Every year, thousands of miles of abandoned and ill-maintained roads clog streams with silt. Overgrown timber stands threaten communities. Undersized culverts block the passage of fish. And hungry hordes of insects turn the forest canopy an angry red.
Almost everyone who cares about the national forests agrees that something needs to be done.
A little over five years ago, Lolo National Forest Supervisor Debbie Austin thought she knew how to make everyone happy.
After thousands of acres burned on the Lolo Forest in 2000, Austin decided there was an opportunity to salvage some timber and use the receipts to pay for some much-needed restoration work in areas near Superior and in the Ninemile Valley.
“After the fire, we found jammer roads that we didn't even know existed,” Austin said. “We felt there was a lot of restoration work that could be accomplished.”
She told the media and anyone else who would listen that the project would be “holistic.” It was a chance to provide local mills with timber, as well as address some pressing needs for restoring a forest affected by years of road building and timber harvest.
The agency spared no expense in putting the project together. An eight-member team, which included a soil scientist, fisheries and wildlife biologists, and a hydrologist, worked for more than a year to write the ambitious Lolo post-burn plan. By the time the environmental document was completed, the agency had already spent more than $1 million.
The plan called for eight timber sales on about 4,600 acres found within the 74,000 acres burned during the summer of 2000. It also included reconstructing 287 miles of road, reclaiming three mine sites, decommissioning 224 miles of old roads and replacing culverts at 108 stream crossings.
Then three environmental groups filed two lawsuits to stop the project.
The Sierra Club and the Alliance for the Wild Rockies couldn't abide the amount of logging in areas without roads. The agency worked out a deal with those groups which allowed the restoration work to continue while dropping some of the controversial timber harvest.
The agency also agreed to reimburse the Alliance $75,000 for its legal fees as required under the Equal Access to Justice Act. That money came directly out of funds set aside for restoration work, Austin said.
The second lawsuit, filed by the Ecology Center (now part of Missoula's WildWest Institute), eventually shut down the project after an appeals court overruled a Missoula judge in a split decision. The U.S. Forest Service is now negotiating the Ecology Center's request for a $110,660 reimbursement in legal fees.
It's too early to know where the money to pay for the group's attorney expenses will come from, Austin said. If the Lolo National Forest doesn't have the funding, it may have to ask the regional office or Washington headquarters to help out.
“It is money that would have gone toward some other project,” Austin said. “It's appropriated money.”
Much of the planned restoration work on the Lolo post-burn project wasn't completed as a result of the court cases.
Hardly any of the 287 miles of proposed road reconstruction was done. The agency managed to decommission about 73 miles of another 224 miles of abandoned roads that crisscross the area. About half of the 104 undersized culverts were replaced. And one of the three mine reclamation projects was completed.
Walking away from those restoration efforts has a negative impact on the overall health of the watersheds, Austin said.
“Clearly, the watersheds are not in as good a condition as they would have been had we been able to complete this restoration work,” Austin said. “The roads that were there before the fires are still contributing sediment to the streams.”
Under current funding levels facing the Forest Service, Austin said there isn't a plan to go back anytime soon to revisit those restoration efforts.
“It certainly does make you think twice before you propose a project,” she said. “You take a hard look and try to find places where you feel you might have the most success.”
Environmental groups want the agency and Congress to rethink the way it funds forest restoration.
“We don't think it's right that the good work is held hostage by the timber component,” said Bob Clark, the Sierra Club's Missoula representative. “The timber portion should have to stand on its own without bogging down restoration work.”
The Lolo post-burn case was a classic example, Clark said.
The agency was proposing to cut timber in unroaded areas far from any community in a project that included quite a number of important restoration efforts, he said.
“The Lolo post-burn offered lot of good things, but it also had too many bad things in it as well,” he said. “We couldn't let it go by. We're definitely disappointed that a lot of that restoration work wasn't completed.”
The Sierra Club and WildWest Institute want Congress to earmark funds specifically for forest restoration.
The Forest Service has a huge backlog of restoration work, said Matthew Koehler of the WildWest Institute. In Region 1 alone, 85 percent of the culverts don't allow fish passage and there is a
$1.4 billion backlog on road maintenance.
The agency is trying to pay for a lot of this work by tying it to controversial timber sales, many of which are “on shaky legal ground,” he said.
“With lumber prices at historic lows, I really don't believe they're going to be able to make the kind of money they need to get this work completed, especially considering the cumulative impacts created by heavy logging efforts in the '70s, '80s and into the early '90s,” Koehler said.
On top of that, the Forest Service doesn't always follow through in its promises to do forest restoration using funds obtained through timber harvest, Koehler said.
“We find that happening time and time again,” he said.
Julia Altemus of the Montana Logging Association said it makes sense to couple vegetation management with restoration work, especially considering how tight Forest Service budgets are currently.
“We've seen a lot of restoration work end up not getting completed after timber sale projects are shut down by court decisions,” Altemus said. “When those projects fall apart, then nothing gets accomplished.”
Environmental groups are proficient in tying up projects long enough to ensure the timber being sold no longer has value - and then they say the Forest Service doesn't follow through on its promises for restoration work, she said.
“They continue to throw the baby out with the bath water and then blame everyone but themselves when we can't accomplish their goals,” she said.
At the end of the process, the groups ask for “outlandish” legal fees, Altemus said, pointing to WildWest's recent request for more than $110,000.
“They are the only ones who are actually winning anything,” she said. “There's only one group that's coming out ahead on this. It's certainly not the Forest Service or wildlife habitat or the people who live here in it. ... I don't think the Equal Access to Justice Act was set up to be used this way.”
“It's the way they're keeping their lights on. It's what they're using to pay their mortgages,” Altemus said.
Austin said a lot has changed in the seven years that have passed since the 2000 wildfire season.
“Things are very different now,” she said. “All sides are starting to communicate much better. It's taken all of us a long time to get to this point and it's not going to change overnight.
“One thing is for certain,” she said. “I don't ever want to spend more than $1 million on a project that never happens again.”
Reporter Perry Backus can be reached at 523-5259 or at pbackus@missoulian.com
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