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Public Land Sell-off Plan Returns, But With a Twist
By David Frey, 2-06-07
An unpopular Bush administration proposal to sell off federal lands to pay for rural schools is back on the table with some new measures meant to win over opponents as it comes before a Democrat-controlled Congress likely to be even more skeptical.
The new measure is identical to last year’s, but with four key changes largely aimed at criticisms lobbed by conservationists who blasted the administration for selling off public lands for what they said was inadequate funding by the administration.
“I think it is not enough to simply state you’re opposed to one option for funding this,” says Agriculture Undersecretary Mark Rey, who oversees the Forest Service. “I think partisan, bipartisan or otherwise, the onus is one those who would oppose this alternative for funding to come forward with their own alternative, and that’s a burden they so far failed to lift in this debate.”
The question comes at a critical time, as many rural schools and county governments that have been relying on a stopgap funding measure face serious cutbacks and layoffs as they prepare for those funds to dry up.
The issue dates back a century when the federal government allotted a quarter of the proceeds from timber sales to rural counties – including many in the West – which saw big chunks carved out for public lands that couldn’t be settled or taxed. For many, those dollars proved to be a boon up until the 1980s, when timber sales slacked due to environmental laws and shifting economics. By the late 1990s, many rural schools found themselves trimming activities, cutting staff, even shortening the school week.
In 2000, Congress enacted the Secure Rural Schools and Community Self-Determination Act, a stopgap measure intended to help schools and counties carry on while rural areas and land managers adjust to fewer dollars coming from timber sales. That measure expired Dec. 31, prompting the Bush administration to put forward a controversial plan last year: sell off some 300,000 acres of Forest Service land deemed too isolated, remote or unnecessary.
Congress soundly rejected that, leaving the future of many of these school systems in limbo.
“This is in our view a real emergency,” says Bob Douglas, president of The National Forests Counties and Schools Coalition. “It isn’t contrived. It’s real. Those layoff notices are going to be sent to employees and families as early as March.”
His organization worries up to 16,000 school employees and county government workers are in danger of being laid off in 4,400 rural school districts, affecting more than 9 million schoolchildren.
“When you take 60, 70, 90 percent of the land from the county, place it in the National Forest system and tell people you can’t tax that land, you also can’t settle that land or use it for any kind of economic development, that severely impacts the county,” says Douglas, who is also superintendent of California’s Tehama County schools. His county has already seen timber sales all but vanish, he says, and neighboring counties that continue to have struggling logging economies face dire cutbacks in their schools without more funding.
Critics blasted the Bush administration for proposing to sell off federal land to cover the gap. The plan would sell off tens of thousands of acres throughout the West, including 26,021 in Idaho, 21,699 in Colorado, 15,498 in Wyoming and 11,159 in Montana.
“We’re going to find a way to fund the Secure Schools program without selling even one acre of public land,” says Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., in a press release. “Auctioning off our outdoor heritage is not the way to do this. Our public lands in the West are sacrosanct. The President can count on a fight in Congress.”
The latest plan tries to address earlier criticisms. Officials removed some 27,000 acres in 242 different parcels of National Forest land from the auction block in states like Arizona and Montana after determining they had qualities that had been overlooked. In addition to the $400 million intended to be generated for rural schools, and equal amount would be dedicated to buy desirable lands and protect habitat. That money would be divided based on the income generated from the sales, in response to criticism that states were losing public lands only to see that money flow to other states. The proposal also calls for a national advisory committee to review each parcel.
“It’s déjà vu all over again,” says Michael Francis, national forest program director for The Wilderness Society. “I guess the administration and Mark Rey didn’t learn anything last year when, as far as my memory serves me, they got universal condemnation and no support in Congress at all from Republicans and Democrats. To turn around and try it again this year either shows arrogance or hubris on their part.”
Even this measure is intended as yet another stopgap intended to give rural communities until 2011 to wean their economies from their traditional reliance on timber sales. In some cases, those rural economies have found themselves swept up in suburban shifts as places like Portland, Ore., have begun drawing commuters from far-flung parts that no longer seem like such rural enclaves.
“Where a county is experiencing an influx of new entities and new residents, that economy is adjusting,” Rey says. “It’s becoming vibrant. But in places where that hasn’t occurred, we still have economic distress. So, I think an additional five years is justified. I don’t think it’s justified beyond that.”
