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BUREAU OF LAND MANAGEMENT ROADS – PART II

THE BLM ROAD MAINTENANCE PROGRAM MOVES TO VANCOUVER

FROM AN INTERVIEW WITH BILL MALTBY, SEPTEMBER 2010

The Western Oregon Roads Maintenance Program had been headquartered in the Federal Highway 

Administration Division Office in Salem, Oregon, since its inception in the mid 1950’s. By 1972 that 

was about to change.

William E. Maltby had taken over the 

BLM roads program in 1969, and recalled that 

at that time all of the BPR construction program 

“was done out of the division offices.” The 

facility that now houses the Western Federal 

Lands Highway Division in Vancouver, 

Washington, was “originally...the survey and 

design office,” he said, but by 1972 “they’d 

formed the Federal Projects Office as a 

construction and design and survey” operation 

in the facility. The Federal Projects Division 

Engineer was moved from the Regional Office 

to Vancouver, and “at the same time they moved 

us in because they said this is part of the Federal 

Lands Program rather than the Federal-aid 

program.”

As the maintenance operation had 

grown, management of the operations in the five 

BLM districts had been split between two 

general foremen, Ken Schearer and Evan 

Wruck. But with 99 employees and the 

continuing addition of more and more timber 

access roads, Bill thought this operation would 

be even more easily managed “if we had a 

foreman in each of these districts in charge of all 

the units within that district.” He said “we 

correlated with those people all the time, as well 

as the BLM district managers, of course.”

Staff in the various districts of the BLM 

agreed with the changes he proposed, “so we 

took this to the Regional Office and I said, ‘the 

BLM is behind it. They feel that the 

coordination between us and them would be 

great.’”

When they moved the office from 

Salem to Vancouver, Schearer and Wruck both 

opted to retire. Two new general foremen were 

brought in, Max Foster and Stan Pierce. “Max

had been the maintenance foreman in the Reedsport

area and Stan was the maintenance foreman in 

Roseburg,” Bill said.

Once these Lead Foremen for FHWA were 

located in offices correlating to each of the five BLM 

districts, “it really worked well,” Bill said. “They 

could coordinate....on a week by week basis....They 

could go to the area managers that were handling the 

timber movement and talk to them about where they 

were moving and what the project was and get some 

advanced information...

Wells Creek-Vincent Road, early 1970’s.

Photo courtesy Bill Maltby.

“Along with this, the good thing about it was, 

if the BLM had some work outside of Western 

Oregon” or in other land management programs, 

FHWA people could be sent in to do the work. “We 

went over into eastern Oregon to the Lakeview area 

and built a little airport for them. We went over into 

the Prineville area and redid the road along the 

Deschutes River, the Deschutes River Road.”
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Bill Maltby pointed out the Rogue River in southwestern Oregon “where they had the big burn.” These were BLM roads, he 

noted, including Cow Creek, “all the way from Riddle down here to Galice.” Galice is just to the east of the Shady Branch 

Recreation Site, #45 on the map, and Riddle is just southwest of Myrtle Creek. 

BLM Recreation Guide for Oregon, © 1978, courtesy Bill Maltby.

When there was a big fire in the Rogue 

River area, crews from the FHWA “built a strip 

up in the area above the Rogue River, up above 

Galice” to facilitate bringing in the fire crews. 

FHWA also had a number of cats and could bring 

them in, and Bill noted “we were doing a lot of 

fire suppression work” on the Rogue and at other 

fires at different times. 

Under the BLM general lands program 

they worked on projects in the Steens Mountains 

and in Burns and Baker City. “We sent a crew of 

three graders and operators over into the 

Burns/Lakeview area to blade the public lands 

roads,” he said, noting that “those districts over in 

Eastern Oregon district had very little personnel 

for road maintenance.” He recalled one tour he 

took of the public lands in Eastern Oregon. “I 

took a drive from Frenchglen...(The road) went 

across...to Lakeview, and I’ll tell you—that was

an experience....I had a regular sedan, and I said, ‘I 

need a Jeep for this thing.’”

