[Congressional Record Volume 149, Number 89 (Tuesday, June 17, 2003)]
[House]
[Pages H5415-H5416]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                            SAVE OUR FORESTS

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Pursuant to the order of the House of 
January 7, 2003, the gentleman from Oregon (Mr. DeFazio) is recognized 
during morning hour debates for 5 minutes.
  Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Speaker, the Bush administration is about to open up 
our national forests to a new phase of road building. Now, in 
preparation for commenting on this, I had my staff check because the 
last time I had checked with the Forest Service, they had an 8 billion, 
not million, $8 billion backlog on maintenance on Federal forest roads. 
Hundreds of thousands of miles of road, crisscrossing the United 
States, the West, and yet they have an $8 billion backlog.
  Now, the Forest Service said yesterday said, no, no, no, the 
Congressman is wrong. It is not 8 billion. We just recalculated it. And 
I thought, well, this will be good news. It is $10.5 billion. The 
Forest Service has a $10.5 billion backlog on Forest Service roads. Of 
the 382,000 miles of roads, only 21 percent meet their maintenance 
standards; 50 percent are declared unsafe for driving; and 50,000 miles 
of roads are missing from the data. They are unclassified. They might 
be there. They might not. They might be passable; they might not. They 
have not had a chance to go out and look lately. Yet they are proposing 
under the Bush administration to begin a new phase of road building. 
Well, how is that?
  Well, we heard a couple of weeks ago they will uphold the Clinton 
Roadless Rule. And I had some folks in Oregon say to me, We cannot 
believe that the Bush administration will uphold the Clinton roadless 
rule. And I said, Well, there were an incredible number of comments on 
that rule, over 2.2 million, over 600 public meetings. It was hard 
fought, well constructed, well thought out, and it was very popular 
among most folks in the western United States. And yet, I said, it does 
seem unusual.
  Well, it turns out, no, they are not really going to uphold the 
roadless rule. They will immediately put in place exceptions for the 
Chugach and the Tongass Forests in Alaska, 300,000 acres. Except 
300,000 acres of timber harvest with roads in the Tongass Forest will 
affect well over a million acres of land with fragmentation and eroding 
and other problems, perhaps even more. And, of course, there is the 
expense that comes with that. And then in the Lower 48 they will have a 
national policy, sort of, except they will develop an exception process 
where Governors can ask for exceptions on Federal lands for the 
roadless rule.
  What kind of national policy is this?
  At the same time they are staring in the face of an over $10 billion 
backlog, which they have no intention of dealing with because, of 
course, there is no money to deal with thinning or fire protection or 
even fighting forest fires, and particularly low on the totem pole is 
road construction. Every year the road maintenance unanimous money is 
stolen and used to fight fires, and they do not put the money back, and 
they never get around to it; and the backlog has grown by $2 billion 
since this President has been in office.
  The roads are unsafe. They are crumbling. They are causing all sorts 
of problems with erosion into pristine streams. They need culvert work. 
They will erode worse without the culvert work. And yet this 
administration wants to go on another road-building binge to fragment 
up the little bit of remaining roadless area in the United States. Just 
like Gale Norton recently said that all of the wilderness areas under 
study by the BLM would no longer be studied for wilderness value. The 
Forest Service, under the direction of this administration, wants to 
make certain they put in enough roads before this President leaves 
office, to fragment that up so those areas can never again be 
considered for roadless or wildness designation.
  This is wrong-headed policy at the wrong time. This administration 
should do what it said it was going to do, uphold the roadless rule in 
all of

[[Page H5416]]

the States, and then it should begin to deal with the very real needs 
of the Forest Service, to deal with its maintenance backlog. Some of 
these roads need dramatic amounts of work in the short term. I have 
some in my district that have been promised for several years that 
roads, washed out in flood 5 years ago would be rebuilt; and yet the 
money, as I say, each summer has been taken away and spent on fighting 
forest fires because there is not enough money in the budget to fight 
forest fires because, of course, the administration has no money 
because they have given it away in tax cuts to all the rich people. So 
this is a pretty strange way to run a country and make a policy on 
Federal lands that are so precious to the heritage and to the 
environmental future of our Nation.

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