Campgrounds, Bridges, Boat Ramps: What The Great American Outdoors Act Will Bring Idaho

Idaho public lands and forests are in line to receive $28 million for the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management to put toward improvements and upgrades through the first two years of funding from the Great American Outdoors Act.

Enacted in August 2020, the Great American Outdoors Act is a five-year initiative that provides about $1.9 billion per year in federal funding from 2021 to 2025. Funding is split between the National Park Service, U.S. Forest Service, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Bureau of Land Management and Bureau of Indian Education for projects across the country.

Public lands managers in Idaho say money allocated through the Great American Outdoors Act couldn’t be coming at a better time.

“The biggest impact from the Great American Outdoors Act, for us, is really the ability to improve recreation sites,” Bureau of Land Management Idaho State Director Karen Kelleher told the Idaho Capital Sun in a telephone interview.

“Idaho’s population is growing, and that was supercharged with COVID when a lot more people moved to Idaho and a lot more people discovered the outdoors,” Kelleher said. “The timing of the Great American Outdoors Act has been really fortuitous. We definitely had a significant backlog of work that needed to be done on recreation sites.”

For the 2021 and 2022 fiscal years, the Bureau of Land Management in Idaho has received a total of $11.4 million from the act, said Serena Baker, the BLM’s deputy state director for communications in Idaho. That money should allow the bureau to tackle 75% of its backlog of deferred maintenance at recreation sites, roads and facilities across Idaho.

“We couldn’t normally fund these projects, but it’s allowing us to do bigger projects,” Rod Collins, a deputy state director for the Bureau of Land Management in Idaho said in a phone interview.

View the full article from the Idaho Statesman here.