A Peek into Forest Service Road Management: Road Accomplishment Reports (RARs) Revealed

As with most Federal Agencies, the Forest Service generates a lot of paperwork.  From EAs and EISs to timber sale contracts and inter-agency memos, the Forest Service provides watchdog groups with plenty to keep a sharp eye on.  While much of this paperwork doesn’t contain a lot of hard data on just what the agency does each year, the agency’s Road Accomplishment Reports (RARs) do provide a bounty of useful and interesting data. 

These annual reports are generated by each forest and then combined at a regional level.   The RARs detail how much money the agency spent on road related activities – maintenance, decommissioning, access improvement, new construction – what funds the monies spent are derived from, and then list the corresponding mileages – how many miles were decommissioned, improved, closed, discovered, or otherwise treated over the course of the year.  The RARs also detail fatalities that occurred on the road system and track deferred maintenance amounts for the year. 

The RARs can be a bit daunting at first.  There’s a lot of information, numerous acronyms and techno-speak, but after a steep learning curve, they offer some of the most specific, and detailed information available to the public regarding how the agency manages its road system.

Wildlands CPR has posted 2006 and 2007 RARs in its resources pages, as well as a primer on how to read and interpret these interesting documents.  Want to know how many miles of roads were decommissioned on the Siuslaw National Forest for 2006, just download the Region 6 RAR, find the Siuslaw tab at the bottom of the excel spreadsheet and take a look.  Curious how much money Region 5 spent on new road construction in 2006, check out the Regional RAR.  Wondering how many miles of unauthorized roads were “discovered” and either eliminated or added to the system, it’s in there, too.  Deferred maintenance on the Sawtooth, miles of maintenance level 2 roads maintained on the Mark Twain, all presented in the RARs.

These documents provide a real glimpse into what is happening with the 375,000 miles of roads that fragment our public lands.  They are very worth checking out and searching.  Wildlands CPR has RARs for all regions from 2001-2007 (the 2007 RAR is a nationwide pivot table, with all of the regional information in one document and it is available on the resource page of our website).  We will be posting 2008 and 2009 RARs as soon as they become available to us.  Please contact Sarah Peters – sarah at wildlandscpr dot org for additional information or other RARs.