[pct-l] Bush Forest Sell-Off

[RoksnRoots at aol.com (RoksnRoots@aol.com)]

        Associated Press:



           " More than a quarter of the $800 million the Bush administration 
plans to raise by selling national forest would benefit rural schools in 
Oregon and Washington, though just 6 percent of the sales would occur in those 
forest-rich states.

       Only about 10 percent of the proceeds would go towards rural schools 
in the South and Midwest, the two regions where more than a third of the sales 
of 300,000-plus acres would occur, according to an analysis by the Southern 
Environmental Law Center.

       Oregon alone would get $162 million, in exchange for 10,581 acres, 
under the administration's plan for reauthorizing a law set to expire Sept. 30.

        Agriculture Undersecretary Mark Rey, who directs U.S. forest policy, 
said the law was devised to help those rural counties hurt by logging cutbacks 
on federal lands. Parcels proposed for sale are isolated, difficult or 
expensive to manage, or no longer met Forest Service needs, he said.

        'They are not evenly distributed' throughout the country, Rey said, 
although Congress could adjust the funding formula as it sees fit. The plan 
also calls for a phased reduction in funding to zero by 2011.
   
         David Carr, public lands director for the nonprofit law center, 
called the regional disparity unfair and said the land sales would set a dangerous 
percent. The Center's analysis is based on how states fared under the Forest 
Service land sales program this year.

        REPUBLICAN QUESTIONS

      'Selling off America's natural heritage is not the way to fund 
government services,' Carr said. 'We need to be adding to the public land base in the 
South, not holding a bake sale on bits and pieces of our limited national 
forests for short-term budget needs.'

        Even prominent Republican leaders question the plan.

       'Why sell most of the lands in those states that don't get much money 
from these payments and very little land in the states that get the most 
money?' asked Sen. Pete Domenici, chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural 
Resources Committee.

       The New Mexico Republican said he wanted to 'keep an open mind' about 
the idea. His state would get $2.3 million, just one-fifth of 1 percent of the 
overall proceeds, in exchange for selling 8,000 acres, or 2 percent of the 
sales.

         Sen. Jim Talent, R-Mo., also questioned the proposal, saying there 
was no guarantee that money generated by the sales would stay within Missouri. 

       'We need to see more of the benefit of this proposal than we are now 
seeing,' Talent told Bush administration officials at a Senate hearing last 
week.

          Under the Bush plan, 21,566 acres in Missouri's Mark Twain National 
Forest would be sold, with proceeds going to a general fund. The sell-off 
would be one of the biggest in the country, while Missouri's share of the school 
funding is among the lowest at $2.7 million.

         Sales would be more even in California, where $69 million would be 
received for selling about 80,000 acres.

         Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden, one of the chief architects of the rural 
schools law, called questions raised by Talent and Domenici legitimate and said 
they were a key reason he opposes the plan. 

         'I don't want to pit your beautiful forest against school stability 
in Missouri,' Wyden, a democrat, told Talent at a committee meeting last week.

         Wyden and other Oregon lawmakers say the state receives so much 
money under the rural schools law because it was hurt the most by federal policies 
that restricted logging in the 1990s.

           Other states 'aren't half-owned by the federal government, and 
they didn't see a 95% harvest reduction on federal lands,' as happened in Oregon 
and Washington, Rep. Peter DeFazio, D-Ore.

          Money from the six year-old 'county payments' law has helped offset 
sharp declines in timber sales in Oregon and other Western states in the wake 
of federal forest policy that restricts logging to protect endangered species 
such as the spotted owl. 

        Andy Stahl, of Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics, 
said the land-sale plans puts the inherent inequality of the county payments law 
in stark relief. "





           - R 'n R:

                           My only comment is to say the article seems to 
focus on the inequality of the distribution rather than the selling-off of ever 
more valuable national forest lands in the face of radically increasing sprawl. 
In other words, in a country where the press is supposed to represent the 
people, neither it nor the government's representatives, who allegedly stand for 
their concerns, mention the main concern - that is the looting of natural 
lands for budget payments. We have truly come off the rails in this country and 
this is evidence of it. You can fairly say we are no longer directly represented.

        I think Bush said, after his re-election, that he saw it as an 
endorsement of his policies.







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