Swan View Coalition has issued a new report showing the Forest Service is slow and inept at repairing its ineffective road closures and is grossly underreporting the percentage of its closures that are likely ineffective!
SVC revisited 10 of the 141 road closures it found ineffective in 2022 in the Swan Valley Geographic Area, the 10 highlighted in photos in its 2023 report “Road Hunt.”
Only one of the closures had been “repaired,” by closing the gate and locking it. Another was made worse as the road closure boulders the public was already illegally driving around were removed. To make matters worse, the latter boulder closure has been being trespassed since at least 2016, in spite of claims that the Forest Service “corrects the problem as soon as they are able.”
The new report, “Roads Revisited,” serves as a supplement to “Road Hunt” and documents with photos and narrative the fate of the ten ineffective road closures revisited two years later.
The new report also provides an update to ongoing litigation over the Flathead National Forest's road closure program. The U.S. District Court in Missoula, MT, again faulted the Forest Service's and Fish and Wildlife Service's abandonment of the Flathead Forest Plan's prior Amendment 19 full road reclamation program and their reliance instead on entrance-only road closure devices that even the agencies show are not entirely effective at preventing public trespass shown to harm threatened grizzly bears.
The new report also follows the ongoing saga of how the Flathead National Forest switched from monitoring road closures to see if they are “effective” in 2020 to monitoring if they are “functional” in the years since, with no documentation whatsoever for how it then gets from “functional/not functional” data to annually report the percent “effective/ineffective.” FNF data shows that a substantial number of closures the agency found “breached” by motor vehicles in 2021-2023 were nonetheless listed as “found functional.”
In the absence of a clear methodology for calculating road closure ineffectiveness rates, which the FNF itself says increased from 4% to 7% from 2021-2023, the new report uses FNF data to show those ineffectiveness rates likely have instead increased from 17% to 31%.
