An environmental group has filed a federal lawsuit in Pittsburgh challenging 19 recently approved salvage logging projects in the Allegheny National Forest as illegal under the Bush administration's Healthy Forest Initiative.

The projects, which would log a total of 1,670 acres out of an estimated 10,000 acres containing trees damaged by a windstorm in July 2003, were all approved last month.

They were approved using a provision of new regulations that allow the U.S. Forest Service to forgo environmental assessments and shorten public comment periods if a proposed logging project is less than 250 acres and requires less than one mile of road construction.

Jim Kleissler, of the Allegheny Defense Project, said the Forest Service segmented its salvage timber projects so it could speed up awards of logging contracts and avoid doing comprehensive environmental assessments required of bigger projects.

Eventually, the Forest Service plans to grant salvage timber contracts for logging on 4,600 acres of the forest.

"The Forest Service is using smoke and mirrors to make 1,700 acres of logging fit into a policy specifically designed only for projects smaller than 250 acres," Kleissler said.

Steve Miller, Forest Service spokesman for the Allegheny National Forest, said he hadn't seen the lawsuit and couldn't comment.

The state's only national forest is located on more than 500,000 acres in Forest, Warren, McKean and Elk counties.

The timber products industry has been critical of the Forest Service for dwindling timber cutting in the Allegheny and for being slow to allow salvaging of the storm-damaged trees.

Jack Hedlund, executive director of the Allegheny Forest Alliance, a group of industry, school districts and municipalities that supports more timbering in the national forest, criticized the environmental group for "monkey-wrenching the system" to delay the timber cut and hurt the economies of communities around the forest.

"It all turns on what you feel is segmentation," Hedlund said. "These project areas are scattered to and fro all over the eastern part of the forest. I don't see how you can make it one project. There's no way it's contiguous."

Tammy Belinsky, an attorney for Wildlaw, the law firm representing the Clarion-based environmental group, said that as part of the lawsuit filed yesterday she will ask the U.S. District Court in Pittsburgh for an injunction to stop logging already occurring on several of the 19 projects.

Belinsky said that at the time the Bush administration put the forest policy in place less than a year ago, the Forest Service promised that projects would not be chopped up into smaller segments to avoid the legal requirement to do environmental impact studies.

"The short time frames for public participation and the project analysis that was not shared with the public all give the appearance of an agency trying to slip something by the public," she said.

Kleissler said several of the 19 timber projects are located on exceptional value watersheds and include at least one small, roadless area that is part of a new wilderness designation area proposed by the Allegheny Defense Project.

"There are a number of sensitive areas and others with really steep slopes," he said. "We're just asking the Forest Service to follow its own rules."