The message is clear, reduce road maintenance costs, minimize impacts to the ecosystem by preventing vehicle access, mitigate for soil displacement and geologic mass-movement and place land back in production. All federal agencies have heard these messages from management at the highest level and strongly from the public. The challenge then is to balance the multiple use needs and objectives from all concerns to address this issue. Access to private lands, established facilities, recreation, administrative/management uses and fire suppression are a few of the factors supporting the need to keep open and maintain existing Forest Service System roads.
For the past few years the Applegate Ranger District has taken this issue seriously and has integrated road decommissioning opportunities into the NEPA planning effort. The problem of managing various road decommissioning NEPA decisions across the entire district was identified early and the need for a database to track decisions and schedule, budget and prevent conflicts was developed.
A strategy evolved to cover most of the district under various pre-planned project NEPA processes and accomplish an integrated Access and Travel Management plan in lieu of one larger effort for the Applegate Adaptive Management Area. The Rogue River National Forest Engineers were accumulating plans to decommission roads from all four ranger districts and attempted to standardize the information.
An Oracle database was developed on a PC-based computer for basic data input, form and report generation and linked to a map-based GIS system. Later this database was integrated into a computer interface called INFRA on the Forest Service corporate IBM computer system. This new system now allows the road managers the opportunity to quickly and accurately schedule and budget for road decommissionings. Out-year scheduling is now easier and roads planned to be decommissioned will be implemented on time.
The interdisciplinary teams (IDT) assigned to planning activities across landscapes on the Applegate Ranger District have also evolved to meet this challenge and opportunity. A basic shift in assumptions has occurred. Historically the IDT has relied upon the road managers for recommendation to close certain roads and many times have suggested not to decommission some of the roads. The IDT did not question the original list of roads and may have missed opportunities to consider other roads. Recently, the IDT has started with a complete list of roads to consider for decommissioning within and near the Planning Area and have removed them from the list only after discussing and agreeing upon them. The results have been a dramatic increase in the number and miles of roads proposed for decommissioning.
Closing existing Forest Service roads affects many people in different ways. By utilizing current funded NEPA processes this task has become more responsive and less conflicting with other resources and objectives. The public involvement component of the process has assisted in making informed and comprehensive decisions.
This approach has been successfully tried on the Applegate Ranger District and may need to be further evaluated to determine if it could be applied on the entire Applegate Adaptive Management Area. This expansion of the experiment could include all four of the administrative units within the AMA (Applegate Ranger District of the RRNF, part of the Galice Ranger District of the Siskiyou NF, and parts of the Ashland and Grants Pass Resources Areas of the Medford District of the BLM).
Even if adequate funding became available for a comprehensive, AMA-wide Access and Travel Management effort, continual and site-specific tracking of roads is needed. This computer-based tracking system has been designed to be flexible enough for the management of existing and future roads for any agency.
Tom Lavagnino
December 1998