Forest Road Repair Dollars, Jobs Arrive in Oregon
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February 22, 2010
PORTLAND, Ore. - From Ashland to Joseph and points in between, Oregon will get one in eight of the federal dollars allocated by Congress nationally for forest road and trail repairs on public lands this year. Part of the Legacy Roads and Trails Remediation program, that $12 million represents a rare funding increase for such work and will boost employment opportunities in many small Oregon towns. Local crews will replace culverts, decommission old logging roads and stop sediment from suffocating creeks that otherwise would be good fish habitat.
Mary Scurlock, policy director with the Pacific Rivers Council, says this maintenance has been put off for years due to lack of funding. Now, getting it done can help the economy as well as the environment.
"This is really work that needed to be done anyway. We have longstanding obligations under the Clean Water Act, we have endangered species problems. We know the impacts from these roads are real and substantial, and we have an obligation to address them."
Oregon has 69,000 miles of national forest roads. Scurlock says at least half of them are no longer needed and are in bad shape, but fixing them or even closing them is an expensive proposition.
"It does require skilled operators bringing heavy equipment out into the woods, engineers to plan it, and an interdisciplinary look at the road system to prioritize where we're going to spend our money. The really staggering part is that, as large as some of the numbers are, if we don't address the problem, those numbers are going to continue to spiral upward."
Some of the work was started in past years, in places like the Illinois River Basin of southern Oregon and in the Mount Hood National Forest, but funding has not been guaranteed from year to year, Scurlock explains. That made it tough for the Forest Service to plan projects and complete them, she adds.
The money is being distributed this month to 12 national forests around the state to get the work done.