Mark Rey is a carpetbagger of the worst kind. He is the creation of Whorehaeuser, Mega Pulps, et al, when he represented their interests before Congress. The Bush administration cares not one whit about Western States because they did not support his presidency and ran most of their Republicans out of Congress, losing the Republican majority which did little to justify their tenure in the majority but puff and strut like the back bench
bantams they had been in their former life. Now they get to experience that life again.
Selling land is a bad idea. Not buying more land is a good idea. The Federal royalty money gained from offshore oil and gas leases is supposed to go into a fund to buy land. Why not use that money to support those counties with large federal land ownerships not now getting timber share money? The vast Federal ownership in the West comes with a local cost to local governments. To deny that is wrong headed. At one time, the county 25% of gross USFS revenues on resource sale, royalty, rent and lease incomes financed government short on taxable assets. When timber was taken from the economic table, and nothing offered in its stead, Congress provided a payment in lieu of taxes. Now the Bush Administration has taken this payment out of the budget, and the Dept of Ag's Rey is proposing selling land to fund the proposal to restore that money. Rey is playing bad politics, knows he is, and for that he should be placed in stocks in the courtyard of every county now without the funds. Just a day in each of the 700 plus counties. No bad fruit to throw this time of year. He would get real tired of snowballs hitting his smug little bearded visage. The fruit would be available before he made the circuit.
Someone has to tell the posturing geeks that we call Congress that it is time to get some things done to make this a better country, and this tired little ploy USDA-USFS is making will not be tolerated. I am frankly tired of lipstick on pigs.
David
A fine article, but there is an historical problem with your statement that "The issue dates back a century when the federal government allotted a quarter of the proceeds from timber sales to rural counties – including many in the West – which saw big chunks carved out for public lands that couldn’t be settled or taxed."
This isn't exactly true in the West. The states, and their subordinate counties, were carved out of the public domain, not the other way around. Neither the states and certainly not the counties--which by the way, are creatures of state law, and have no sovereign status whatsoever, contrary to the claims of the so-called "county movement"--ever had any ownership of the public domain, and thus they had no inherent claim on an income stream from taxes on federal property. Taxes paid are a matter of federal largesse, and not a given. Legally, the public domain has always been federal property for the federal government to manage as it sees fit. Let's not forget, for example, Thomas Jefferson's Louisana Purchase; he bought land from Napoleon and the French. (Of course, the French stole it, but that's another issue). Title has always rested in the federal government. It can choose to sell that land, or to keep it for other purposes.
National forests in the east, for example, were largely created out of formerly private land, such as the Pisgah National Forest in my native western North Carolina. Much of this land passed into federal ownership in the 1930s because the owners couldn't pay the taxes on them and the feds bought the land for back taxes. This may be a little known fact in the history of the national forests, but it is a fact nonetheless.
Simply having taxable private property doesn't mean much when the owners can't pay the taxes.
And of course, the federal government is not obligated to pay taxes on its property, unless it formally waives its sovereign immunity to allow it. That is precisely the source of the PILT payments. PILT payments are in a sense a gift, not an obligation or requirement.
Regarding the federally owned national forests in the West, they are technically "reservations" from the existing public domain created to achieve specific purposes. With the national forests, the two original purposes were to provide timber and water. Congress over the years expanded those purposes to include wildlife conservation, biodiversity, etc.
Regarding timber, virtually everywhere you look in the West, it wasn't environmental laws or environmentalists that caused the logging industry to decline. The industry declined because it had severely overlogged the national forests and there was no longer enough commercial grade timber to support the volume required by the larger mills. That most certainly was the case with the Louisiana-Pacific mill in nearby Dubois, Wyoming, which went bust in 1988.
The claims that enviros killed the logging industry in the West are simply false. It was the logging industry that did itself in, not to mention the local communities that depended on it.
The fact is, there is still a logging industry in the intermountain West. It is largely a value-added industry, such as house logs, along with such traditional products as post and poles, sawtimber, and firewood. It seems clear that current use is sustainable. The "timber beast" days were not sustainable.
Therein lies the problem of the local schools. In a sense, they relied upon an unreliable goose--an unsustainable logging industry-- to lay the golden eggs. Now they need to find a new goose, but it isn't selling off national forest land. It's called economic diversification, which is a matter of enterprise.
