Cuts in forest trail budgets on hold

After facing significant cuts to their budgets for trails over the next three years, national forests in Montana have had the funding restored to previous levels — for now, at least.

A new funding formula for how the Forest Service apportions the national trails budget would have amounted to a 30 percent drop in available trail funding in the Forest Service’s Region One, which includes Montana, the Idaho Panhandle, North Dakota and part of South Dakota.

“That’s been put on hold,” Region One spokeswoman Elizabeth Sloan said. “We’re going to take another tack, we just haven’t determined what that tack is yet.”

Trail budgets for the region’s forest units would have been unaffected for the remainder of the fiscal year ending Sept. 30, but Montana’s forests had been bracing for significant dips in spending starting in the 2017 fiscal year.

Congress annually appropriates money to the Forest Service, breaking that budget down by specific programs, including trails and other recreation categories. The Forest Service has historically assigned that trail funding to each region based on the number of trail miles in its forests.

“Based on that scenario, the Northern Region won, hands down,” Mary Laws, the Kootenai Forest recreation manager, said. “Other places, in California, Oregon, Wyoming, Colorado and back east, people were saying, ‘We might not have as many trails, but we have more people.’”

In response, the Forest Service began giving more priority to trail use last October with the start of the 2016 fiscal year.

Kent Wellner, the trail and dispersed recreation program manager at the regional office in Missoula, said the new funding formula didn’t favor Region One, where use statistics rank second-to-last within the nation’s nine regions.

“This is a pretty significant budget reduction for Region One trails,” Wellner said. “We’re going to look inside the region at what the best way, the most fair way is to allocate trail money.”

His office was able to stave off the cuts for the 2016 fiscal year by pulling money from other programs that hadn’t yet been designated for specific projects, such as funding for future bridge replacements.

“There are other forms of funding that can be used for trails and bridges, but there’s no regional reserve left,” he said.

With 1,841 miles of trails from Trout Creek to the Canadian border, the Kootenai National Forest’s trail budget had been projected to drop 10 percent next year, followed by an additional 10 percent drop in 2018.

Laws said the forest’s trail funding has remained consistent throughout the past decade and accounted for $395,000 of the forest’s $18 million budget in 2016.

That money helps pay a dozen employees who annually clear more than half the forest’s trail mileage, check post-wildfire areas for downed trees and focus extra maintenance work on high-volume areas such as the Ross Creek Cedars Scenic Area south of Troy.

The Flathead National Forest had expected to lose 25 to 30 percent of its trail dollars by 2018.

Out of its roughly $15 million annual budget, the forest currently spends $595,000 on its 2,049-mile trail system.

A 10 percent decrease in trail funding was expected for fiscal year 2017, which starts Oct. 1, followed by a further 15 to 20 percent cut the following year.

Forest spokeswoman Janette Turk said the new funding formula didn’t favor the Flathead, since more than half of its trails fall within the remote mountains of the Bob Marshall Wilderness Complex.

“It’s expensive to take care of trails in the backcountry,” Turk said. “You’re not using motorized equipment, you’re on horseback, and all of that is very expensive.”

The new formula gave some consideration to each forest region’s trail miles falling within the wilderness, but those rankings were only weighted at 12 percent. Trail mileage (not including snow trails) and trail use are each used to determine 44 percent of the regional allocations.

On April 15, a pair of press releases from Montana’s two senators announced the temporary restoration of trail funding.

“Montana’s National Forests and public lands are a treasured part of our state and today’s news ensures that Montanans will continue to enjoy our great outdoors,” Sen. Steve Daines, R-Mont., said in a statement. “This is a welcome step to see the Forest Service value Montanans’ feedback and I will continue to press the Forest Service for strong trail budgets for Montana each and every year.”

Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont., attributed the reversal to a committee hearing the week before, in which he criticized Forest Service Chief Tom Tidwell’s decision to implement the new funding formula. Tester also sent a letter to Tidwell urging the forest chief to restore the lost funding.

“These trails are critically important to our outdoor economy, and restoring these damaging cuts will allow folks to continue to explore Big Sky Country,” Tester said in a press release. “I appreciate the Forest Service taking another look at how important this is to Montana.”

Reporter Sam Wilson can be reached at 758-4407 or by email at swilson@dailyinterlake.com.