08 MARCH 2022 | MEDFORD, OR. — The Rogue River-Siskiyou National Forest will be receiving $30.4 million in disaster relief funds, of which not a dime will go to recreation programs, according to Virginia Gibbons, the national forest’s public affairs officer. “Recreation needs were not a high priority for this particular pot of funding,” she writes in a note. The forest applied for a quarter-million dollars to help maintain the trail systems impacted by recent wildfires, “but that piece of our proposal did not get funded,” she adds.
$27 million will be used for road and culvert repairs, and $3 million will go to the J. Herbert Stone Nursery to grow saplings that will be used for reforestation efforts. Gibbons says that the money can be used through fiscal year 2026, and that “we don’t see any potential for this money to not be utilized.”
There was no public involvement and projects were determined by an internal process. The funds were authorized by Congress through a 2021 disaster relief bill, which allocated $28.6 billion to federal agencies, and $710 million to the U.S. Forest Service. The legislation has latitude in it, but mandates $175 million must be used for hazardous fuels and $175 million for “high priority post-wildfire restoration for watershed protection, critical habitat, and burned area recovery.” Read the legislation here.
“This illustrates a vacuum we see in D.C. A lot of the movers and shakers in Washington see recreation as the Park Service’s bailiwick, and an afterthought of the Forest Service,” says the Club’s executive director, Gabriel Howe. “If the Wilderness Society, Pew, or one of the other heavy hitters were pounding their firsts for recreation, bills like this would include little carve-outs for our disappearing trails, campgrounds, picnic areas, waysides and fire lookouts.”
He says he’s concerned that local communities are losing their relationship with national forests. “All these places I visited growing up and inspired me, they’re all falling apart.”
You can read more about disaster relief funding in the Pacific Northwest’s National Forests here.