The national forests were created to achieve national conservation as well as local economic goals, and a hundred years after the creation of the US Forest Service, it's clear that conservation of the national forests for the ecosystem services they provide is far more important than short-term, unsustainable commodity uses such as large-scale logging. If Congress so chooses to emphasize conservation over commodities, that is its inherent, sovereign right to do.
Robert Hoskins
Excellent comments! I will inject some emotion into this debate: Our public lands, particularly in the west, are the crown jewels of this country. These lands are the place where one can still find a measure of "physical freedom" and experience the sweetness of open public commons. Large blocks of unfragmented public lands are the last best hope for perserving remnants of the pre-european biological diversity. Of course, the grandeur of the Big Sky Western Landscapes are ever being assulted by "eternal growth" advocates who abhor the obstacle of wild undeveloped lands. Wild lands represent speed bumps to the perpetual growth machine that will never be appeased.
Comment By bearbait, 2-07-07Robert Hoskins
I thought the 25% of gross revenues from resource and use proceeds was a brilliant Congressional move that took 25% of the gross, off the top as it were, thus making it difficult for the USFS to get into business, or try to fund their political turf from within. Anytime you lose that much up front, your business model predicts failure. S. Puter's "Looters of the Public Domain..." shows how crooked government and the Gen'l Land Office was a century ago. 100 years ago this year, as a matter of fact. The 25% was a reaction by a suspicious and non-trust-government Congress.
The money was to be shared with the county of origin. The Federal government has been required by Congress, on many fronts, to deal at the county level because that takes State government out of it. It keeps a Boise influenced Idaho state government from keeping all the money in Boise, and ensures the money gets distributed where it was developed. Again, Congress wisely acknowledged the tyranny of an urban majority and crooked State politicians. You remember, at that time US Senators were in many cases chosen by the State legislature, not popularly elected. In Oregon, the schools part of the money was taken by past Governor Kitzhaber and dumped into the state school funding pot which awards a dollar amount per child per day in school with greater amounts to children with special needs. The State initiative capped property tax in rural areas is not able to fund education, and the urban hoi poloi are having their taxes redirected to rural areas, and they bitch about it constantly.
You say there should be a diverse new economy for these areas of the West. Well, there is, and it is amenity homes, ranchettes, and landscape vistas, fly shops, junk stores, mini marts, malls, and art retailers. Of course, you fail to note that a paucity of land in private hands is resulting in ranch subdivisions, winter range loss to llamas, goats, dogs, horses, and children with bb guns and worse. It is a supply and demand world. That attraction to the land that would bring diversity mostly is bringing in made elsewhere money to be spent on personal comforts, and if you can provide a personal comfort for those who might afford it, you are the diversity. Blixeth is bringing diversity. Carpenters and contractors build houses one at a time. When the land is full, those jobs become remodel or rebuild jobs. Or you find a job as a housekeeper or some other minimum wage seasonal job in a housing market that is only affordable to working folks who are public servants or dope dealers.
I would prefer the diversity that logging and milling might bring. A little sunlight on the ground grows pioneer species of plants, and provides biodiversity now lacking in public forests, unless you include wildfire managed diversity. Some of that does not work well at all. We all talk about ladder fuels for fire. No one is talking about ladder vegetation to higher elevations for wood boring insects. Might some logging do some good in stopping insect infestations? Excess in anything can be viewed as bad. Even excess aforestation. The loss of meadows, fens, wet prairies, savannas, due to tree invasion and no human burning (protection in excess) and excess forest fire fighting. No matter what protectionists say, there is evidence that all is not well on America's most protected forest lands. And, the new diverse economy of log houses and ranchettes in the rural/wildland forest interface might be transitory in light of new government mandates to not fight fire beyond public land borders, just because they can make stupid decisions like that from Washington D.C., and do.
When you talk about forest reserves in the public domain, for watersheds and a stable supply of timber, you must mention those reserves were lands withdrawn from entry. Entry being anyone of the myriad "homestead" laws, all of which, I believe, had some monetary component. The lands were "proved up" and a sum paid, and you occupied your homestead. Many of those were on checkboarded lands adjacent to private RR lands sold to homesteaders or timber interests. A century of subsequent trades of unclaimed public domain, common school lands, and private lands has created block ownerships in the West out of what was once a checkerboard ownership pattern. When Pres T. Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot were drawing pencil boundaries on a map in advance of certain legislative measures to disallow that land use designation (forest reserves) by Presidential order, Pinchot had already claimed for administrative use the majority of possible hydroelectric sites. That is why a lot of Federal dams are built where they are, why Ranger Stations are located where they are.
