Another victory over the warlord of environmental destruction....GAYLE NORTON!
House Cuts Funds for Tongass Roads
By Paula Dobbyn
Anchorage Daily News
Thursday 17 June 2004
The U.S. House of Representatives approved a bipartisan measure late Wednesday night to end
federal funding for logging roads in Alaska's Tongass National Forest.
Sponsors say the amendment, if approved by the Senate, will save taxpayers $35 million, the
amount the Forest Service estimates it loses annually on Tongass timber sales. Critics see it as a
backhanded attempt to shut down the Tongass timber industry.
House lawmakers approved the amendment to the Interior appropriations bill on a 222-to-205 vote.
Reps. Steve Chabot, R-Ohio, and Robert Andrews, D-N.J., sponsored the measure.
Alaska's congressman, Republican Don Young, called it an "ill-conceived, ill-thought and very rude
amendment."
"This is an easy cheap vote for somebody from Ohio, somebody who doesn't know squat about the
people of Alaska," Young said.
Environmentalists were delighted.
"It's a helluva good first step for us. We have a long way to go before we can bring real reform to the
Tongass but this is really significant," said Tim Bristol, executive director of the Alaska Coalition, a
conservation group. "People realized that this was really about saving taxpayers' money. Despite Don
Young's best efforts to threaten, insult and misinform, the majority of Congress voted the right way on
this one."
The measure would bar the Forest Service from spending any money next year on designing or
building new logging roads in the Tongass. The 17-million-acre temperate rain forest in the Southeast
panhandle is crisscrossed by more than 4,500 miles of logging roads constructed over the last five
decades.
The Forest Service and the timber industry say new roads are needed to reach old-growth stands of
cedar, spruce and hemlock located in remote reaches of the Tongass. Logging opponents say the
Forest Service has a huge maintenance backlog and can't take care of the existing roads.
In floor debate, the amendment sponsors said the Forest Service's management of the Tongass
amounts to corporate welfare. For every $36 million it spends administering timber sales annually, the
agency collects a little more than $1 million. That's government waste at its worst, said Andrews.
"The issue here is whether you favor throwing good money after bad," he said.
Rep. Richard Pombo, R-Calif., who opposed the amendment, said if the Forest Service's road funds
get cut off, the agency would not be able to fix culverts, repair storm damage or maintain access to
visitors centers.
"This is much more far-reaching than even the authors envisioned," Pombo said.
Andrews denied that, saying the measure simply prevented the Forest Service from building new
logging roads.
J.D. Hayworth, R-Ariz., said the vast majority of the Tongass is off-limits to logging so it doesn't
make sense to pass a measure that would hurt the existing industry, which has suffered major job
losses in the last decade.
"We've already locked away this environmental treasure," he said.
The debate over whether the government should subsidize the Tongass timber industry is not new.
Taxpayer groups, along with hunting and fishing organizations, have long opposed how the Forest
Services manages the Tongass and they came out again in support of the Chabot-Andrews
amendment in letters to lawmakers.
"Although elimination of this program alone will not solve our nation's enormous deficit, getting rid of
these special-interest subsidies is a good first step in the effort to restore fiscal sanity to
Washington," wrote Paul Gessing, director of government affairs for the National Taxpayers Union.
Rep. John Peterson, R-Penn., said if hunters support ending logging or road building in the
Tongass, they're misguided.
"I don't know how many of you hunt, but my hunters hunt where people timber," he said.
"Old-growth forests don't have a lot of wildlife because there's no food there."
The Tongass, which represents the country's biggest block of intact old-growth forest, supports
world-class populations of bear, deer, wolves, bald eagles and all five species of Pacific salmon. It's
widely considered the brightest gem in the country's network of national forests.
Dennis Neill, a Forest Service spokesman, simply chuckled when asked if old-growth forest
supports abundant wildlife in Southeast Alaska.
The Chabot-Andrews amendment has a ways to go before it could affect ground conditions on the
Tongass. The Senate still has to pass the legislation and then President Bush, a supporter of the
timber industry, could veto it.
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