Economic Stimulus and Rural Green Jobs through Watershed Restoration:
Green jobs through watershed restoration
Investing in green jobs on our publicly-owned, 193-million acre National Forest System offers the opportunity to immediately create high-wage, high-skill rural jobs fixing needed infrastructure, reclaiming unneeded infrastructure, protecting clean drinking water, fish and wildlife habitat, and saving millions of taxpayer dollars over the long-term.
This proposal calls for $250 million in increased funding for each of two years for the existing Legacy Roads and Trails Remediation Initiative (LLRI) as part of the economic stimulus package. This investment in green jobs would provide 3500 direct jobs per year. Economists estimate that road reclamation work, for example, provides 14.5 direct jobs per million dollars spent.
What the investment would do
National forest lands are laced with 380,000 miles of logging roads and an $8-10 billion road maintenance backlog. The Forest Service has stated that its road system is 25-40% larger than what is needed to provide resource management and recreational access.
The over-scaled, crumbling road system destroys habitat and causes landslides and flooding. This damages drinking water for the 60 million Americans who rely on national forests for their water, as well as fisheries, hunting opportunities and other natural resource values.
In recognition of the problem with the Forest Service roads system, in FY 2008, the US Congress authorized the LRRI as a new program providing $39.4 million in funding to address the legacy of failing, ecologically-damaging and expensive roads on national forests. The funding was designated to protect clean drinking water supplies for communities and improve water quality for threatened and endangered fisheries. The program directed funds to be used specifically for reclaiming unneeded forest roads, and upgrading culverts and performing critical maintenance on needed forest roads. This road reclamation and remediation work provides the same type of high-wage, high-skill jobs as road construction, and most of these jobs would go directly to rural workers in the affected areas.
More than 100 conservation, labor and community organizations have endorsed a proposal to increase funding for the LRRI program as part of any new economic stimulus package. Heavy equipment workers hired through this program could become part of a National Watershed Restoration Corps. The proposed funding will also create staffing opportunities within the Forest Service to implement the program. Sustained funding for watershed restoration will encourage local contractors and workers to make long-term investments in equipment and training.
Rationale
Providing significantly increased funding to the Forest Service for the LRRI makes good ecological, economic, and political sense:
- Creates high-wage, high-skilled rural community jobs: Investing $250 million per year for two years can provide at least 3,500 jobs per year for people in rural, resource dependent communities. Rural communities will be the direct beneficiaries of these jobs because it is too expensive to move heavy equipment over long distances. Restoring forest watersheds provides an excellent rural green jobs companion to the many urban green jobs being proposed in the fields of alternative energy and energy efficiency.
- Turns a liability into an asset: We have an opportunity to restore watersheds by reducing the road infrastructure on Forest Service lands - saving millions if not billions of taxpayer dollars over the long-term in reduced maintenance and mitigation costs, while also protecting and restoring clean drinking water, fisheries, and wildlife habitat.
- Provides shovel ready jobs: The Forest Service has more than enough critical maintenance work on passenger-vehicle roads to put people to work immediately.
- Protects ecosystem services from climate change impacts: Restoring ecological integrity to watersheds will make them more resilient and adaptable to the anticipated consequences of climate change, potentially saving millions of dollars in protecting the ecosystem services such as clean water, carbon sequestration and flood control, over the long run. For example, severe storms in the Pacific Northwest are increasing in intensity and frequency because of climate change. In the past few years these storms have caused road failures and landslides as well as severely damaging fisheries and drinking water sources costing tens of millions to the federal government to repair,
- Offsets job losses from housing downturn: Many excavator operators are being hit by the housing downturn, by providing new, needed heavy equipment work in rural communities, we can re-employ people impacted by the housing slump. These workers can learn new heavy-equipment skills through worker retraining programs to enable them to more effectively participate in road reclamation and remediation work.
- Invests in appropriate infrastructure for long-term benefit: Decision-makers can invest smartly by ensuring that in addition to fixing facilities that are continuing to provide needed services, public land managers also take the time to identify what transportation facilities are no longer needed and then use the proposed funds to reclaim those roads back to productive wildlands. Addressing the overbuilt and failing roads system will provide long-term benefits for protecting water, habitat and healthy forest ecosystems.
Proposed Funding Direction:
- 50% of funding to road reclamation
- $50 million/year of funding to the Forest Service to increase capacity to run program
- With additional funds, lower-skilled workers and youth conservation corps workers can participate in re-vegetation projects after the heavy-equipment work has been completed.
- Secure local hiring preferences, at prevailing wage rates.
- Secure worker retraining and apprenticeship opportunities
- Encourage multi-state, comparative economic and ecological monitoring programs
For more information contact:
Sue Gunn, Washington Field Coordinator, Wildlands CPR; sue@wildlandscpr.org; 360-352-6236
Randi Spivak, Executive Director, American Lands Alliance; randi@americanlands.org; 202-547-9029
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| eco stim fact sheet 1-21-09.doc | 134.5 KB |