Forest Service needs revenue to offset $800 million cost of county payments law

By JIM MANN

The Daily Inter Lake

The Forest Service on Friday posted a list of 306,628 acres of national forest lands across the country that could be sold off to pay for a program that compensates counties and schools for declining timber receipts.

The list includes 29 tracts totaling 2,928 acres on the Flathead National Forest and 35 tracts totaling 3,819 acres on the Kootenai National Forest.

In explaining the proposal during a teleconference, Department of Agriculture Undersecretary Mark Rey stressed that he expects the list will be whittled down substantially after a public comment period next month.

Rey said because of constraints in the Bush administration budget released last week, the Forest Service needs new revenue to offset the $800 million cost of reauthorizing a six-year-old "county payments" law that is set to expire this year. The $800 million, to be distributed in a five-year phased reduction to zero, is half the amount that was paid to counties over the last five years.

That has caused alarm among county leaders across the West, including the Lincoln and Flathead county commissioners. And the proposal is being blasted by many western lawmakers and conservation groups.

Rey said that only about half the acreage on the "candidate list" would need to be sold to meet the $800 million revenue target. The criteria for selecting the lands, he explained, involved selecting isolated forest tracts, surrounded by private lands, that are expensive to manage and are "no longer meeting national forest system needs."

Pressed on what that means, Rey acknowledged that some tracts will have public values as wildlife habitat, recreation access or other purposes that justify removing them from the sale list.

Rey refuted suggestions that the proposal amounts to a "sell-off" of public lands, considering that the Forest Service acquires between 100,000 to 115,000 acres for conservation purposes every year.

"That will continue," he said.

If the agency sells off 150,000 acres, he added, it will take only two years to make up for that through new conservation acquisitions.

Many of the tracts amount to "accidents of history" where the Forest Service ended up owning lands completely separate from the consolidated national forests that were derived from forest reserves at the turn of the last century, he said.

"Now the task will be to hear from people on whether they concur," Rey said. "Based on that commentary, we'll rework the list and send it on to Congress."

Currently, there are detailed digital maps depicting candidate tracts on only four national forests, but by the end of February, there will be maps for every national forest, and that's when the 30-day comment period will begin, Rey said.

Listed lands on the Flathead have yet to be mapped, but judging from legal descriptions provided on the Forest Service Web site, the list includes isolated tracts of 80 acres and 115 acres along the Flathead River between Kalispell and Columbia Falls.

It includes a half section of national forest land surrounded by private property between Lakeside and Blacktail Mountain. It also includes the Holbrook tract of national forest land on Big Mountain.

Denise Germann, public affairs officer for the Flathead Forest, said forest officials learned of the proposal only in the last week and are now reviewing the tracts. She said some have obvious conservation values, and the Flathead's supervisor and district rangers will submit their concerns about including some lands on the list.

There were immediate concerns about the potential sale of Forest Service lands on the Flathead River.

"Those are tracts that we think pretty much obviously have strong conservation values," said Fred Fox, executive director of the Flathead Land Trust. "Those values are protected under the current ownership and there is also public access."

Asked about areas with rapid growth and high-dollar development, Rey acknowledged that there may be instances where nonprofit groups, such as the Flathead Land Trust, would be outmatched in an auction process aimed at the highest bidder. There's potential, he said, for the Forest Service to give preference in some cases to nonprofit conservation groups, or simply remove the lands from the list.

Fox said that the Flathead Land Trust's mission is focused on conservation easements, rather than acquiring outright ownership of lands. He said the organization will surely comment on the Forest Service land sale proposals.

So will Flathead Wildlife Inc., said Warren Illi, a longtime member of the local hunting and fishing club.

"I would anticipate that Flathead Wildlife will be strongly opposed to disposing of those tracts along the Flathead River," he said. "I can't speak for all the 2,900 acres on the Flathead Forest, but these tracts on the river are particularly valuable."

There is very little public land along the river between Columbia Falls and Flathead Lake, he said, and as development continues to boom in the Flathead Valley, those lands will become increasingly valuable.

Illi noted that small tracts of land can be the most accessible and useful to the public, even if they are just places to walk dogs.

"It's the stuff that's local, down in the valley, that can be very useful," he said.

Ben Long, a member of the Montana Chapter of Backcountry Hunters and Anglers, said the proposal is "anti-access, anti-hunting, anti-fishing and anti-family."

Long also challenges the Bush Administration's approach. "The process is backwards," he said. "They should listen to the people who know the ground before they make sweeping proposals."

Rep. Denny Rehberg, R-Mont., had a similar view.

"It would be better to start from the bottom up on an issue like this as opposed to this top-down plan," he said. "In natural resource issues, bottom-up is a lot better than top-down."

Rehberg said he also is concerned about the impact of the proposal on counties and school revenues, and he's not alone. Republican and Democratic lawmakers across the West have leveled criticism against the proposal.

By 2013, payments to counties and schools will be phased out, and the federal government will revert to paying them 25 percent of timber revenues.

The Secure Rural Schools and Community Self Determination Act of 2000 was designed to assist communities that had seen sharp declines in the 25 percent payments that corresponded with federal timber harvests.

Schools and counties were given the option to forgo those payments and instead receive a payment based on a three-year harvest average from the early 1990s. Most, including Flathead and Lincoln counties, chose the average payment. The program has pumped more than $2 billion into rural states over the last five years.

Flathead County Commissioner Gary Hall is worried that less than half that amount is proposed for the next five years.

Flathead County currently receives about $1.5 million annually from the program, most of it directed to the county road department, which has an annual budget of about $800,000.

"It will affect our budget severely, especially the road department," he said.

Lincoln County Commissioner Rita Windom said a total of $5.8 million is distributed annually in Lincoln County, with about a third going to schools and two thirds going to the county road department.

If those payments are gradually lowered and phased out by 2013, she said the 25 percent payments will fall far short of replacing them.

Rey said the 2000 law was largely aimed at giving rural economies and the Forest Service timber program a chance to stabilize, and because the law was written to expire in five years, it obviously was never intended to be permanent.

But Lincoln County's economy, and the Kootenai National Forest timber program, have hardly stabilized. Mills in Libby and Eureka, the largest private employers in both towns, have closed since the law was passed. And the Kootenai's timber program has been volatile, largely because of continuous environmental litigation.

Last year, roughly 50 million board feet of timber were harvested from the forest, a volume that would have generated a 25 percent payment of about $1.2 million - just a fraction of the $5.8 million the county received under the county payment program, Windom said.

Windom said Kootenai Forest officials are projecting that less than 20 million board feet will be harvested from the forest this year, which would result in an even smaller payment.

The Bush administration proposal will be at the top of the agenda when the Montana Coalition of Forest Counties meets next week in Great Falls.

"That's all we are putting on the agenda for that day," Windom said. "It's our highest priority."

More information on the proposal, and how to comment, is available on the Internet at:

http://www.fs.fed.us

Reporter Jim Mann may be reached at 758-4407 or by e-mail at jmann@dailyinterlake.com