The North Dakota State Department of Health has analyzed and rated water samples from 141 of the wells in the area. The rating shows that 0% were excellent, 5% were good, 31% were satisfactory, 48% were usable but undesirable, and 13% were unusable of the 141 wells. As I mentioned once before, the initial project of the Indian Health Services to put wells on the reservation was done in 1962.

Since then

the IHS has completed approximately 600 wells at a cost of $1,600,000.00. of these wells, the above mentioned quality is predominant and we also find that many of these wells give the residents no water at all due to their wells drying up. We find that we are continually expending money to replace pumps, pressure tanks, hot water heater fixtures, plumbing, water softners, iron filters, and etc. due to the high mineral and iron content of the water in the area. This is a continual expense for the people, tribe and the U. S. Government. In 1972, the Shell Valley Aquifer was located by the U.S. Geological Survey. It is located 6 miles southwest of Belcourt, North Dakota. The water quality is one of ten best in the state of North Dakota. In 1977, the tribe constructed a water transcission line from the Shell Valley Aquifer to the city of Belcourt, North Dakota with funds furnished by the EDA and Indian Fealth Service. The water used from this aquifer is of a quality that only requires chloration for water treatment. This water line is the first phase of development of the total rural water system for the reservation. The present line serves approximately 3,000 people on the reservation. What we would propose is to expand on the present system using the excellent water from the aquifer to serve the rest of the reservation and adjacent areas. We would add another 6,000 people immediately to the system with this present project with the system being designed to serve a total of 12,000 people in and adjacent to the Turtle Mountain Indian Reservation.

Dakota.

In 1974, Rolette County had the lowest per capita income in the State of North Most of this burden is experienced by the Indian people. The Indian people represent over 60% of the County's population but realize only 20% of the County's income. In 1975, 40% of the Turtle Mountain Reservation families were earning less than 3,500 dollars. Primarily due to a lack of employment and the large percent of the young people in the population, the employment ratio of population in Rolette County is low 27.3 percent. In April 1978, 3,468 Indians residing on the Turtle Mountain Indian Reservation were in the labor force age. Of these 2,934 were classified by the Bureau of Indian Affairs as employable. Of these people 4.2% are classified as unemployed. Between September of 1977 and August of 1978, the Social Services Department of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (the same as the welfare departcent of a County) there was 6,984 families receiving social services money, and/or commodities. This is a monthly average of 582 families on the reservation.

Because of the above mentioned statistics it would not be possible to finance this project by normal means. If a 75% grant for the project was received and a 25% loan paid for the rest of the project, a monthly charge in excess of $30.0 per user would be required. This burden would be excessive and the numbers of socioeconomic people who could hookup would be so low that the project would not be feasible. It the construction cost is totally paid for, a monthly service charge of less than $9.00 would be required for maintenance of the system. The above mentioned statistics show you that our people could not afford to construct the system without your help. It seems logical that the Federal Government is already spending a large sum of money to put in wells on the reservation that are really poor in quality and quantity. We would hope that we could get the $6,000,000.00 requested for this project and in turn alleviate that water problem and give them good quality and quantity of wat.

The Turtle Mountain Housing Authority has spent over $1,200,000.00 since 1962 and adding that to the $1,600,000.00 that the Indian Health Service has spent on wells we find that through that period it has spent over $2,800,000.00 on the reservation for a poor quality of water. If you take the present value of that $2,500,000.00 it could be said that we could have constructed the rural water system just with the funds presently spent on the reservation for poor water in the past. The cajority of the people who have poor water in their hones must transport their laundry off the reservation to get it done, and this is a weekly ritual which has also proven to be expensive. Most people spend between $5.00 to $10.00 per week on laundry alone, this does not include the cost of transportation to and from the laundry facilities. With the present energy crisis, and the high cost of gasoline, it zakes good business sense to conserve our energy resources when and where possible.

