The Road-RIPorter, Summer Solstice 2010

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Legacy Roads and Trails:

A Two-Year Evaluation

By Bethanie Walder

y now, nearly everyone involved in ederal land management – romconservation activists to agency sta - embraces the notion thatensuring clean water and healthy populations o sh and wildlie willrequire proactive action on our part. Even Congress recognized this twoyears ago when it set out to accomplish these ends by investing in xingthe watershed problems caused by Forest Service roads (e.g. repairingand/or reclaiming roads and xing sh culverts) – by creating the LegacyRoads and Trails (LRT) Remediation Initiative. So is it working? With twoyears under its belt, we elt it was time to take a closer look at the pro-gram’s successes and challenges. The Forest Service has made real prog-ress in beginning to address their multi-billion dollar road maintenancebacklog, and although there are some areas that need improvement, on thewhole, they’re passing, though not always with fying colors…To date, the agency has largely been tracking the implementation othe program through data on unds spent and projects completed, but notthe program’s eectiveness as measured through on-the-ground resultssuch as habitat restored or municipal drinking water improved. Similarly,conservation organizations like ours are only able to track eectivenesson a small scale, by looking at individual projects (see description o newmonitoring program on pages 12-13). Thereore, it will likely take years be-ore we ully understand the long-term on-the-ground benets and/or draw-backs o this program. But in the meantime, we were able to take a prettyclose look at the implementation o the program rom both a regional andnational level.To get a sense o things, we scoured theagency’s data on Legacy Roads

then used thatdata to assess their implementation o theprogram. Some o the data in the charts belowis subjective, as we had to use our own judg-ment when categorizing projects that involvedmultiple tasks (e.g. both road decommissioningand road maintenance). Nonetheless, the datapresented are indicative o the agency’s overalldistribution o unds during the rst two yearso the program. Unortunately, the USDA hasnot yet publicly released the nal 2010 projectallocations. We did receive numbers or someregions, but were unable to get comparable datarom all regions, thus we don’t provide any 2010inormation here. We will update these charts onour website once that data is available.

1 For example, we used their nal project allocation listsfrom 2008 and 2009 to develop an analysis of how thefunds were distributed. There was some guesswork in-volved in this, as each project had to be put into only onecategory, even though many projects included multipletypes of work. In addition to the project charts, we alsocompared data from the annual Road AccomplishmentReports, the President’s Budget which reports actualaccomplishments, and the nal reports that the ForestService sent to Congress regarding their Legacy Roadsand Trails accomplishments in 2008 and 2009. All of theForest Service reports cited here can be downloadedfrom our website:http://www.wildlandscpr.org/legacy-roads.

This 2009 culvert to bridge conversion on the Poplar River, Superior National Forest, opened up a mile of trout habitat. Photos courtesy of Forest Service.

The Road-RIPorter, Summer Solstice 2010

— LRT Two-Year Evaluation, continued from page 3 —

AOP and Bridges

Aquatic Organism Passage (AOP) to restoresheries and aquatic connectivity was a prior-ity purpose or which Congress created LegacyRoads and Trails. I you add these two catego-ries together, the agency allocated ~29% o 2008and ~24% o 2009 unds to this type o work. Tobe clear, however, numerous bridge projectswere implemented more or saety than or AOPrestoration – you can see the actual breakdownbetween the two areas in the pie charts. While these AOPprojects have not all been implemented yet, between 1/4 and1/3 o the overall unds were allocated to this priority area.The Elk Creek Project on the Caribou-Targhee National For-est provides an excellent example o how xing one culvertrestored 14 miles o stream habitat or the protected Yellow-stone Cutthroat Trout.

Our Evaluation: Outstanding Effort

The agency breaks down spending into thefollowing basic categories:

•AquaticOrganismPassage(AOP):

culvert and bridgeupgrades and repairs to restore aquatic connectivity

•Bridges:

repairing or upgrading bridges or sh passageor to improve saety

•Decommissioning:

reclaiming unneeded roads (bothsystem and unauthorized) and restoring the aquatic andterrestrial habitat they disturbed

•Maintaining/Improvingroads:

perorming critical main-tenance or improvements on roads or saety or aquatic/hydrologic benets

•Monitoring:

monitoring the eectiveness o work on theground

•Oversight:

unds to the regional or supervisor’s ocesto oversee contracts, develop processes or distributingunds, etc.

•Planning/SurveyandDesign:

conducting environmentalanalyses or survey and design work or proposed work,which can include identiying a minimum road system,and determining the type and scope o work to be done

•Stormproofng:

basically a cross between decommis-sioning and maintenance. Roads are treated to signi-cantly reduce potential aquatic/hydrologic impacts– sometimes culverts are removed and the roads areclosed, but “stormprooed” roads remain part o theoverall system.

•Trails:

improving or maintaining motorized and non-motorized trails to enhance access and visitor experi-ences. Trails unding oten includesbackcountry bridge repairs andupgrades as well.

Decommissioning

Decommissioning was the other top priorityor Legacy Roads and Trails unds, with Con-gress explicitly stating that the entirety o theund was available or decommissioning purpos-es. We were disappointed, thereore, that only14-15% o the unds were allocated or this criti-cal and underunded work. However, becauseew orests have yet to do the necessary plan-ning to identiy their long-term minimum roadsystem, they do not have a clear sense o whichroads and needed and which are not, which canmake it challenging to allocate decommissioningunds eectively.When taking a close look at regional alloca-tions, we were extremely rustrated to see thatRegion 5 (Caliornia) spent only 4% o their 2008money, and 1% o their 2009 money on decom-missioning (see graph on next page). Their AOPand Bridge spending was also lower than ideal.This region likely skewed the national results, asthey spent 60% o their unds on maintenanceand stormproong combined.Most o the other regions took the roaddecommissioning task seriously, exemplied bya project on Upper Joseph Creek in the Wallowa-Whitman National Forest in OR. That projectreclaimed 7 miles o road and removed 22 cul-verts, thus improving conditions or Snake RiverSteelhead Trout. Wallowa Resources, OregonWatershed Enhancement Board, National ForestFoundation and the Nez Perce Tribe all providedadditional unding to support this project.

Our Evaluation: Average Effort (R5 needs serious improvement)

“Five Rivers Road Decommission” onthe Siuslaw National Forest, Oregon. Photos courtesy of Forest Service.