Forest communities lobby for money

About 200 local school and government officials from communities that abut national forest lands will be on Capitol Hill Wednesday and Thursday to lobby for a bill that would provide more than $4 billion in federal assistance.

{mosads}Since 2000, the federal government has supplemented the local budgets of nearly 800 counties, principally in Western areas where federal lands are concentrated, through a special appropriation that would expire on Sept. 30, the end of the fiscal year.

That prospect makes local officials nervous. A one-year spending measure attached to the emergency Iraq supplemental spending bill boosted budgets for fiscal 2007, but not before more than 16,000 lay-off notices went to local officials due to a projected financial shortfall, said Bob Douglas, a leader of the National Forest Counties and Schools Coalition. His group is sponsoring the two-day fly-in.

“This is a very significant source of revenues for most of these entities,” said Douglas, who is the superintendent of the Tehama County School District in California. “It has a huge impact on these communities.”

The one-year appropriation continued a program that Congress adopted in 2000 that had originally provided a five-year funding stream from general revenues to help certain rural communities pay for school activities, fire suppression, road repairs and a variety of other services.

The history of federal financial help dates far earlier, to the creation of the federal forest program in 1906, when Congress began setting aside 25 percent of revenues from user fees applied to commercial activity on federal lands for these communities.

Some have argued that the federal designation prevented the economic development opportunities that these communities could otherwise have used to pay for their schools and local governments. But Douglas said commercial activity on federal forestlands had fallen off to such an extent that user-fee revenues in 2000 were only 12 percent of what they had been at their peak.

Wearing kelly-green T-shirts with the words “Save our Rural Schools and Communities,” the local officials plan to door-knock in support of legislation written by Reps. Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.) and Nick Rahall (D-W.Va.), chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee, to provide a stand-alone appropriation totaling $4.25 billion over five years. 

The money would be split evenly between the Payment in Lieu of Taxes, which goes to counties that abut federal lands, and Secure Rural Schools, which is specifically designated for schools in those counties that lay adjacent to federal forest lands.
Yet the same obstacle that has confounded special interests this session — how to pay for it — is making the lobbying effort more difficult.

Pay-go rules require offsets be found. The DeFazio-Rahall bill would raise fees for commercial activities on federal lands, but Republican staffers have objected to that approach, said Penny Dodge, DeFazio’s spokeswoman.

Advocates still hope for a markup in Rahall’s committee later this month.

The effort has support in the Senate as well, although a companion bill has yet to be introduced there. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) and Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) are among the champions of the bill.

The senators backed the amendment that attached the appropriation to the emergency supplemental bill last March. The amendment passed with over 70 votes. But House leaders blocked the multi-year appropriation and settled for a compromise of one year’s worth of spending.

Getting multi-year spending now is crucial to the communities, Douglas said. While this is the second fly-in day sponsored by the National Forest Counties and Schools Coalition, Douglas said, “Small rural counties hardly are in a position to mount an annual lobbying effort.”