The USFS used the timber to diversify the west by selling 50 year logging contracts, and creating logging circles where only mills in that circle could purchase public timber. The national interest was to create towns and employment, and the Hines Lumber Company of Chicago was the largest beneficiary with long term contracts in Westfir and Hines, Oregon, Spearfish, SD, and two, I believe, in Wyoming. Selling timber was used by the Feds to create economic diversity, and then that rug was slipped out from under the very industry they created. That it threatens to topple governments and schools in the very areas of that diversity creation is a national shame. It is the Bush Katrina response to 700 counties with Federal timberlands now administratively closed to logging. In a practical sense, there is no timber there---just trees waiting to burn.
The point I find most distressing about logging and timber discussions is that on one hand, the no-logging crowd talks about "sustainable" logging when no logging is going on, and they do not talk about "sustainable" wildfire tree removals. What is a sustainable fire removal level for forest acres? It is like the wolf issue whereas nobody from the wolf supporter side will come up with a number for how large a population of wolves there should be, or how low, for that matter. So what is the acreage total that logging might affect in a century, and what is the level of wildfire tree removal acceptable?
Lastly, I worked for a sawmill that used logs from many sources, public and private. When the local USFS lands quit selling timber, and the State elected a Democrat governor, the logging on State land was reduced. Suddenly, the fight for available timber was on, and small mills could not sustain the fight for raw material. Those who had money bought private land and tried to survive. Those that did not went to auction, the equipment off to the third world to process tropical forest logs. But it was, without a doubt, the end to any logging on USFS and BLM lands that shut down 200 mills throughout the West. The lost infrastructure for logs and lumber, the lost jobs, all can happen because of bad management or obsolete equipment and methods, but when the raw material is no longer available, none of those reasons hold water. It was the loss of timber to cut because government changed direction that killed those industries and towns. And you don't quite understand that the Goose was Uncle Sam, and Uncle Sam killed his own creation, which was a lumber industry using Federal timber RESERVED FOR A SUSTAINABLE LONG TERM SUPPLY TO THE US ECONOMY. Uncle Sam murdered his own children. Now Uncle Sam seems to want to starve the ones he did not kill. The end of PILT payments hurts everyone in the county, not just the Looters of the Public Domain. It was not, as you claim Mr. Hoskins, a suicide. It was a murder. Intentional killing of the Goose. Intentional removal of the raw material base. The folks in the mining business just have to wonder at their luck the Mining Law gave them a process to acquire title to their raw material. Only the Robber Barons of the Rail Roads got that lucky in the timberlands business. It was, as you claim, once all Federal lands. Those that now are not were sold, for money or in kind (railroad construction). The "Timber Reserves" were the little kids with the wallet and the string tied to it, hiding behind the fence, and when someone reached for the wallet they pulled it behind the fence. A joke. And the joke was on working people with lives invested in a business the government can and did jerk out from under them. The Goose is a most untrustworthy Goose. Put your Faith in the Congressional Goose, and you will most certainly be disappointed, someday. For certain. No child left behind but the ones in schools with large public land holdings. And that is making the "We aren't having any kids" enviros happy, right Mr. Hoskins? "Not our problem."
Thanks, Robert, for setting the record straight on the public domain. In the case of this article, it may have been an honest mistake/misstatement, but ignorance around this issue is rampant. Even to the extent that Las Vegas Review Journal editorial board--which, being in the biggest public land state, should know its ass from the public domain--put a missive out a couple of years ago with the paranoid title of "How did BLM come to 'own' this land?" And you know what?--they apparently didn't know how it is that Amercan citizens own, and BLM manages, the public domain.
The really sad part is that these were the "leftover" lands, and those without enough water or whatever to be desirable...and now, with engineering making all things possible, tens of thousands of public acres in NV are being auctioned off and developed, to be fed with water transported through pipelines hundreds of miles long....But I digress.
The ever-smug Mark Rey must be called on his remarks about how those opposed should come up with an alternative (kind of reminds you of Mitch McConnell, John McCain, and the war). Last year, I believe it was Max Baucus who proposed closing a tax loophole (I believe it was related to overseas contractors) in order to generate the funds. Something no one should have been opposed to, but which fell by the wayside somehow.