In the Eugene area in 1972, heavy storms 

caused extensive flooding and a lot of erosion. “We 

did a lot of the work that was involved in that 

reconstruction of some of the roads after that flood.”

But one of the biggest benefits of the 

coordination between the different units was the 

ability to move equipment between districts. “We 

would set up a crew to do the asphalt paving and 

we’d move equipment from the districts,” he said. 

“It took a fairly good size crew to do it,” and with 

enough coordination they could avoid taking a 

“district out of operation when we did the 

surfacing.” Resurfacing was a good sized portion of 

their work. “We’d probably do two or three 

thousand miles a year,” he said, “because about 

every five years you had to put another lift of asphalt 

on or do some really major repairs on it.”
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At one point, changes in government 

travel regulations prompted changes in operations. 

Bill explained that “in the early days we traveled 

half on government, half on individual’s” time. 

When the new regs were implemented, employees 

had “to travel totally on government time, and 

some of these fellows had to travel 30-40 miles.”

At the time, some employees “were living in the 

nearest towns to their shops. So we went to the 

Regional Office and said ‘look, why can’t we 

have these crew members...drive their vehicles to 

haul people out from the city out to the shop.’” If 

an emergency came up, the foreman had his own 

vehicle and wouldn’t “have to drive 30 miles up 

in the woods to get to the equipment that he needs 

to use. He can go directly from the city to the 

work location.” Once those changes were 

implemented, it saved a lot of travel time.

Above and below left: Wells Creek-Vincent Road, early 1970’s. 

Photos courtesy Bill Maltby.

something, we said, ‘go ahead.’” The presence of a 

trailer and a caretaker was enough. “It worked really 

great. It stopped a lot of the pilfering that was going 

on and some of the damage to some of our heavy 

equipment that was parked in the yards.” 

The unique needs of the work brought 

opportunities for improvement. “Max Foster

invented a unit to put on a grader; called it a wing.” 

Bill explained how the wing collected the gravel into 

a berm along the edge of the road and brought it 

back across. “They gave him an award for that.”

The operation remained in FHWA’s 

Vancouver facilities throughout the duration of the 

Western Oregon Roads Maintenance program, and 

Bill Maltby was given the first Region 10 Service 

Award in recognition of his leadership of the 

program. Then, after many months of political 

maneuvering and negotiating between the two 

agencies, the program was finally moved out of 

FHWA and into BLM. Reluctantly, Bill Maltby 

moved with it.

Bill noted that when each shop or field 

office was set up, it was located as close as 

practical to the high use timber areas, but once the 

timber was removed from that area, he explained, 

the next area that is “high use is 30 miles away.”

Throughout these operations, he noted, 

equipment was customarily left in the field. 

“You’re in the timber land; normally no people 

are in there banging around.” Then when the gas 

crisis occurred, “we had some problems with fuel 

theft...” They selected some of the more 

vulnerable and heavily used locations that were 

“out in the timber, out away from the city,” and 

offered an opportunity to a crew member to live 

on site. That way they could “put a trailer there... 

and put a person on the property,” he said. 

“We didn’t say to the individual, ‘you 

have to be there 24 hours.’....If a weekend came 

around, and the guy wanted to go for a trip or

Max Foster, second from left, receives an award from Regional 

Administrator R. M. Phillips for his equipment design 

suggestion December 8, 1969. Bill Maltby is behind them, in 

the center. Photo courtesy Bill Maltby.
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“I was lucky enough to get the first Region 10 service award ... I had some hair then,” he quipped. Presenting the award in

February 1972 is John Mors, Director, Federal Highway Projects. At right is Ken Oviatt.

Photo courtesy Bill Maltby.

Coming next: The final installment in this series will take a look at the changes made to the Western 

Oregon Road Management program as it transitioned from being a part of the Federal Highway 

Administration to becoming a part of the Bureau of Land Management.

Stories in this series have been developed by Marili Reilly from interviews and correspondence. 

Retirees who would like to share their memories may email marili.reilly@dot.gov.