LAND FOR SCHOOLS

Feds Can Find Better Way to Fund West’s Rural Schools

By Headwaters News, 2-23-06

The proposal sell off some 300,000 acres of federal forest lands to provide money to rural schools in counties where dwindling timber harvests are biting into budgets has elicited a lot of response around the West, primarily in opposition to the sale.

But not much has been written about the Secure Rural School and Community Self-Determination Act, the legislation that underlies the need to generate revenue. The 6-year-old act is up for reauthorization, thus the Bush administration’s land-sale proposal. Today Daniel Kemmis, in a column for Headwaters News, looks at that aspect of the debate, and an article in the Great Falls Tribune reports on how officials of Montana counties view the issue.

In Western Perspective, Kemmis provides some history of the bipartisan Secure Rural School Act, and provides examples of alternative funding options Congress could pursue.

Kemmis says lawmakers from both parties worked together to write the Rural Schools Act, and bipartisan efforts could once again come up with workable options, such as the Valles Caldera Preserve in New Mexico, created when Congress authorized the purchase of the 6,000-acre Baca Ranch to create the preserve and to operate it as a self-supporting enterprise.

He also suggests that federal lawmakers resuscitate the proposal to reconstitute Region 7 of the U.S. Forest Service as a nongeographical entity to test innovative forest management proposals in a few selective locations.

And, Kemmis writes, the time-tested option of setting aside public lands to be managed for the benefit of local schools could always be revisited.

In the Great Falls Tribune, county officials in Montana are also focusing on the reauthorization of the Act, rather than the land-sale aspect of the issue.

If the Act is not reauthorized, Montana stands to lose about $11 million in federal funding. Although not all the counties in the state get money under the Rural School Act, the loss of that money would be felt in every one of the state’s 56 counties.

Counties who do get Rural School Act money get less money under the payment-in-lieu of taxes program, which compensates local governments with certain federal lands within their boundaries because the federal government does not pay local or state property taxes on land it owns.

The Tribune quotes Bob Douglas, president of the National Forest Counties and Schools Coalition, as saying, “If you are a nonforest county you have a dog in this fight, too. It’s not the time for us to be passive."

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