Road Building Follies

By Bill Schneider, 11-24-05

Not every day is like this, but today I am a conservative, economic-minded pragmatist. Let’s just call me an Official USA Taxpayer. And the subject of economic significance is building more roads into the last roadless areas in the Northern Rockies.

As background (and briefly because it’s a long, complicated story), the Bush Administration more or less dissolved the Clinton-Era Roadless Rule, which prevented road-building in the last wild lands in the West. In Idaho, for example, that’s 9.3 million acres. In Montana, 6.4 million acres. The two states actually share thirty roadless areas along the joint border. Most of this land should be protected as Wilderness under the Wilderness Act of 1964.

This roadless rule controversy has been covered extensively in the press, and now, most people think the federal government gave the responsibility for deciding what to do with the last wild lands back to the governors of the western states. In reality, the governors can only advise the feds on what to do. The federal agencies retain the final say on what happens to these lands, which are, by the way, still federal lands, not state lands. Whatever any governor recommends must be approved or can be rejected in Washington, D.C.

What the feds have done, however, is burden the states with a huge process they didn’t have anywhere near the resources to manage. And why should they? These are federal lands.

Right now, both Idaho Governor Dirk Kempthorne and Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer have asked the counties for recommendations on what should be done. Then, sometime in 2006, the governors will send a recommendation back to the Beltway.

Any taxpayer could interpret this as a huge waste of money, and it would be hard to argue against this. But here’s the part that really chokes up this taxpayer.

Looking forward a few months, it’s likely some counties will recommend more roads, and it’s equally likely some governors will agree and send this recommendation off to D.C. But that’s not really the real issue. Why, I must ask, is any level of government wanting to build more roads when we currently aren’t adequately maintaining at least 80 percent of the massive amount of roads we already have on federal lands?

In Montana, Governor Schweitzer also asked the counties if they would maintain the roads. I’ll go out on a limb and bet county commissions aren’t likely to agree to spend local tax dollars on maintain federal roads. Likewise, the state probably won’t do it. And the federal government already isn’t doing it. So the end result is another unmaintained road that shouldn’t have been built in the first place.

“This ought to be the simplest decision ever for the federal government because they’re not even maintaining one-fifth of the roads they have right now,� notes John Gatchell, conservation director of the Montana Wilderness Association. “On a scale of things, how important is it to build a new road into the last good elk country. The elk hunters understand that building that road is the kiss of death for quality hunting.�

The current process is simply too much bureaucracy to reach a common sense decision. It’s like deciding whether or not to get a second mortgage on your house to buy Suburban when you can’t afford gas for the three vehicles already sitting idle in the driveway. And to make this all worse, the FS just had its budget for road maintenance slashed another 23 percent to save money for other federal programs like slowing the growth of the suddenly skyrocketing deficit.

“If you have a limited amount of money,� asks Gatchell, “do you want to spend it building expensive road systems that will be fought by hunters and hikers or do you want to spend it on maintaining the roads we have right now?�

It’s hard to believe we’re even thinking about it—and spending huge amounts of my precious tax dollars on a process that’s going nowhere, and doing it very slowly and expensively. In the post-war road-building binge ending in the early 1990s, the federal government, mainly the Forest Service, quadrupled the miles of roads on federal lands, but now, it’s time to accept reality. The FS should have already accepted the reality that the road-building days are all but over. Instead, the FS should embark on an aggressive process of turning roads into trails, which are much cheaper to maintain.

Nobody in the Forest Service or the hierarchy of motorized recreation organizations will stand up on a stump and say this, but interest in building new roads is only about wilderness prevention. You know, build a road we don’t need or won’t maintain so a wild area can no longer be considered for Wilderness.

On second thought, it might have nothing to do with Wilderness. Instead, it’s pure economics. In past decades, we subsidized (an taxpayer expense, of course) roads for logging companies, but now, we no longer need to continue this because for various economic reasons, timber cutting has tailed off in the Northern Rockies.

In summary, we now only maintain a small minority of our public lands roads, and we have no real reason to build more except to prevent wilderness designation, so why even partake in a expensive process to decide whether we should build more roads into the last roadless areas. Instead, let’s make the smart economic decision and designate these areas as Wilderness so we they can better bolster the struggling local economies of the New West. This is not that hard to understand! [End of article]