HELENA – A forest restoration project developed by government officials, conservationists, loggers and rural community leaders in western Montana could receive up to $91 million over 10 years under a new federal program, organizers said Monday.
The U.S. Forest Service’s Northern Region nominated the 1.5-million-acre Southern Crown of the Continent project as one of the region’s two public-private collaborative restoration projects. The other is Idaho’s 1.5-million-acre Clearwater Basin project. Both are considered high-priority areas to restore ecological health and function, Regional Forester Leslie Weldon wrote in a letter Friday announcing the nominations.
“These proposals represent a fundamental shift from traditional public involvement and resulting conflict, to collaboration and resulting cooperation, with more than 40 external partners collectively and unanimously supporting these proposals,” Weldon said in the letter.
The projects will compete with others from across the nation under the new Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration Program signed into law last year. So far, 26 proposals have been submitted and up to 10 will be selected this summer by an advisory council, said Bill Timko, deputy director of the Forest Service’s Forest Management division in Washington, D.C.
The Southern Crown of the Continent project covers the Blackfoot, Clearwater and Swan River watersheds — 70 percent of which is public land — and has been six months in the making, said Debbie Austin, supervisor of the Lolo National Forest. The 10-year plan calls for restoring 46,000 acres of forest land and 937 miles of streams, plus thinning brush to reduce the chance of fire on some 27,000 acres near rural communities, organizers said.
The plan would create some 170 full- and part-time logging, restoration and monitoring jobs. It would cut small- and medium-sized trees that can be used for lumber and biomass fuels, improve 280 miles of trails, remove noxious weeds on 81,000 acres and decommission some 400 miles of roads.
If picked, the project would be funded over its life by $37 million from a new Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration Fund, a $37 million match by the federal agency and its partners, plus up to $17 million in additional investments, said Scott Brennan, the Wilderness Society’s Forest Program director and, Austin, co-chairman of the group that developed the proposal.
Brennan said the Montana project fits in well with the new federal program, which aims to establish a new national approach to forest restoration emphasizing different groups working together. Conservationists, timber companies and rural organizations all had a hand in developing this plan.
“This proposal has several strengths, several things that distinguish it. It’s a very important place ecologically,” Brennan said. “It’s a place where, in my view, all of the criteria that Congress established scored very highly.”
Austin said that if the Montana restoration project is selected, parts of the program can be implemented through the Forest Service’s regular program of work. But the preference of everybody who developed the plan is to take the comprehensive approach detailed in the 10-year project, she said.