By Jenny Neyman
Photo by Jenny Neyman, Redoubt Reporter. A bull moose browses along the Sterling Highway last winter. A stretch of road between Mileposts 58 and 79, slated for an upgrade, is a particularly active spot for wildlife crossings and vehicle collisions. The Kenai National Wildlife Refuge and state Department of Transportation are trying to agree on what to do to decrease those collisions.
Redoubt Reporter
Ironically enough, the progress report was where progress got tripped up on a project meant to decrease the number of wildlife-vehicle collisions on the Sterling Highway.
The report was issued at the conclusion of a Sterling Highway Wildlife-Vehicle Collision Study, covering Mileposts 58 to 79, from the east entrance of Skilak Lake Road to just east of Kenai Keys Road outside Sterling. Agencies involved in the study need to sign off on the report and its findings to move on to the design and construction phases of the highway rehab project. The project would re-pave that section of highway, add some passing lanes and address the growing problems of large wildlife — moose, caribou and bears — crossing and being hit on the highway.
For the differences of opinion holding the project up, there is agreement on one thing — something needs to be done with that stretch of highway. That, at least, gives Rick Ernst, wildlife biologist with the refuge, hope for a project that’s been nearly a decade in the making.
“I think the Department of Transportation agrees that we don’t want to do nothing, and the refuge and all the agencies involved I’m sure don’t want to just do nothing,” Ernst said. “But it’s trying to decide on how much we’re going to do that’s at issue.”
Viewpoints collide
Nine years ago, state DOT sent the refuge a letter, saying it was looking at repaving a portion of the Sterling Highway, Mileposts 58 to 79. Traffic volume was increasing, as were the number of collisions between animals and vehicles on that section of road.
At statehood, the federally managed refuge granted the state an easement for the highway cutting through the refuge. One of the stipulations was state DOT needs the refuge to sign off on any highway projects happening on refuge land.
The refuge doesn’t oppose the highway revamp. New pavement, wider shoulders and passing lanes would better facilitate the increasing traffic on the highway, but the project also needs a way to reduce wildlife-vehicle collisions in order to truly be safer for drivers, Ersnt said. The refuge is tasked with protecting the interests of the environment and wildlife on its lands, so any proposed collision mitigation efforts need to work for drivers and be healthy for wildlife, too.
To figure out what options would fit the bill of being effective and protective, an interagency work group was formed in September 2005, with representatives from the Federal Highway Administration; Alaska DOT; Alaska Department of Fish and Game; Alaska Division of Public Safety; the nonprofit Alaska Moose Federation; and Ernst, representing the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
For the study, the group gathered data on the number and location of wildlife-vehicle collisions along that stretch of road, established a hotline where drivers could call in and report where and when they’ve seen wildlife along the highway, and tracked the migrations of GPS-collared moose and caribou, to see where and how often they crossed roads.
After two years of study, a progress report was issued summarizing the study results. From the findings and research into wildlife-vehicle collision mitigation efforts that have proven successful elsewhere, Ernst believes the best option is to construct underpasses along the highway where animals can safely cross underneath the road.
In order for the project to move forward, all members of the interagency work group need to sign off on the progress report and agree to a plan for mitigation efforts. Several revisions later, the last one issued in February 2009, and that still hasn’t happened.
“This is probably the sixth draft,” Ernst said. “We’ve made numerous revisions, where all the agencies involved made comments and it’s been rewritten several times. This, we were hoping, was the document that everybody could agree on. All the agencies have tentatively agreed to it other than state DOT.”
At issue, Ernst said, are recommendations to mitigate wildlife collisions, especially along a seven-mile stretch of the highway where the highest number of wildlife crossings and collisions were recorded.
“What we were tying to impress upon them is the current best practice for spacing of wildlife crossings for large animals is 1.2 miles between crossing structures,” Ernst said. “They’re proposing one within a seven-mile stretch of road.”
Another meeting was held Nov. 18 to try to come to an agreement over the project’s wildlife collision mitigation efforts.
“We’re just trying to come to some consensus on what we can do to make the highway safer for the people and wildlife,” Ernst said.
A consensus was not reached. The refuge would like to see a total of eight underpasses along the highway revamp project, with moose-proof fencing put up in between the underpasses to funnel animals to the crossings. Ernst said DOT is proposing just one — replacing a culvert where the highway crosses the east fork of the Moose River with a bridge that would allow large-animal crossings underneath it. Other than that, the idea is to fence the high-crossing stretch, with no other spots for animals to get across the road.
That’s unacceptable, Ernst said.
“I’ve told DOT this until I’m blue in the face. Yeah, they could fence this whole stretch of highway and we could say now we have no more wildlife-vehicle collisions, and from a safety aspect, the project would be a big success. But from the biological perspective, what we’ve done is cut the refuge into two smaller pieces. And whether bears or caribou or moose can survive as well is questionable, so we’re trying to maintain the habitat connect between the north and south halves of the refuge by putting in crossing structures so animals can stay off the highway yet still get to the other side of the highway.”
