Nearly 200,000 acres in the Deschutes and Ochoco National Forests could be subject to road construction and logging as the Trump Administration moves to repeal 25-year-old protections on public forest lands.
The United States Department of Agriculture, the federal agency that oversees the U.S. Forest Service, announced on Aug. 18 a filing to rescind the 2001 “Roadless Rule,” which prohibited new road construction, reconstruction and timber harvests across more than one-quarter of national forest lands in the country.
The Forest Service published a draft Environmental Impact Statement on the proposed change Aug. 19 and opened a public comment period the following day. It closes on Sept. 21.
Agency leaders and timber industry groups say removing the rule would allow for badly needed wildfire fuel reduction work and introduce more local control over forest management. Environmental and conservation groups have blasted the move, saying it could spoil some of the last remaining relatively untouched landscapes while threatening wildlife and drinking water.
The roadless designation covers about 137,000 acres in the Deschutes National Forest — about 9% of the forest’s total 1.9 million acres. The forest lies west and south of Bend, stretching from the Metolius River and Mt. Jefferson area south past La Pine and east past the Newberry Volcanic National Monument.
Roadless designations cover about 6% of land in the 850,000-acre Ochoco National Forest outside of Prineville.
Local advocates say these roadless areas are some of Central Oregon’s crown jewels. They include Tumalo Mountain, some of the forests surrounding the Cascade lakes, trails near Tumalo Falls, forests surrounding the Newberry monument and Lookout Mountain in the Ochocos, the highest point in the range.
“It’s a lot of these really iconic spots,” said Fiona Noonan, wild lands and water program manager with Central Oregon LandWatch, a nonprofit environmental group. “They’re iconic in part because they don’t have roads going through them.”
The proportion of designated roadless areas in Central Oregon forests is smaller than others in parts of southwestern and northeastern Oregon, where roadless areas cover up to one-quarter of the land in some national forests.
Along with a draft Environmental Impact Statement, the Forest Service released an interactive map showing which lands would be affected should the roadless protections be repealed.
The federal government officially adopted those protections in 2001, but their inception goes back decades prior.
Congress passed the Wilderness Act in 1964, initially designating about 9 million acres of undeveloped land as wilderness — the most protective and restrictive land designation under the federal umbrella. Wilderness designations — such as those in the Three Sisters, Mt. Jefferson, Mt. Washington and Diamond Peak — prohibit motorized access, commercial activities, roads and structures.
In the 1970s, the Forest Service surveyed another 60 million undeveloped acres to determine if those should also be left as wilderness or opened for natural resource activity.
Protections for most of those lands were initiated by the Clinton Administration more than 20 years later. After a handful of lawsuits, federal courts repealed and reinstated the rule repeatedly over the course of another 10 years.
Unlike wilderness areas, roadless areas don’t strictly ban motorized recreation, said Sami Godlove, Central Oregon field associate with environmental advocacy group Oregon Wild.
But “for all intents and purposes, if you go into a roadless area, you feel like you’re in a wilderness area,” Godlove said.
Wildfire risks and Bend’s water supply
For proponents of rescinding the rule, far too many acres have been off-limits to roads for far too long. In a press release, USDA and Forest Service officials framed the roadless rule as an impediment to thinning overgrown forests likely to fuel large wildfires.
“Repealing the Roadless Rule is more important than ever because 24.5 million acres of the Wildland Urban Interface, where forests meet communities, are either in roadless areas or within a mile of roadless – making increased access a major public safety issue,” the Forest Service press office said in a statement to the Source. “Roads improve access for wildland firefighting when timing is critical and lives are at risk.”
In its Draft Environmental Impact Statement, the Forest Service wrote that getting rid of the roadless rule would provide the most local flexibility for managers to carry out wildfire risk mitigation.
At the same time, the Forest Service acknowledged that building more roads could actually result in more human-caused wildfires, citing a study linking greater road density to higher-frequency of wildfire ignitions.
The draft document also links to the Trump Administration’s directives to strip away regulations and ramp up timber harvest on public lands.
Amanda Sullivan-Astor, forest policy manager with Associated Oregon Loggers, a timber industry group, said the group supports removing barriers to forest treatments, both because of wildfire risk reduction and economic benefits for rural communities.
“Whether the work involves commercial harvest, non-commercial treatments, fuels reduction, road improvments or other forest health treatments, active management can help reduce the risk of catastrophic wildfire, improve forest conditions and protect critical access,” Sullivan-Astor said in an email.
Meanwhile, the debate over roads and wildfires has big implications for Bend’s main source of drinking water.
Roadless areas cover large parts of the Tumalo Creek watershed, where Bend draws 60% of its water supply. The City sees wildfire as a major risk to that supply. It’s a big reason why the City is planning a $60 million treatment plant expansion that hinges on a land transfer from the Forest Service. The project includes a new pretreatment system to remove wood, dirt and debris that could enter the stream after a wildfire.
Studies have also shown that forest roads threaten drinking water quality by increasing sediment, which can make the water harder to treat, along with hindering freshwater biodiversity.
“We’re concerned that any changes could negatively impact water quality,” Mike Buettner, the City’s public works director, told the Source. “Water quality starts at the source, and we’ve been beneficiaries of 100 years of protection in that watershed. We feel like that’s contributed to the high level of water quality we have here in Bend.”
In the last few years, Buettner said, the City had been in conversation with Forest Service officials about what rescinding the roadless rule might mean for the Deschutes National Forest and the watershed. But since last year’s cuts to Forest Service staff, conversations have shifted to “basic service levels,” Buettner said. He said the City has reached back out to the Forest Service to learn more.
According to Buettner, the road building ban has prevented the Forest Service from doing wildfire mitigation in the heart of the watershed, partially because another tactic — using helicopters to clear vegetation — is cost prohibitive. Allowing the Forest Service to go in and perform “ecologically sensitive” thinning work could be a silver lining to rescinding the rule, Buettner said.
“There’s sort of this double-edged sword,” Buettner said. “You’ve got the protection of no roads in this pristine watershed. But after 100 years we’re looking back thinking, how do we effectively do fuels mitigation here and protect ourselves long term.”
“Under these regulations, it’s quite difficult,” Buettner said.
Meanwhile, Bend Mayor Melanie Kebler said the City Council has been a “stanch supporter” of public lands since Trump was elected.
“We will continue to push back against these harmful changes to federal public lands policy,” Kebler said in an email.
The Forest Service is expected to release a final Environmental Impact Statement at some point in 2027.
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