May/June 2000. A big step forward on roads. Clear-cuts for kids.
A Road Revolution
With all the attention being paid to roadless areas and their fate, a quiet revolution is changing the face of the U.S. Forest Service’s road system from within. Led by Deputy Chief Jim Furnish, star of FSEEE’s Torrents of Change video, the agency has proposed a remarkably sensible and comprehensive new policy for managing its vast transportation network.
The new policy requires that each national forest identify the minimum road system needed. The new system must be consistent with the goals of each particular national forest plan, must be affordable and must minimize environmental harm. Each forest will create an atlas of its roads that shows the unneeded roads and that sets schedules for their decommissioning.
With 380,000 miles of national forest roads and a maintenance backlog of more than $8 billion, there’s no question that new direction is needed. The maintenance problem alone is a red flag for both environmental and fiscal reasons. Poorly maintained roads are a major source of erosion and sedimentation in streams, degrading water quality and harming fish habitat. Taxpayers also face a substantial liability through the Federal Tort Claims Act for any forest visitor injured in an auto accident on a Forest Service road not maintained to the agency’s standards.
Most national forest roads were built for logging. But most road users are recreationists. Log truck use has dropped by more than half, from 42,000 trucks in 1990 to 15,000 today. But recreational vehicle use has increased dramatically. Most recreational use occurs on only 20 percent of the road system. It makes good sense to ensure that scarce maintenance dollars are spent on the 20 percent of roads that are most heavily used.
Much of the other 80 percent probably serves little useful purpose today. These were roads built for log trucks, leading to log landings in clear-cuts—not the prime places where most recreationists like to hike, picnic or sight-see.
The new road policy demands that managers make tough choices: Which roads should remain open? Which should be closed? Where should our scant maintenance dollars be invested to get the biggest bang for the buck? Though tough decisions are what district rangers and forest supervisors are paid to make, they too often seek to avoid them.
Even on a national forest as progressive as Oregon’s Siuslaw, where Furnish forged the essence of the new road policy, getting district rangers to decide that some roads must be closed so that others can remain open was tough. It took putting them in a room, locking the door and not letting them out until the job was done.
More than any other landscape feature, roads define the purposes and uses of forests. A high-density, spaghetti-like jumble of roads means an industrial forest managed for fiber production. A point-to-point ridgetop road with viewpoints means a scenic highway like the Blue Ridge Parkway in the southern Appalachians. For most national forests, the road system of the future will focus on getting people where they want to recreate—along rivers, lakes and reservoirs and at trailheads and campgrounds. There will be far fewer roads than today, but they will be better maintained for the visiting public. And the environmental impact from the roads of yesteryear will, over several decades of restoration, fade to a memory. —Andy Stahl
FSEEE in Action
This is an advertisement FSEEE placed in the Portland Oregonian and four other Oregon newspapers. Hundreds of readers throughout the state called Ron Wyden, the state’s Democratic senator, to protest his sponsorship of the Secure Rural Schools and Community Self-Determination Act (S1608 and HR2389), a.k.a. Clear-cuts for Kids.
This ad is just one prong of our strategy to derail this dangerous bill. Our members have also written letters, signed post cards and called their legislators. FSEEE staffers have explained the bill’s pernicious shortcomings to dozens of legislative aides and interest groups. We’ve analyzed the windfall Oregonians will receive in property tax payments made by other federal taxpayers. We’ve sent numerous fax transmittals explaining the bill’s defects to counties that will lose money for local roads and schools if this bill becomes law.
Has it made a difference? Yes. Without these efforts, this bill would likely be sitting on the president’s desk right now, awaiting his signature. As it is, the bill is still making its way through Congress, where it is becoming a political hot potato.
This legislation is unlike any other affecting public lands. First, the bill does not direct or prescribe forest practices, as do wilderness bills and the National Forest Management Act. Instead, it hands over authority for U.S. Forest Service spending to local advisory committees made up predominantly of commercial special interests. If this bill becomes law, it will mark the first time in history that a federal agency will have a major portion of its budget directly controlled by nongovernmental interest groups.
Second, Clear-cuts for Kids is an artful Trojan horse, seeming to assist a few western rural school districts that face financial difficulties and exploiting those difficulties to coerce support. The subterfuge worked all too well; it sucked in the powerful National Education Association, which signed on before the bill was even written. The association’s support is particularly difficult to explain, since the bill provides very little additional money for schools. In Oregon, for example, three-quarters of the money will go to county roads and only one-quarter to schools.
Most remarkable is the lack of real debate within Congress about the forfeiture of federal control over public lands this bill portends. Congress, more than any other group, should understand that he who pays the piper calls the tune.
FSEEE will continue to defend your national forests and work to stop this bad legislation. We couldn’t do it without your help. Thanks for standing up for your public lands.