless rule occurred in January 1998, when “the Forest Service published an Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking to solicit comments on revising the National Forest Road system.” The report chronicled the phases of public meetings on the issue of the roadless rule:

After holding 31 open houses attended by an estimated 2,300 people and receiving 53,000 comments, the [Forest Service] agency issued an interim rule on February 12, 1999 which suspended road construction for 18 months.

[...]

In response to the [October 19, 1999] Notice of Intent, about 16,000 people attended 187 public meetings. More than 517,000 responses were received by the time the next steps were taken, when the Forest Service published a DEIS [Draft Environmental Impact Statement] on May 10, 2000.

[...]

Following publication of the DEIS, the Forest Service held two cycles of public meetings regarding the draft and the proposed rule -- about 230 for information sharing and about 200 for collecting oral and written comments. About 16,000 people attended comment meetings, at which nearly 7,000 (or 44 percent of the attendees) spoke. The Forest Service received more than 1.1 million written comments on the DEIS which it analyzed and addressed.