National forests feeling budget pinch

PORTLAND — The cash-strapped U.S. Forest Service can no longer afford to maintain many campgrounds and trailheads and has started ranking recreational sites for possible closure.

Oregon’s Deschutes and Winema national forests are among the first to go up for review, The Oregonian reported last week.

Forest Service officials say the crunch is partly a result of President Bush’s Healthy Forest Initiative, a push to thin flammable Western forests, which has diverted money away from the upkeep of forest facilities.

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

The moves underlines the hard choices facing the Forest Service in the agency’s centennial year.

“Trade-offs 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.”

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.

“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 Oregon group Wild Wilderness. “It’s the complete perversion of the meaning of public lands.”

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.