KNF's '10-percent projects' to start soon

With initial funding in place and contractors ready to roll, all Kootenai National Forest needs now is a little cooperation from Mother Nature.

When Montana’s cranky spring weather lightens up, heavy equipment operators will head out to spots in three areas of the forest to get started on improving roads.

It’s all part of the first wave of funding through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act – more commonly known as federal stimulus money.

“They wanted an early release of funds that can immediately go out and try to create jobs,” said Paul Stantus, who is overseeing stimulus projects on the forest. “And the Kootenai got one of those projects. There weren’t very many in the region given out.”

As announced roughly three weeks ago, the Kootenai was awarded money that will be used for road maintenance – including blading, hazard removal, drainage and surface repair, removal of stumps, reinforcing slopes and culvert repair.

The Forest Service refers to the first round as the “10-percent projects.”

“We have to commit those funds within seven days of them telling us and it’s very difficult to do that because you do that under contract,” Stantus said. “The only way to do that was using existing contracts. We have renewable contracts with a number of contractors for operating road maintenance equipment.”

The Rexford/Fortine, Three Rivers and Canoe Gulch districts will all see work coming their way. The $120,000 in funds awarded to the Kootenai will be divided up three ways among those areas.

“We told them up front that we’ve got snow on the ground and we can’t go to work right now,” Stantus said. “But they know they have this coming so they can rent additional equipment if they need to and make plans for hiring.

“It’s weather-dependent but we can usually get out on the ground toward the end of April,” Stantus added.

Paul Bradford, Kootenai National Forest supervisor, said the funds are not designed for any specific projects, but just road maintenance-type work in general.

Stantus said he’s been asked if the money will go toward work that the Forest Service would contract for anyway.

“I said, ‘no it isn’t’ … we’d like to have much more road maintenance funding than what we get,” he said. “This will enable us to get to more roads and do more road maintenance.”

Nationally, the Forest Service was allocated $1.052 billion. The remaining 90 percent of that money will go toward a variety of projects that the national office has been reviewing. The Kootenai and other forests around the country submitted a list of work they would like to see get done. The range of eligible projects did have criteria to meet.

“The other 90 percent of the money, that’s what we don’t know about,” Stantus said. “It was project specific … the selections will be made at the Washington office level. They gave us guidelines and we proposed specific-type projects. Those projects were maybe thinning, piling projects. The idea of these projects is to put people to work and create jobs.”

Bradford expects to hear something within the next couple of weeks.

“From what I understand, they’ll send down kind of a draft decision list that we will then verify or validate on whether or not we really can accomplish the projects that were selected,” Bradford said. “What we’ll try to do is move through that validation process and it will be all across the agency. We’ll move through that as quickly as possible.”

Bradford said the ultimate decisions would be made at the Washington level with little, if any, decision-making at the regional level. The job at the regional level is simply to validate project feasibility.

“It’s work that we’d like to get done … it’s kind of a wish list of good work that we could do,” Bradford said. “In some cases, it might be five, 10 years before we get the work done – thinning or whatever – work we would eventually get done. What this could do is accelerate this on the ground.”

One component of the criteria involved unemployment rates. Sanders and Lincoln counties in western Montana have the highest unemployment rates in the state – a factor that could bode well when it comes to funding.