It is very

With the projected growth rate of the reservation and the high density of people in a small area, we feel that it is imperative that the rural water system be constructed immediately. To delay any further would only cost additional money and continually inconvenience our people with bad water and low supply. frustrating for us to see that what we really need and realize that the low incomes on the reservation do not allow us to go to the Farmers Home Administration and request loan funds so that we can move ahead on this project since our people would not be able to afford to pay it back. If you visit our reservation you will find that we have continually tried to upgrade the living conditions on the reservation. We have brought the water from the Shell Valley Aquifer to Belcourt to furnish good water for that community. We are continually upgrading the road system on the reservation and have just recently completed the shopping center in Belcourt on the reservation. Unemployment, low incomes, and water are major problems on the reservation. The completion of this $6,000,000.00 rural water system would allow us to expend more of our efforts and help the unemployed and low income people find better jobs with higher wages.

If this rural water distribution system is constructed, I feel confident that the system we already have can operate and maintain this rural water system. The tribe presently has a public utilities commission which is in control of the present water and sever system in Belcourt, North Dakota. The Commission is responsible for all maintenance and upkeep, connections and collections of fees and all other aspects of operating this utility. It is intended that the rural water system would also be operated by this body. All homeowners which hookup to this system will be charged a monthly water user's fee which will cover the cost of operations and maintenance.

As Chairman of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewe Indians I can speak for our people and can say that they would appreciate any consideration and all cooperation you can give us on this project.

If you have any questions or require anything additional from us please do not hesitate to contact me immediately. We are alerting you of our intention of bringing before your committee this testimonial of our tribal need. It is our hope to have our state representative testify before your committee in our behalf.

STATEMENT OF THE LEAGUE OF AMERICAN WHEELMEN

The Heritage Conservation and Recreation Service and its predecessor, the Bureau of Outdoor Recreation, have been very helpful in encouraging recreational bicycling in many parts of the country. Their efforts have aided both in creating off-road trails, particularly on abandoned railroad rights-of-way, and in designating trails on the existing network of roads. Notable among the latter have been the East Coast Bicycle Trail, which opened in 1976 between Richmond, Virginia and Boston (and is currently being extended) and the recently mapped system of touring trails in the state of Georgia.

For off-road trails, the pressing need now is to create as soon as possible a technical support system to enable states to take advantage of the vast mileage of rail abandonments. The prospect

of increased deregulation of rail service, and of consequent further abandonments, makes this need even more urgent. Much of the required analytical work has already been done in the 1977 study, "Availability and use of abandoned rights of way" under Section 809 (a) of the 4-R Act. The states have to be aided in creating the policies, the administrative structures and the procedures that will conserve these rights-of-way often by conversion to trails before these linear corridors are chopped up and lost forever as a public resource. In addition, better methods should be developed for public participation in rails-to-trails projects, including effective ways of dramatizing the benefits of such projects.

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Equally important is the proper development of the public road network as a major resource for recreational bicycling. This may be the single area of greatest potential return on investment of the recreation dollar, and it needs much more attention. Components of this approach would include:

(a)

(b)

(c)

(d)

(e)

Evaluation, mapping and potential signing of long-distance

trails.

Evaluation and mapping of local loop trails to serve the needs of novice and more advanced cyclists.

Creative approaches to overcoming gaps and obstacles in the road network from the nonmotorized user's viewpoint (e.g. river crossings and controlled-access roads that ban bicycles). Improving access to the passenger rail system for travel to and from the end points of bicycle tours.

Experimentation with street closings and other ways of raising the attractiveness and safety of urban recreational bicycling. A third area of great concern is the improvement of bicycle access for the carless to various recreational resources, including parks. The National Urban Recreation Study rightly recognized the access problem of those without automobiles, but did not take the next step of examining the bicycle's potential and problems as one potential access mode.

