Dispute Over Repair of Logging Roads May Supersede Construction Issue

Western Republicans in Congress are in an uproar over the Clinton administration’s proposal to stop building logging roads over tens of millions of acres of national forests.

But a bigger controversy is brewing over what to do with the more than 400,000 miles of existing national forest roads. Fewer than half are maintained to proper standards, and many are literally falling apart.

“It’s like the crazy aunt in the basement that nobody wants to talk about,” said Chris Wood, special assistant to Forest Service Chief Mike Dombeck.

“We are up here on Capitol Hill regularly fighting over a $47-million roads budget when we’ve got a $10-billion maintenance backlog,” he said.

“We’ve got to change the face of this debate to address the long-term needs and find a way to pay for them.”

The poorly maintained system is accelerating soil erosion, contributing to landslides and disrupting normal flood cycles. All take their toll on wildlife habitat, especially that of troubled salmon and trout species that rely on cold clear water in national forest streams.

In his 1999 budget plan, President Clinton proposed spending $218 million--up 20% from 1998--to remove and rebuild logging roads and restore national forest watersheds. The blueprint would nearly triple the annual amount of roads to be obliterated and replanted--from this year’s 1,200 miles to 3,500 miles next year.

The plan follows Dombeck’s proposed 18-month moratorium on road building in roadless areas of national forests that cover 5,000 acres or more. That move would effectively shut down timber harvests in roadless areas except for limited helicopter logging in some parts of the West and on several exempted forests in Oregon, Washington, Alaska and Northern California.

The moratorium has drawn sharp criticism from several influential Republicans who could blunt the effort if not block it altogether.

“I fully intend to lead the fight to defeat this special-interest proposal which was created by extremists in the national environmental organizations and the Clinton administration,” said Rep. Don Young (R-Alaska), chairman of the House Resources Committee.

Among others lining up against it were Reps. Robert F. Smith (R-Ore.), chairman of the House Agriculture Committee, and Helen Chenoweth (R-Idaho), chairman of the House Resources subcommittee on forest health; and Sens. Frank H. Murkowski (R-Alaska), chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, and Slade Gorton (R-Wash.), chairman of the Senate Appropriations interior subcommittee.

Sen. Gordon Smith (R-Ore.) said he will consider legislation to reverse what he fears could become “a big land grab” for preservationists, “a blank check to those groups who have never been satisfied.”

Dombeck said the moratorium is needed while the agency gets a better grasp on the overall situation--a “timeout,” as he described it in January.

Just 40% of the existing national forest roads are maintained to the engineering standards used in their construction, he said.

In addition to the 373,000 miles of roads on the books, the agency discovered in recent months an additional 60,000 miles of “ghost roads” they hadn’t known existed.

Road repair and reconstruction needs, which were estimated at $5 billion just five years ago, have doubled to $10 billion as a result of a closer examination over the last six months.

“The system, in many respects, is falling apart,” Deputy Agriculture Secretary James Lyons says.

Sen. Larry E. Craig (R-Idaho), another critic of the administration’s logging policies and chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources subcommittee on forests, said the numbers are news to him.

“We have seen no data from them except what we read in the papers,” said Mark Rey, staff director for the subcommittee.

Failure to fully brief Congress on the needs before announcing the new policy undercuts the agency’s requests for significant funding increases, Craig said.

“While we understand there are unmet road-repair needs, it is going to take more than press releases, private leaks, preservation-group pandering and predictions of peril from the Forest Service before we are convinced they are serious about this,” he said.

Tom Mills, director of the Forest Service’s Pacific Northwest Research Station in Portland, Ore., said he can attest to the need for repair to stem further habitat damage.

“We’ve been accumulating additional scientific information about the effects of roads for some time. What it shows is the ecological impact of roads turns out to be more extensive than we previously thought,” Mills said.

“The bottom line is there clearly is enough scientific information to support the strategy the chief announced, to take a closer and more holistic look at road-management decisions,” he said.

Dombeck said building a logging road “is a long-term commitment.”

“It’s not like you go in and come back out again. You have to maintain this road for decade after decade,” he said.

“We’ve got to make sure the roads we are maintaining are needed and take those we don’t need and decommission them and quit spending money on them.”

Lyons said the Forest Service for decades “has treated roads as assets on their balance sheets.

“Well, they are assets all right, but they are depreciating assets. . . . If you don’t invest in those assets, they begin costing you.”

Dombeck said the moratorium on new road building would be felt most in Idaho, Montana and eastern Oregon. Chenoweth and Sen. Conrad R. Burns (R-Mont.) predicted thousands of timber jobs would be lost as a result.

But environmentalists say the overall economic impact would be positive.