The Forest Service has OK’d a land exchange that provides Texas businessman B.J. “Red” McCombs access to a proposed village high on Wolf Creek Pass.

Rio Grande National Forest Supervisor Dan Dallas on Thursday announced his support for the land exchange in a Final Environmental Impact Statement, concluding the agency’s four-year review of the swap.

The decision gives the Forest Service 177.6 acres of riparian wetlands and streams along the Continental Divide and delivers McCombs 204.4 federal acres above 10,000 feet on Wolf Creek Pass.

McCombs, 87, has spent 28 years planning a 1,711-unit, 10,000-person resort village on roughly 300 acres he acquired in a land swap with the Forest Service in 1986.

It’s not been an easy path for McCombs. The project’s history includes vehement opposition from environmental groups, lawsuits, countersuits, and local municipal approval that was overturned by a judge.

A galvanized collective of environmental and land advocacy groups has opposed the village at every step. The groups urged the Forest Service to consider the overall impact of the village when the agency weighed the access issue and the land exchange.

The issue is bigger than access, said Matt Sandler, staff attorney for Rocky Mountain Wild, which counts the Village at Wolf Creek as its most crucial fight.

“This really is a city they are approving,” Sandler said, “and anything otherwise is misleading.”

The swap, proposed in 2010, moves McCombs’ planned village further from the Wolf Creek ski area and grows the parcel to about 325 acres bordering U.S. 160, which provides access to his Forest Service in-holding, as is required by federal law.

Dallas, in a press briefing, said the environmental analysis’ “no action” alternative — which was supported by village opponents — was “viable and indeed attractive,” but would have denied McCombs his right to reasonable access.

“The land exchange presents the Forest Service with the opportunity to acquire important and unique resources,” Dallas wrote in his 34-page decision, which accompanied the 800-page Final Environmental Impact Statement.

Dallas also said giving McCombs access will spark economic development in rural southern Colorado.

“The land exchange presents the Forest Service with the opportunity to convey lands that would contribute to community growth, development and economic prosperity,” Dallas wrote.

Dallas said the intent of the Forest Service when it approved the controversial 1986 land swap that gave McCombs the island of private land along the Continental Divide “was to create a village.”

When asked if the agency would approve the land swap today, Dallas said: “I don’t know how to answer that. I’ve been asked that many times. It was what it was. We can’t change that.”

The agency’s reviews of land exchanges that create islands of private land surrounded by public lands “has gotten much more … intense,” he said.

“Any sort of land exchange is generally controversial unless they are pretty small and simple ones, unless they have a really good identified reason like we have now,” Dallas said. “Land exchanges have gotten much more comprehensive; how we look at them, how we consider them. The public interest determination is looked at extremely closely.”

After the agency issued its draft environmental impact statement in 2012 supporting the land exchange, the agency harvested 893 letters commenting on the land exchange and more than 120 attended public meetings in August 2012.

“The proposal for the Village at Wolf Creek has been rife with controversy and strong feelings for a very long time and I’m certainly not so naïve that my decision will settle the controversy and strong feelings,” said Dallas, expressing confidence that his team’s process was thorough and transparent.

The Forest Service will field public comments on the decision for 45 days. If land advocacy groups file objections — which is likely — the agency can extend the comment period for another 75 days.

“We are going to hit it from every side,” Sandler said. “Really we will be looking at this with a microscope to find the inadequacies in this decision.”