The comments above have some implications for the budget request of the Heritage Conservation and Recreation Service:

The budgeted amounts for technical assistance in the regional offices and for resource area studies on trails probably are too low to do justice to the vast opportunities and urgent needs in this field. Adequate funds should be made available for technical assistance

in mapping the network of public roads for their suitability for bicycle touring, and for a clearing house for bicycle touring maps.

There should be a flexible fund to provide seed money, with a 100% federal share if necessary, to support innovative programs in recreational cycling street closings, safety training combined

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with short tours and with various kinds of instruction (e.g. nature study), and other suitable programs that may cost little but cannot readily find local support. Each such venture should have a built-in provision for evaluation and publication of the findings.

As the principal national organization for bicyclists, the League looks forward to working with the Congress and the Department of the Interior in fostering broader opportunities for recreational bicycle use by cyclists at all levels of proficiency.

STATEMENT OF THE INDUSTRIAL FORESTRY ASSOCIATION

Mr. Chairman and Members of the Committee:

My name is W.D. Hagenstein and I reside in Portland, Oregon. I am a professional forester. I am a registered professional engineer in Oregon and Washington and a registered professional forester in California. I am Executive Vice President of the Industrial Forestry Association which has been working for a permanent timber supply for the Douglas Fir Region for forty-five years. I have been with the Association for thirty-eight years and its manager since 1949.

Industrial Forestry Association Members grow and harvest trees and manufacture lumber, pulp and paper, veneer and plywood, shingles and shakes, hard and soft board, poles and piling, doors, furniture, and other essential forest products. They operate more than four hundred wood-processing plants and manage more than 5 million acres of privately-owned forests in our Region. They employ 70,000 people whose paychecks total a billion dollars per year.

Our Members are divided nearly equally between landowners and non-landowners. Virtually all of them are dependent in part on outside sources for raw material for their manufacturing plants. Most of our non-landowning Members get from half to all of their raw material from public lands by bidding competitively on timber sale offerings. In the last five years, our Members have purchased about half of the national forest timber offered for sale in Western Oregon and Western Washington. They have also provided the market for much of the leftovers from national forest timber processed into lumber and plywood in the form of chips used for pulp and paper in our Region.

I have appeared before with this Areas of Agreement Committee to support a better balanced and better funded program for our national forests. I'm glad to do so again. Parenthetically, I'd like to say it was just 32 years ago that I first appeared before a Committee of Congress to support improved forestry on the national forests. I've done so frequently because the segment of the American economy our Association represents is heavily dependent on national forest resources for basic jobs and payrolls.

My colleagues from the forest industry and I have divided up the things we want to discuss with you today. My topics are roads and reforestation

First, I'd like to discuss roads. They are the key to successful protection and management of the some 90 million acres of the national forests dedicated to the practice of forestry. The Forest Service has repeatedly testified before Congress that it still needs to build upwards of 150,000 miles of roads to complete its essential transportation system. Thus it was a shock to us to learn with this roadblock to better management and provision of its rightful share of the Nation's timber supply that the Administration budget request for national forest road construction for 1980 was $128 million less than this year's, when it should be $10 million more if the Forest Service is to fulfill the goal of the Resources Planning Act.

Please bear in mind that our Industry and every thinking citizen supports the President's program to slow down inflation, but not building the roads to allow getting the full allowable cut of timber from the national forests on the market is inflationary. Why? Because it adds to the already serious artificial timber shortage the Government has been inflicting on the American consumer in the last decade. What's worse is that not keeping up with an orderly schedule of road construction requires the Forest Service to "rob the frontend," as we foresters say, by not having flexibility good forest management requires. When the roads are in place the Forest Service can sell the worst timber first and save the younger more vigorous timber for later decades.

In my last several appearances before your Committee I've explained the wantonous waste of the 6 billion board feet of Western national forest timber which is lost annually because of trees dying from old age, killed by insects and disease, laid flat

by wind and burned by fire. Only 10 per cent of this is being recovered for use now. With the national forest land available for forestry completely roaded at least half of this waste could be reached and salvaged. That would build 300,000 homes each year for Americans. It would provide 90,000 jobs alone in logging and manufacturing. It would put $200 million in the Treasury and share $65 million with the counties for schools and roads.

