Most people who enjoy national forests arrive by car and need a road to access public land. The current Forest Service road maintenance backlog threatens both our freedom to enjoy the national forest and the health of our forest and water.

Unmanaged roads are not only bumpy rides. They wash out and erode, polluting water, damage wildlife habitat and speed the spread of weeds. The current 380,000-mile Forest Service road network, an artifact of past land management strategies, needs a better, more modern balance.

The Forest Service has many miles of redundant, obsolete or unnecessary roads that are costly to maintain and do not serve the millions of people who visit national forests. American Whitewater, along with our partners in the Outdoor Alliance, supports a common-sense policy, including retiring unnecessary roads to limit environmental damage and focus scarce resources on maintaining the roads that best serve the public.

Currently, deferred maintenance is over $8.4 billion nationwide and increases annually as allocated funds fall far short of annual maintenance needs. This is intolerable, both for taxpayers and forest visitors.

A number of national forests have already set sound road maintenance priorities, but lack the funds to reach those goals. In the proposed 2008 Budget, funding for deferred maintenance is reduced by 25 percent. We can no longer afford to keep sweeping this problem under the rug -or the future costs will be much greater both in squandered tax dollars