The U.S. Forest Service is ignoring a growing crisis of national forest road disrepair, while supporting road subsidies to the timber industry that will only compound its record $10 billion dollar road maintenance backlog.

In addition, Undersecretary of Agriculture Mark Rey announced last week that a decision is coming soon on the administration’s policy on roadless area protection in the lower 48 states. Whatever the administration decides will have an important impact on the future maintenance backlog. Opening roadless areas to construction would almost certainly compound the future backlog problem.

As TCS has discovered, the maintenance backlog on Forest Service roads has now surpassed $10 billion. Each state in the top ten for largest maintenance backlogs also has greater than one million roadless acres. Ending the Clinton-era roadless policy will open up millions of forest acres to road building and increase the backlog, while doing nothing to deal with the existing problem. It’s like souping up a car that doesn’t have an engine.

It should come as no surprise that the timber industry will be the big winner if forests are reopened to road building. President Bush has never shied away from helping out his industry buddies, and Undersecretary Rey is himself a former timber lobbyist. If it’s not bad enough that we practically give the timber in our forests away, we also pay for the roads to access that timber. From 1998-2002, the forest industry received $140 million in taxpayer money for new road building.

There is little doubt that the administration wants to end the roadless policy, one of the most visible policies of the Clinton administration. It has already exempted one of the biggest prizes for the timber industry, the Tongass National Forest in Alaska. In a decision announced two days before Christmas, the administration cleared the way for road building and set the stage for 50 timber projects in the Tongass. This despite a $900 million road maintenance backlog in the Tongass and $30 million in annual losses from timber sales. American taxpayers are paying while the timber companies are playing. If this is any indication, we should expect more of the same in the lower 48.

Our nation’s forests cover an area approximately the size of Texas, yet the system of roads that crisscrosses them is more than twice as long as the U.S. Highway System. This makes the Forest Service responsible for an enormous roads system that it has proven it cannot handle. According to an analysis by the Office of Management and Budget, the Forest System “has been unable to demonstrate that it can maintain its current infrastructure needs.”

All the blame does not lie with the Forest Service, however. The administration does not take road maintenance as seriously as it does road construction. The president’s fiscal year (FY) 2005 budget calls for a 68 percent reduction in spending on deferred maintenance. In FY 2004, he proposed zeroing out the program. The Forest Service cannot fix a thing without the money to do it.

The solution to the maintenance backlog problem is obviously not more road building. It does not take a math degree to understand that adding more roads when there is not enough money to maintain current roads will result in an even bigger maintenance backlog. Common sense calls for the Forest Service to require road repair before new construction and for Congress to end sweetheart subsidies to timber companies to build more roads. Instead of finding ways around the roadless rule, the administration would best serve taxpayers by making it law and focusing on finding solutions that will reduce the maintenance backlog.