The sooner the national forest road system is completed the sooner the national forests can be providing the 19 or 20 billion board feet of timber the Nation needs from them every year. We're only getting little more than half of that now. Doubling the timber output of the national forests would help make us self-sufficient for timber once again. That should help our balance of payments problem too because we're now buying about the same amount of timber annually from Canada as the deficit of the full national forest timber potential. But without roads, it can't be done. The Congress should set a goal of completing the national forest road system within a decade. If you don't, you can tell America's young families their homes are going to cost more yet because there won't be enough building materials to go around, And, gentlemen, the beautiful thing about all this investment is that if you insist on efficient business management of the national forests, you can proudly tell your colleagues and constituents it didn't cost them a dime because you should ultimately see net annual receipts from national forest timber sales exceeding the cost of growing timber on this great national estate.,

Second, I'd like to say a word about reforestation. Parenthetically, I've had some firsthand experience in this basic forestry practice. Our own Association is the only one in the Nation which has been growing trees in non-profit nurseries for reforestation of our Members' tree farms. We started this in 1941 and to date have provided some 60 companies enough trees in the last 36 years to plant more than 800,000 acres. Our segment of the Industry is reforesting more than 150,000 acres of freshly harvested land each year. Where plantations are less than fully successful our tree farmers replant them and are doing so on more than 40,000 acres a year. They also are catching up on the backlog of lands left idle by fire and other causes in the past and in 1977 in Western Oregon alone reforested 28,000 acres in this category. At the rate they are catching up with this chore another six years will see our total industrial tree farm area of 7.6 million acres all occupied by trees growing tomorrow's homes, paper and other consumer essentials.

In view of this progressive record of reforestation on private lands, you won't be surprised that our reaction to the Administration's reduction of a third in its request for reforestation on the national forests was shock, bewilderment and dismay. When the Oregon and Washington Congressional Delegation reacted similarly, Assistant Agriculture Secretary Cutler called it "phony." He claimed Pacific Northwest concern over reforestation of idle national forest lands was an overblown issue and that the backlog of unrestored lands was exaggerated. Well, gentlemen, we don't know whether the exact acreage figure is correct, but the Forest Service knows or should know. All I know as a professional forester whose 40-year career has been intimately concerned with working every way possible to assure the people of our Region and the Nation with an adequate timber supply, that the way to do it is to keep our forest inventory shelves fully stocked by having trees growing on every acre the good Lord provided us for that purpose. Secretary Cutler, himself a trained forester, must know that if we don't get the new trees in the ground, we can't justify the harvest of the old ones now. If the national forests aren't replanted--especially the idle lands, many of which have been without useful trees for a half century or more--then the harvest of their present mature inventory must be reduced. This will add to the Nation's artificial timber shortage both now and in the future. It's surely no way to slow inflation.

Finally, may I once again make the plea that the Resources Planning Act of 1974 was the finest addition the Congress has made to putting pants on the national forests since your predecessors of long ago created the National Forest System. It offers the best chance for scientific land-use planning to achieve a balanced program so that our national forests can serve their citizens-stockholders more fully in every respect than they have to date. It's crystal clear to me as a lifelong student and practitioner in forestry that as long as the national forests are not selling their full allowable harvest nor salvaging the maximum annual mortality possible that we're not building roads fast enough. And as long as there are non-stocked or poorly stocked productive lands not growing trees or enough trees, we're not reforesting fast enough. Therefore, your Committee needs to find out what the Administration's real intent in management of the national forests is by making it prove we don't need more roads and more reforestation to help it put the damper on inflation to which both it and the American people are dedicated. The Nation can make no finer investment in its own future than putting enough funds into better forestry on our national forests. It's the most important way to better housing, better employment, better recreation and better returns to the stockholders of our national forests--and that's every American--regardless of where he or she lives.