Rural school leaders concerned about retaining forest program

This law guarantees that a certain amount of money from federal timber sales and other forest receipts is distributed to rural schools and county governments for road projects.

“For a number of our school districts, especially the small rural districts that are right smack dab in the middle of all the forest land, it’s about half of their general fund,” says Erika Hoffman, senior legislative advocate for the California School Boards Association (CSBA). Timber receipts amount to $3 or $4 million for some districts.

CSBA is lobbying for reauthorization of the act as part of the National Forest Counties and Schools Coalition, which represents 1,100 organizations in 37 states. 

The act affects about 39 districts in California, Hoffman says. For the Del Norte Unified School District, which serves 5,200 students in Crescent City, Calif., “everything is in jeopardy -- music, sports, fine arts, building repairs, and roofs,” says school board member Bob Berkowitz, who is representing CSBA on the coalition.

Revenue from timber sales makes up about 20 to 25 percent of Del Norte’s discretionary funds, which comes to more than $1 million a year, Berkowitz says. “When you take that money out of the system, it leaves a huge hole in the budget.”

The use of timber sales to support rural schools goes back to the early days of the last century. In 1905, the National Forest System was formed from 153 million acres of forest land that was set aside and removed from future settlement and economic development.

In 1908, Congress enacted a law stating that 25 percent of all revenues generated by timber sales from national forests would be shared with school districts and counties to support public roads.

Congress intended the national forests to be managed in a manner that would provide a permanent source of funding.

According to Berkowitz, this worked well until the early 1990s, when environmentalists fought to protect the spotted owl and other endangered species, and logging was suspended in national forests.

As a result, revenue from national forests declined 85 percent since 1986.

Congress passed the Rural School and Community Self-Determination Act in 2000 to help rural schools make up for the lost revenue.

“The problem is, in a lot of these areas, there is nothing to really build an economic base on, because they are so isolated,” Hoffman says.

In Oregon, where 198 school districts have come to rely on the $157 million a year they receive under the act, there’s a unique situation, says John Marshall, director of legislative services for the Oregon School Boards Association (OSBA).

The federal forest funds are considered local revenue for purposes of equalization in Oregon, so the potential loss of revenue would have an impact on every school district in the state, Marshall says.

If the lost revenues are offset by state funds, he says, “it will take state resources away from every school in the state.”

“It’s a big deal for us,” says Marshall, who says a number of districts and counties in Oregon, as well as OSBA, are members of the coalition fighting to save the forest program.

It’s also a big deal for Oregon’s congressional delegation, “all of whom, from both sides of the aisle and both chambers, are very active in trying to find ways to make sure the act is reauthorized and funded,” he says.

President Bush has proposed an alternative plan. His fiscal 2007 budget request proposes selling 304,370 acres of U.S. forest land to generate about $800 million for a one-time, five-year extension of the act. 

This plan has sparked criticism from both Democratic and Republican legislators, who say the temporary gains are not worth the permanent loss of public land.

Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), a former U.S. secretary of education, called the proposal shortsighted, and Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), who is working on legislation to reauthorize the act, vowed to “do everything I can” to stop the Bush proposal to sell forest land.

Agriculture Undersecretary Mark Rey calls the proposed sale “painful, but necessary.” He says the land that would be sold is scattered, isolated, difficult or expensive to manage, and no longer meets Forest Service needs.

In testimony before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, Rey said the Administration proposal is “justified as a one-time transition to help rural schools.”

Opponents of the sale disagree. Four retired Forest Service chiefs -- Max Peterson, Dale Robertson, Jack Ward Thomas, and Michael Dombeck -- wrote a letter to the agency criticizing the plan as “an unwise precedent.”

“Selling off public lands to fund other programs, no matter how worthwhile those programs, is a slippery slope,” the letter states.

“Keep in mind that the federal government buys and sells land all the time and this is just a small portion, but regardless, we should not have to sell our birthright,” says Berkowitz.

He says an alternative plan has been proposed that calls for the federal government to lease more of the national forest land instead of selling portions of it.

“If we lease it, we get revenues forever, and we keep those revenues for the schools and communities, and the federal government still retains ownership,” he says. But he adds that the coalition has not taken a position on this idea.

“It’s the federal government’s obligation to keep their word that they made in 1908,” he says.

Eighty percent of the land in Del Norte County is owned by the government, either in the form of federal forest, state park, or recreation area, he says. “Take that amount -- 80 percent -- away from being able to create revenue in the form of taxes and you’ve got devastation. Any place with huge amounts of federal forest is in the same boat.”

“This is a national issue,” says Berkowitz. As the Sept. 30 deadline for reauthorization nears, the coalition is planning a strong presence in Washington, D.C., to urge Congress “to protect our rural schools.”

“Those federal forests and the production from those federal forests are important for our national economy, not just the economies of timber communities,” adds Marshall.