Put a Saw to Logging Giveaway

For decades, generous subsidies and credits have allowed loggers to crosshatch federal timberland with dirt roads so they can more easily haul in their chain saws and truck out cut trees. Under existing law, the logging company with the highest bid at federal timber sales wins the right to cut on public land. However, revenue to the Treasury from these auctions is reduced significantly by road costs. Timber companies that do their own road-building can deduct the cost from their timbering payments to the government. Often the U.S. Forest Service itself cuts these roads, at the behest of the loggers but with money from a direct federal appropriation. In all, taxpayers pay out or give back close to $97 million annually under this arrangement.

Congress has another opportunity next week, possibly its last this session, to trim taxpayer giveaways to timber companies working federal forest lands. It should not hesitate.

The road subsidy has created major environmental problems. Erosion from the increasingly dense patchwork of dirt roads threatens water quality and degrades wildlife habitat, a growing threat to federal forest land.

The responsibility for upkeep on the more than 380,000 miles of dirt roads has long fallen to the U.S. Forest Service, but that agency’s budget is woefully inadequate to the needs.

The companies’ road-building credit creates an incentive and subsidy for loggers to cut ever more trees. The program bestows federal approval on a most pernicious trade-off: future trees against immediate profit, an unwarranted subsidy to private industry.

The cycle can stop this year. In July the House of Representatives agreed to cutbacks in the road credit program and small reductions in the Forest Service’s own road-building activities. Next week the Senate will vote on a much better plan offered by Sen. Richard H. Bryan (D-Nev.). His amendment to the Interior Department’s appropriation bill would abolish the credit program altogether and channel more Forest Service money to fixing old roads than to clearing new ones. This proposal deserves support.