Feds must live up to commitment to maintain failing logging roads

There's an old saying that when you find yourself in a hole, you stop digging.

Right now, our federal government is in a hole and is still digging.

In doing so, it is turning its back on an agreement with Washington state to maintain and restore thousands of miles of decades-old, deteriorating logging roads in our national forests.

Prolonged underfunding of forest road maintenance in our national forests has increased erosion and road failures, and the problem grows daily. Muddy water from failing and washed-out forest roads harms fish — including threatened and endangered runs of salmon — that need cold, clear water to thrive and reproduce.

Muddy water harms the gills of salmon and trout. Silt smothers their eggs when it settles into clean gravel beds. Muddy runoff also contributes to making streams wider, shallower and more susceptible to warming by the sun. Warm streams further threaten salmon and trout that need cold, clean water to survive.

Rivers and streams with headwaters in the Mount Baker-Snoqualmie and the Olympic national forests flow into an already sick Puget Sound. If we are serious about saving Puget Sound, we must pay attention to the top of the watersheds that feed it.

Climate change will further challenge the integrity of our state's national forest road network. Climate models suggest that winter rainfall may increase in the Pacific Northwest. And, with expected increasing winter temperatures, the snow line in our state will rise. This will result in more precipitation in the form of rain rather than snow. These factors could increase flooding and consequent scouring of important fish habitat.

Right now, the federal government lags behind large private and state forest landowners in maintaining the 22,000 miles of national forest roads it manages in Washington.

Private and state timber landowners are on target to comply with the road-maintenance requirements in Washington's forest-practice rules by 2016.

In an interagency agreement with the Washington Department of Ecology, the U.S. Forest Service agreed to bring our state's national forest roads into compliance with Washington's forest-practice rules — which include road-maintenance requirements designed to protect water quality and fish habitat — by this same 2016 deadline. It is clear that the federal government will miss this deadline; the only remaining question is by how much.

As Rep. Norm Dicks, D-Bremerton, said at a hearing in May, "If we do not fix our roads, we will have to drink our roads — after they slide into our streams."

If needed roadwork begins now, the Forest Service estimates it will cost $300 million to bring Washington's national forests into compliance with today's standards. That translates into $30 million annually for the next decade.

Currently, the federal budget provides the Forest Service only $3 million annually to address this problem. At this funding level, it will take more than 100 years for the Forest Service to bring its roads into compliance. This is both staggering and unacceptable.

Rep. Dicks' House Appropriations subcommittee on the interior and environment recently passed a $65 million program to repair deteriorating Forest Service roads in environmentally sensitive areas. If this program goes through, Washington can compete with other states for a share of that money, resulting in significant increases to the road-maintenance budget for Washington's forest roads.

This funding is an important starting point for fixing the problem, and I would like to express my sincere appreciation to Congressman Dicks for his hard work on this issue.

The U.S. Senate will soon vote on its budget. It needs to at least match the House's budget. Sens. Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell are strong supporters of road maintenance in Washington's national forests, but they will need help from others in the Senate to match Dicks' additional investment in maintaining the nation's forest roads.

Washington has long partnered with the Forest Service, which is doing the best it can with the funding it receives. Our beef isn't with the Forest Service; it's with the current administration, which has chosen not to seek funding necessary to meet its road maintenance commitments.

It's high time for the federal government to live up to its commitment to restore and maintain its failing logging roads. Puget Sound restoration, salmon recovery and the health of our rivers will suffer if it does not.

Jay Manning is director of the Washington Department of Ecology. For more information on this issue, http://www.ecy.wa.gov/programs/wq/nonpoint/forest_practices.html