Roadless Rule Protects Drinking Water for Up to 2 Million People in Oregon
By various counts, up to 2 million people in Oregon get their drinking water from federally inventoried roadless areas in municipal watersheds. Cities like Salem, Eugene, Bend, Ashland, Baker City, Lake Oswego, Oregon City, Pendleton, and Portland all rely on roadless areas of forestland to filter and purify their drinking water before it’s treated for consumption.
Most of these cities have found ways to legally shelter their watershed from logging or other extraction. Portland’s Bull Run Creek reservoir is a model in municipal watershed protection, and Bend and Salem watersheds are sheltered by protective covenants, although not to the same extent as Portland. Eugene, population 172,000, is unique among Oregon’s largest cities in that so much of the McKenzie River watershed relies on informal partnerships with private landowners and the various REIT’s and TIMO’s that manage industrial forestlands there.
The limits of this model have been made apparent, recently, by the discovery that timber heiress Katherine Jones-McCann had constructed a sizeable compound directly adjacent to the McKenzie River without securing county permits. Luckily, most of the Eugene water supply comes from federally Inventoried Roadless Areas in the Willamette National Forest, notably the Hardesty Mountain Roadless Area some 25 miles southeast of the city.
The recission of the Roadless Rule, however, could mean that Eugene’s luck has run out. The experience of a several mall Oregon towns with watershed degradation from private lands logging—Rockaway Beach, Wheeler, Yachats and others--portends an uncertain future for Eugene.
The problem with recission is that, contrary to popular belief, there are already tens of thousands of miles of road on National Forest Land already. An estimated 370,000 miles of NF Roads already exist. This massive network of national forest roads is already too expensive for the U.S. Forest Service to maintain. Chris Wood, a former USFS senior policy advisor, recently told Outdoor Life that the service can only maintain about 20% of existing roads, with a current maintenance backlog of $10.8 billion. This was among the original considerations when the Roadless Rule was put into effect 25 years ago; there were just too many roads already.
Anyone who hikes, forages for mushrooms or hunts on public land in Oregon has seen how often logging roads can erode and even collapse into creek bottoms, inevitably clouding the rivers they feed. The gated roads I hike and forage in Lane County often require new maintenance annually. Shoulders erode every winter, sometimes dangerously. Culverts can be blocked, causing washouts, just as a matter of course. If USFS opens roadless areas to new roads and logging, municipal watersheds will suffer over the whole state.
As I said, my hometown of Eugene is in this exact situation. It is downstream from inventoried roadless areas that naturally filter surface water feeding the McKenzie River, Eugene’s sole water supply. And Eugene is not unique. A 2025 University of Washington study found that some 25,000,000 Americans depend on roadless areas to help filter their drinking water. Absent this natural filtration, many communities will struggle to purify public water.
For more than 30 years, Big Timber and Wall Street have hungered for old trees on public land. By feigning concern about wildfire and rural jobs, they’ve not only found a way to get at those trees, but to have the taxpayers pay the price. Please don’t let them get away with it! Uphold the Roadless Rule.