Cutting wildlife’s habitat range in half could have serious consequences, Ernst said.
Photo by Jenny Neyman, Redoubt Reporter. A sign on the Sterling Highway near the east entrance of Skilak Lake Road asks motorists to call and report wildlife sightings near the road.
“You get a whole slew of different ecological impacts where you may have less genetic diversity, moose or caribou populations that become smaller because they’re not crossing the highway, they’re stuck on one side, and eventually that population may become extinct,” he said.
The refuge is not going to agree to a project that doesn’t preserve wildlife migration, Ernst said. Until the refuge gives its OK, no work will be done to that stretch of road, but that’s not a good option, either.
“The worst part is the traffic volume is going to continue to increase,” Ernst said. “I’m sure our wildlife-vehicle collision rate is going to continue to rise with higher traffic volumes. The other concern that the refuge has is as traffic volume rises, some animals are going to prefer to not even approach the highway. You’re going to get moose or bears or caribou that may stay on one side of the highway versus the other.”
Mike Hall is the state DOT representative in charge of the project. He said he recognizes the importance of animal migration and wouldn’t propose to just fence the entire corridor. DOT is looking at a bridge over the east fork of the Moose River that would accommodate animal passage. But other than that, DOT is still considering options.
“I think it will be a combination of the underpass and fencing and crosswalks. Sometimes the details take a little while to work out. We need to get a concept kind of laid out,” Hall said.
He said DOT is trying to balance the costs of efforts to mitigate wildlife-vehicle collisions with the results and benefits of such mitigation measures.
“We look at it from a different standpoint. The refuge has their mission, we kind of look at it from a cost-effective, crash-reduction (standpoint). We’re working toward an agreement and trying to work through that process,” Hall said.
“If you’re trying to reach an understanding of why we may look at this through different pairs of glasses, we have responsibility for all these state roads through the region. Some of these have a higher crash history. You have to apply the dollars for mitigation where they’re most needed, and it may not be this project. What you do is look at it from a cost-benefit standpoint — how much money am I willing to expend to achieve what benefit? And the benefit may be crash reduction, and you can assign a value to it and you can do a calculation. Our traffic engineer is looking at that and running through those calculations.”
Who foots the bill?
Re-paving 21 miles of highway, adding passing lanes and widening shoulders is no cheap endeavor. Ernst said state DOT had a handout at the Nov. 18 meeting estimating the highway construction costs at $40 million. Hall said he’d rather not comment on project cost estimates at this point. The state draft 2010-2013 Statewide Transportation Improvement Program listing for the project estimates it at around $30 million, including Moose River bridge work. Ernst estimates the wildlife crossing mitigation efforts at issue — eight animal crossing underpasses and fencing along the seven-mile stretch generating the most concern — would cost another $9 million.
Ernst said he recognizes the resource challenges DOT faces, but doesn’t think that argument flies in this situation because the Federal Highway Administration would provide most of the funding.
“Federal Highways said all of the recommendations are reasonable, that we’re not asking for pie in the sky for mitigating the highway for wildlife. And they can fund all of the mitigation through their various funding programs, but DOT refuses to use those moneys to pay for the mitigation,” Ernst said.
“My biggest complaint is that Federal Highways is paying for the vast majority of this project. The problem being that DOT doesn’t want to use some of these funding sources because that takes away from money they would put toward other projects,” he said. “It’s virtually all Federal Highway Administration money being spent on a national wildlife refuge. If DOT is not willing to do mitigation on a national refuge with federal funds, where would they be willing to do mitigation?”
About 90 percent of the funding for highway projects in Alaska comes from federal funding, with about 10 percent from the state. A portion of the federal funding is flexible, giving the state some leeway in where the money is spent. But by and large, federal funding is approved for specific projects outlined and prioritized in the state’s STIP list, and funding comes as a reimbursement. The state presents a project on the STIP list, the Federal Highway Administration approves it, then the state has to show the feds that the project was done basically as planned in order to get the federal funding as a reimbursement, said Dave Post, central region planning manager for DOT.
“The feds have to go ahead and approve what you intend to spend their money on. It has to be appropriate to the STIP program,” Post said. “The feds, you tell them what it is you intend to do with the money, you do what you said you were going to do, they review it, then they reimburse you on it and let you move on to the next step.”
So it’s unlikely DOT would propose a project with wildlife-mitigation components that appease the refuge, get approved for funding from the Federal Highway Administration, then decide to do something else with the project, because that would run the risk of losing the federal reimbursement money.
But what may happen is DOT doesn’t include all the mitigation efforts the refuge would like to see in an effort to keep costs down on this particular project, keeping in mind all the other projects needing funding. There’s a finite amount of money available to Alaska from the Federal Highway Administration each year, so DOT tries to prioritize where and how it gets spent. DOT could propose to spend $49 million on the Sterling project, complete with all the wildlife mitigation efforts the refuge would like to see, or it could propose to spend $40 million on just upgrading the highway and replacing the Moose River bridge, and apply for that extra $9 million to another highway project needing funding.
