Legacy Roads and Trails funding remains steady ($45 million!) in 2012

The Congressional fervor for deficit-reduction and budget-cutting left us on pins and needles as we awaited funding news about the fate of our favorite Forest Service program, Legacy Roads and Trails. In mid-December Congress adopted an overdue omnibus appropriations bill (including, as "Division E" the Department of Interior, Environment and Related Agencies Act, 2012) to approve budgets for numerous government agencies throughout the remainder of Fiscal Year 2012 (FY12). Funding levels weren’t the only thing that was delaying approval of budgets, as Republicans and Democrats argued about numerous policy provisions that were proposed as riders on the remaining appropriations bill.

We’re pleased to report that Forest Service Legacy Roads and Trails (LRT) funding remained stable, at $45 million! Securing level funding is a big victory in this political and economic environment – especially since Congress cut LRT in half from FY10 to FY11. The House had proposed further cuts, but fortunately those were not enacted. In addition, the final bill included important “report language” directing the agency to start documenting and publicly reporting on the number of jobs created or maintained through the LRT program.

But all was not perfect with the LRT allocation - Congress made one important change that could have significant consequences. They created a new Integrated Resource Restoration (IRR) pilot program and directed the Forest Service to put $13 million of the total LRT money into that pilot. IRR is being tested in Forest Service regions 1, 3 and 4 (covering MT, ID, ND, NM, AZ, NV, UT,  and a small portion of WY). In those regions, LRT will be pooled with other Forest Service line items like fish/wildlife, timber, and vegetation/watershed, to create a new comprehensive funding mechanism for restoration. We are concerned that LRT funds, therefore, could be used for non-road oriented work, including timber harvest, through this new pooled program. For years we’ve advocated that road mitigation and reclamation needs be decoupled from timber management, and LRT provides entirely independent funding with specific sideboards targeted specifically at water quality or endangered fish habitat improvements. IRR, however, pools the funding together again – which means road work might be tied to timber management again.

While we support the idea of integrated restoration, we are worried that IRR doesn’t yet include enough sideboards to ensure that activities funded with this money will be truly restorative from both a watershed and landscape perspective. We will be working closely with the agency to raise our concerns and to promote strong direction to the pilot regions regarding IRR implementation on the ground. We are encouraged, however, by initial comments that they might use IRR funding as a way to implement their new Watershed Restoration Action Plans – many of which identify road maintenance and/or reclamation as a priority.

But LRT wasn’t our only worry in the final appropriations bill – we were closely watching several anti-environmental riders. We’re equally pleased to report that the language on some of these riders was dramatically improved before final passage. For example, we had previously reported about riders that would exempt logging and silvicultural practices from the Clean Water Act as a result of a very important legal victory at the Ninth Circuit. The final bill, instead of creating this exemption, set a one-year delay for enforcing that legal victory (NEDC v. Brown) – providing a much needed time-out for the EPA to develop a plan for implementing the decision.

Congressman Wally Herger (R-CA) had also pushed a rider that would have limited the implementation of new off-road vehicle travel plans in California national forests. The final language adopted however, does no such thing, and appears to have has no clear impact on travel planning in California.

The final bill wasn’t perfect, but the environment fared surprisingly well. Let’s hope we’ll be able to say something similar, or even stronger, for FY13.