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April 12, 2005

U.S. forests look for sites to close down
The budget takes money away from parks' facilities to finance thinning flammable forestland
MICHAEL MILSTEIN

Your favorite national forest campsite will soon be competing for its survival, while the ranger station down the road may show up for sale on the Internet.

The U.S. Forest Service is ranking recreation sites such as campgrounds and trailheads for closure, because it can no longer afford to maintain them all. Oregon's Deschutes and Winema national forests are among the first nationwide to undertake the reviews.

The squeeze is driven in part because President Bush's Healthy Forest Initiative, a push to thin flammable Western forests, is diverting money away from the upkeep of forest facilities.

The Forest Service is also attempting to sell offices and compounds that bustled during the logging heyday decades ago but now sit idle.

Its officials hope cash from the sales will help keep other decaying facilities from falling apart.

The moves underscore hard choices facing the Forest Service in the agency's centennial year. Its vast network of rural offices and the most well-used array of campgrounds and other recreation facilities in the country must shrink in line with budget cuts by the administration and Congress.

"Tradeoffs were made to keep the priority on hazardous fuels," said Hank Kashdan, Forest Service budget chief. "The budget is tight, and we had to make tough calls and tradeoffs to keep the priority on other programs."

The public may not notice sales of scattered ranger housing, offices and warehouses around the West. Most of the properties lie outside national forest boundaries. But two inside national forests are being considered for sale because they lie next to holdings that are already private, officials say.

One of the more potentially valuable is a Washington ranger district complex covering about 35 acres on the south side of Lake Wenatchee in the Okanogan and Wenatchee national forests. Like many offices, it was emptied by consolidations as federal logging declined over the past two decades.

There may be more obvious changes in the 2,635 campgrounds, boat ramps, picnic areas and other recreation sites in Oregon and Washington national forests, and the roughly 16,000 such sites nationally.

None will be sold. But all national forests have been directed to put those sites through a rating system by 2007 that will assess their costs, popularity and how closely they match what each forest designates its "niche" audience.

Those ranking lowest may be shut, have their seasons trimmed or have services, such as garbage collection, cut back to bring spending in line with budgets dropping by millions of dollars a year.

Some suspicious of motives

"It is likely that most forests will have to make tough decisions to close some sites, curtail operations at other sites and decommission some sites in order to define a sustainable program," former Deputy Chief Tom Thompson wrote to regional foresters last month.

Others see darker motives. Starving the agency of cash forces it to keep only the most lucrative sites and run public lands like a commercial enterprise, they say.

"They will close those sites the public has always enjoyed but which they cannot afford because they are not profitable," said Scott Silver of the Bend group Wild Wilderness. "It's the complete perversion of the meaning of public lands."

The review approaches national forests as a marketing expert might. It directs forest staff to focus on their "recreation niche" or their forest's main attraction to the public.

A forest might identify its leading draw as white-water rafting, for instance, or backcountry hiking, said Kimberly Evart Bown, regional director of recreation, lands and minerals.

Its recreation sites will then be rated on how closely they match that niche. A campsite or boat launch along a river might rate high, while unrelated sites might fall lower.

In the end, a computer will rank sites based on factors such as how well they fit the forest niche, their importance to local economies and whether they duplicate services offered by nearby private facilities. Those ranking highest are first in line for funding.

"We don't have the money to sustain them all anymore, and we're trying to make sure our facilities best serve people who use them," Bown said.

Sites run by commercial concessionaires under contract with the government will be protected from cutbacks.

Few forests have completed the review, so it's unclear how many sites will be affected. But the erosion of money, despite added recreation fees imposed in recent years, suggest it could be many.

Oregon's Deschutes and Winema national forests started the assessments last year. They weighed costs such as of cleaning bathrooms and repairing picnic tables and water systems against the money they get to pay for it.

"If we can't do all that to standard, we have to shut them down," said Rich Kehr of the Winema National Forest in Klamath Falls. "There's a significant number of sites we are considering closing."

Forests will draft blueprints for how they will cut back sites to stay within their budget. They will then seek public input on the plans, and look for local groups that might help maintain sites to keep them open.

It's a more reasoned approach than struggling each year with ever-tightening budgets, said Kathy Ludlow, a recreation analyst with the Forest Service's regional office in Portland.

"We'll lay out a clear picture to the public about what we're facing," she said. "We want their ideas, too."

Forest recreation money shrinks

One aim of cutting facilities is to head off a long list of needed repairs that forests have repeatedly postponed. Backlogged repairs at recreation sites in Washington and Oregon cost $42 million, almost double what the Forest Service got in 2005 just to run the sites.

Forest campgrounds tucked along shady streams and elsewhere account for about three-quarters of the maintenance backlog, according to federal figures.

Funding for forest recreation in the Northwest also sunk by 14 percent since 2004 to less than $25 million in the president's 2006 budget proposal. Trail maintenance dropped 24 percent to about $7 million.

The Bush administration plans to cut money for maintaining all Forest Service facilities nationally by 46 percent, from $218 million last year to $118 million.

Programs within the Forest Service would have to begin paying to maintain their office space. A goal of the shift is to make the programs more accountable, so they eliminate unnecessary space and cut costs further.

The administration also hopes to offset funding drops with new legislation letting the Forest Service sell unneeded administrative facilities such as offices and housing. It would expand on permission Congress gave in 2001 to sell as many as 10 properties each year.

Public sites such as campgrounds would not be candidates. Instead, sales would target properties such as three houses in Sweet Home built in the 1950s where employees of the Willamette National Forest once lived. Some are advertised for sale on the Internet.

The inventory of buildings "made sense 40 years ago, but it doesn't make sense today," said Richard Sowa, director of engineering for the Forest Service's Pacific Northwest region. Forest Service staff in the Northwest has dropped by almost half since 1990.

"We just can't afford to keep up everything we have," Sowa said.

Selling excess buildings would raise an estimated $45 million in fiscal 2006 to help pay for keeping up remaining buildings, Kashdan said. It would also take aging buildings off the federal roster, reducing their drain on the budget.

Any sales would be subject to review to be sure the buildings are not considered historic.

In the Northwest, 51 sites with nearly 400 buildings such as offices, housing and warehouses have been marked for possible sale. Another 700 buildings are considered unneeded, but sit on forestland that will not be sold.

Comments (1) >>

Dakota E. Mills said:

To Whom It May Concern: I find the state of our country in a state of crises, when it foolishly retracks freedom from it's citizens, which it should always make a priority to come first when calculating expense. Our National Forests are our only escape from the 24-7 life we continue to lead, all for the sake of this country's economy. Please take time to think about taking such drastic measures, to cut costs. Sincerely, Dakota E. Mills

September 25, 2006

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