“We can’t really say just because it’s federally funded, the feds are paying for it so we can do as much as we want. We have other federal aid projects that have mitigation needs, as well,” Hall said. “(The mitigation efforts) have the potential to be fairly costly. From our crash-reduction standpoint, they don’t seem to be warranted. We’re just looking at it a little differently than Fish and Wildlife Service is, but I’m optimistic we’re going to come together on it.”
Projected standstill
The next step is for state DOT to submit a proposal with mitigation efforts, which Ernst expects by Dec. 7.
“Once we get that, we’ll have to either tell them yes or no, and then let the chips fall where they may,” Ernst said.
Ernst said the decision won’t be up to him, so he can’t say whether a compromise would be acceptable, or what form that may take.
“The ball’s in their court to either respond to our regional director’s letter (recommending the mitigation efforts) or send us a new proposal that has all the mitigation in it, or we’re probably going to say no to giving them any permit to do the work at all. I guess then, I hate to say it, but it’d probably be a matter of once enough accidents occur that DOT’s going to do something, or if they get sued over an accident. Because we’re clearly not going to let them just fence the refuge. That’s one of our Congressional purposes, is to conserve fish and wildlife populations and habitat, and the highway is clearly impacting that goal.”
Public impact
From the refuge’s perspective, the highway and its lack of wildlife-mitigation structures have a significant impact on the refuge, Ernst said. That perspective has been debatable, however.
Five years ago, when the interagency group was put together for the collision study, the project had to go through a National Environmental Policy Act review, since federal dollars were being spent, Ernst said. The refuge was not counted as a cooperating agency in the development of the NEPA document, so although the refuge got to comment on the NEPA review, it didn’t get to have a direct say in it.
Through the NEPA process, Federal Highways and state DOT requested and were granted a categorical exclusion from the process being open to the public and from needing an environmental impact assessment or full-blown environmental impact statement on the highway project, because the project wasn’t expected to have any significant impacts to the refuge, Ernst said.
“The refuge disagreed with that wholeheartedly, but even though it was federal dollars on a national wildlife refuge, we were not a cooperating agency,” Ernst said. “We made comments on their draft categorical exclusion document, they addressed some comments and some they didn’t agree with and signed this document. We disagreed with it, but there was nothing we could do about it at the time.”
If the categorical exclusion hadn’t been granted, the public would have been more involved in the process and able to weigh in on the matter of wildlife-mitigation efforts, Ernst said. DOT did hold one public meeting about the project, but no one showed up. The meeting was on a Saturday in July, Ernst said, which may help explain the lack of participation.
Ernst said he’d like to see the project be more open to the public, especially since the public has been asked to participate in the study by calling in wildlife sightings. He can’t release the progress report or its findings, for example, until all agencies involved sign off on it.
If and when DOT and the refuge agree on mitigation and the project moves forward, the NEPA document will have to be reviewed, since it was signed back in 2005. Ernst said the refuge hopes to be counted as a cooperating agency this time.
“We’ll push to have an environmental assessment or environmental impact statement and get more public involvement in the process,” Ernst said. “Now, because of the study and summary of data and new information from the motoring public, we think it’s clear that the categorical exclusion that they signed is no longer valid.”
Hall said DOT is planning to have a public involvement component to the process, once they get to the design phase.
“Yes, people will have the opportunity to weigh in on it,” Hall said. “We’re hiring a design consultant and they’ll have a public involvement task,” Hall said. “Reaching out to people who use that road is going to be a challenge because the peak traffic is in the summer months when the salmon runs are occurring and people are driving down from Anchorage to fish. How do we get them involved, too? But there will be a public involvement process. Exactly what that is I’m not sure right at this point in time.”
Public input, and especially a potential environmental assessment process, could tack on extra months, seasons or even years to a project that Hall said he’d like to start working on in 2011.
Still, Ernst and Hall said they’re hopeful the project will get done, in a way that works for drivers and wildlife. Even though the progress report has as yet failed to progress to the next stage, the fact that the study was done in the first place is progress in itself, Ernst said.
“It’s frustrating, but I expected it. That’s the way the ball bounces on highway projects. I guess I’m hopeful because it’s probably one of the first times that Federal Highways and the Department of Transportation have funded a pre-construction study. It’s actually probably one of the first in the country where there’s been some wildlife studies done before a road project is done. Most are always after the project’s been built.
“We’re making progress, we’re talking. It’s still wheeling and dealing. We’ve got to come to some agreement, so I’m hopeful we’re going to get there. It’s just going to take a little more time than I had hoped.”
The refuge is still collecting motorist observations of wildlife from MP 58-79 of the Sterling Highway. To report a sighting, call 262-2300.
