The money is part of a $4.7 million “Legacy Road and Trails” funding package presented earlier this year to the U.S. Forest Service's Northern Region for restoration to improve water quality and fish habitat, and reduce public safety risks on damaged roadways.
On the Bitterroot forest, the funding will pay for decommissioning nearly 14 miles of roads that have long been closed to public travel. Another eight miles of road will have culverts replaced, water bars dug and other work to reduce the amount of sediment ending up in nearby streams.
Following a contentious lawsuit by seven conservation groups that challenged the amount of salvage logging proposed by the Forest Service, the agency agreed in a 2002 settlement to a list of restoration projects and a significant reduction in the scale of salvage logging.
The work was to include stream restoration and fish habitat improvements, replacing culverts to improve fish passage, obliteration of roads and improvements to others to prevent sedimentation of streams.
The Bitterroot received about $30 million in 2002 that was supposed to begin paying for the restoration work.
After large fires erupted around the West that same summer, the agency took away $26 million of that to help pay for firefighting efforts.
The next year, Bitterroot forest lost even more funding to pay for wildfire suppression, after the agency transferred $2 million of the $7 million allocated to it for restoration work.
“Those monies were just gone,” said Sue Heald, the Bitterroot's planning and recreation staff officer. “They never were replenished.”
The Bitterroot forest has been paying for the restoration work out of its regular budget allocation ever since, she said.
“There's not been an extra big pot for us to dip into,” she said.
The forest did fare well in the competition with the 12 other national forests in the Northern Region for this latest round of funding.
Heald said that's probably because the Bitterroot has approved projects sitting on the shelf and ready to go.
“We still have a fair number of projects that we haven't been able to implement because of funding,” she said. “I'm sure that made a difference this time around. I think we did pretty well.”
The Bitterroot forest has put its three projects out to bid.
“We may be able to do more than just those three,” she said. “If there is some money left over, we'll do some more work. We'll just have to wait and see.”
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