For the past few months West End County Commissioner Bruce Martinson has been bringing up the plight of ill cared for Forest Service roads at the three West End township board meetings. The roads are used by loggers, tourists, fishermen, hunters, photographers and people headed into the great outdoors for a wide variety of reasons.
Martinson has worried that as the roads and bridges crumble, they will be taken out of service and become roadless areas, gone forever for the public to use.
With 2,482 miles of roads that fall under its care, the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) Superior National Forest Service staff have been hard pressed to provide or secure the necessary maintenance work that these roads and bridges need in light of ever decreasing funds it receives from the federal government.
In 2001 USFS Superior National Forest Service received the equivalent of $1,876,045 when adjusted to 2014 dollars for road/bridge maintenance.
This year $454,000 was appropriated, but Superior National Forest staff say 10 times that—$4,824,348— is needed in 2014 to properly maintain the many miles of roads it is responsible for.
This winter the USFS notified Cook County commissioners that the Temperance River Bridge on the 600 Road in Tofte would be closed to vehicle traffic effective May 1, 2014. The bridge, which is badly in need of repair, is only four miles from Highway 61 and is adjacent to the Sawbill Trail. Martinson said tourists, hunters, fishermen, leaf watchers and berry pickers use the bridge. The bridge will be open to snowmobile traffic in the winter, but not motor vehicles, Martinson said, and he worries that more bridges will be closed and more access points denied to people wanting to go into the wilderness if enough money isn’t appropriated for their upkeep.
To make his point, Martinson said that on the east side of Superior National Forest there are 19 bridges that are over 50 years old. A further lack of maintenance or replacement will cause the Forest Service to take more and more of them out of service as they continue to age, again taking away access for loggers, tourists, local residents, and firefighters who may need to gain entrance into a remote location to fight a wildfire.
Commissioner Martinson asked his fellow commissioners to support a resolution calling for the USFS to “properly maintain the roads within its jurisdiction and increase the future dollars budgeted for road maintenance within the Superior National Forest,” which the commissioners voted to support at their April 8 meeting.
The resolution was sent to the Eastern Regional Forester in Milwaukee and U.S. Senators Al Franken and Amy Klobuchar, as well as U.S. Congressman Rick Nolan.
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