Mount St. Helens needs more money, committee told

, For more than a year, members of a Mount St. Helens advisory committee have heard plenty of advice about how the cash-strapped national volcanic monument ought to be managed.

Some want the monument to stay with the Forest Service; others say it should become Washington's fourth national park. With the committee due to finalize its recommendations next month, recreationists of all stripes had one common piece of advice for the four members of Congress who formed the committee: Fund it properly.

"The federal agency that manages the monument is not the issue," said Susan Saul, a Vancouver hiker who lobbied for the bill that created the monument in 1982.

Saul, who spoke during a public hearing Monday evening in a conference room at the Camas Police Department, represented the Mount St. Helens Protective Association. She said the group endorses the advisory committee's draft recommendation for the Forest Service to retain management of the monument, assuming Congress and the Obama administration provide better funding.

Visitor center closed

The issue came to a head in late 2007, when chronic budget shortfalls prompted the Forest Service to permanently close the Coldwater Ridge Visitor Center after just 14 years.

U.S. Sens. Maria Cantwell and Patty Murray and Reps. Brian Baird and Norm Dicks commissioned the 14-member advisory committee to explore the surrounding community's vision of the monument's future. The committee includes a cross-section of elected officials, recreationists, scientists and residents.

Frustrated by the budget cuts, Cantwell initially suggested turning the monument over to the National Park Service.

However, the committee has proposed recommending keeping the Forest Service in charge — with a dedicated line item for Mount St. Helens within the Forest Service budget.

"It's a bit of an attempt to get the best of both worlds," Cowlitz County Commissioner Axel Swanson said in an interview shortly after the committee released its draft recommendations last month. "We're comfortable with the Forest Service staff, we're comfortable with the access they provide, and we want the line-item funding."

National budget

Swanson, who co-chairs the committee with Skamania County Commissioner Paul Pearce and Lewis County Commissioner Lee Grose, added that he and other members of the committee will be watching closely to see if Congress follows through.

National parks such as Mount Rainier receive a line item allocation in the federal budget each year. By contrast, Mount St. Helens receives its share of recreation money from the Forest Service only after it filters through three distinct layers of administrative overhead, from national headquarters, through the regional office in Portland, and, finally, through the Gifford Pinchot forest headquarters in Vancouver. At each level, the monument competes with other recreation programs.

On top of all that, the Forest Service's national budget has been squeezed by declining timber receipts and rising firefighting costs.

"The Forest Service and the budget process is too big of an abyss," Swanson said. "It's not working."

The recreation program at Mount St. Helens amounts to about $500,000 annually. By comparison, California's Lassen Volcanic National Park, which is similar in visitation and acreage to Mount St. Helens, operates on a budget nine times the size — $4.5 million.

The advisory committee is conducting the first comprehensive review of Mount St. Helens since 1982, when Congress established the 110,000-acre national volcanic monument in the wake of the eruption of 1980.

On May 18, 1980, the largest landslide in history unleashed an eruption that killed 57 people, leveled 230 square miles of forests and shot a nine-mile-high plume of ash that circled the globe.

Among the committee's proposed recommendations: a new highway extension north from the Spirit Lake Memorial Highway to Randle; overnight accommodations at Coldwater Ridge; and destination resorts in and around the monument.

Of course, that costs money. Several speakers noted that the Forest Service has struggled to maintain its existing system of trails, roads and visitor attractions surrounding the volcano.

Saul, along with other environmental groups, critiqued the idea of destination resorts, campgrounds or additional motorized use inside the monument boundaries.

Christine Colasurdo, a Portland author whose family owned a cabin on Spirit Lake before the 1980 eruption, called on the committee to honor the mountain as a place of historical remembrance similar to Gettysburg or Fort Clatsop.

"Can we have no treasures in the Pacific Northwest?" she said. "Can we not say, as a people, 'Let's remember what happened here and treat this place differently'? Do we need to make money off of Mount St. Helens?"