Funding for Public Lands Restoration
The Forest Service is trying to manage millions of acres of public lands on bake sale budgets and Congress continues to funnel scarce dollars to programs that no longer reflect fundamental American values. A departure from the agency's archaic funding system is needed to support our nation's current priorities.
The Forest Service's overall budget has been halved in the past decade, and in the Pacific Northwest, the picture is even gloomier. On the Gifford Pinchot National Forest since 1992 there has been a 74 percent reduction in full-time staff and its overall budget plummeted 61 percent. This bleak budget outlook is echoed in national forests across the Northwest.
Fortunately, rural forest communities, conservationists, loggers, tribes and other leaders have stitched together an elegant and simple solution: Fund restoration on national forest lands which will create jobs you could raise a family on and return salmon to streams and wildlife to the woods.
One of the most important places to invest restoration dollars at significantly higher levels is the Forest Service roads system. There is conservatively an $8 billion backlog nationally, and on the Gifford Pinchot National Forest alone – again conservatively – there is a $60 million backlog. This backlog means Northwest residents can’t reach their favorite hiking, hunting and fishing areas because there is so little money to repair even popular roads. The backlog also means increasingly severe impacts to fish and wildlife species, and as climate change throws more severe and frequent storms and floods our way, it means exponentially more money will be needed to repair roads that are guaranteed to fail in the next round of storms. Conversely, an investment in the road system now means good family wage jobs, the protection of community drinking water supplies, restoration of habitat for fish and wildlife, and a reduced future taxpayer burden.
Investments in restoration can come from private and public sources, but on federal lands like national forests, the most efficient and effective method is direct funding, or appropriations, from Congress. Congressman Norm Dicks and Senator Cantwell have championed this issue in Washington DC. To learn more, please visithttp://www.washingtonwatersheds.org/. For more information on restoration projects in the Central Cascades, please visit our Restoration page.
