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Paving Forests
Forest Highway Program

$242.6 million

Using funding from the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA), the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) is proposing to widen, pave and realign existing roads in National Forests to connect them with state highways. Many of these roads are seldom-used, narrow dirt roads. The FHWA will spend approximately $162.4 million per year until 2003 for these forest highways. Design and construction of the roads will cost more than $1 million per mile. Such funding will come at the expense of providing money to decommission forest roads and to bring existing forest roads into compliance with current standards. The USFS has identified a $10 billion maintenance backlog for existing forest roads. In fact, USFS Chief Dombeck has stated that only 18 percent of the forest road system is currently maintained to standard.

Green Scissors Proposal
1) Reduce forest highway funding by 50 percent. 2) Change the structure of the program; the USFS should focus on maintaining and bringing existing roads up to current appropriate standards. This would save federal taxpayers millions of dollars.

Current Status

In 1998, Congress passed the Transportation Equity Act for the 21st Century (TEA-21) which guaranteed funding for the Forest Highway Program at $162.4 million per year until 2003. The USFS, states or counties nominate roads for inclusion in the Forest Highway Program. Once a road is in the program, the USFS is eligible to receive 100 percent of the funds necessary to rebuild the road, but no funding to maintain the road.

Program Hurts Taxpayers

The Forest Highway program is a waste of taxpayer dollars, and is an inappropriate and expensive solution to the USFS's road maintenance problem. The program paves, widens, and straightens narrow dirt and gravel back-country roads to handle increased high-speed traffic. Many of the improvements are unwanted and unwarranted. Overbuilding these forest roads wastes millions of taxpayer dollars. Smaller, less expensive improvements or increased maintenance are all most of these roads need.

Forest highways are more expensive to maintain than forest roads. Forest highways operate at the same maintenance costs as state highways, around $6000-$8000 per mile per year. Forest roads cost a lot less to maintain. For instance, a 28-mile long forest road in Wyoming called the Loop Road costs a total of around $6,000 a year to maintain in contrast to the $6000-$8000 per mile for a forest highway.

The USFS, states and counties lack funds to maintain the roads once they are upgraded. Once the FHWA builds a forest highway, a road maintenance agency, usually that of a county or state, becomes responsible for maintaining it. The USFS recently became a public road authority, allowing it to maintain federal highways even though the USFS, like most states and counties, is already over-extended in maintaining its own roads.

Program Hurts the Environment

The paving of forest highways increases habitat fragmentation. The Forest Highway Program takes narrow back-country roads that meander through National Forests and turns them into two-lane paved suburban highways. By making these roads wider, straighter and flatter, the FHWA increases the number and speed of vehicles that travel on them. The wider, straighter roads and greater number of vehicles on the roads will in turn cause even greater disruption to wildlife habitat and could irreparably affect the foraging and reproduction of many species.

Contacts

• Bethanie Walder, Wildlands Center for Preventing Roads, (406) 543-9551.
• Erich Pica, Friends of the Earth, (202) 783-7400 x229.