This agreement will have projects ranging from watershed restoration, soil stabilization work with roads and trails, and fuel reduction work by harvesting timber

The U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service, Region 8 (Southern Region), awarded the South Carolina Forestry Commission a $635,250 cooperative agreement under the Good Neighbor Authority program (CFDA 10.691) effective July 10, 2025, with completion targeted for September 30, 2032. This agreement authorizes the South Carolina Forestry Commission to conduct landscape-scale restoration and land management projects on federal lands in South Carolina, generating revenue that is reinvested into forest management objectives.

The cooperative agreement funds a comprehensive suite of forest restoration and infrastructure improvements, including watershed restoration, road reconstruction and maintenance (surface replacement with gravel and culvert pipe installation), heavy brushing and limb removal along roadways to facilitate logging vehicle access and reduce fuel loading, ditch bank re-establishment and culvert cleaning, trail repairs to restore damaged tread and footbeds, and bridge replacement on damaged trails. These projects collectively enable increased timber harvesting activities through improved accessibility to timber stands requiring thinning, while simultaneously addressing soil stabilization, fuel reduction, and public safety concerns. The work encompasses both infrastructure development to support forest management operations and environmental restoration driven by flood damage recovery and land health priorities.

This consists of road reconstruction by replacing the surface of the road with new gravel and culvert pipes to allow for logging vehicles in the national forest. Heavy brushing of the roads by removing overhanging limbs that can be in the roadway to prevent damage to log trucks that will traveling forest roads for harvesting activities and to reduce fuel loading along road edges. RE-establishing the ditch banks that have been filled with sediment from the flooding rains and cleaning out of the culverts. Trail repairs to put back the foot bed of the trail that had been washed away by the heavy rains along with bridge replacement on the trails that have been damaged or washed away along the trails for the safety of the public. This work will allow for more timber harvest activities as IT will allow for accessibility to the timber stands that are in need of thinning.