Land sale has few selling points

The Bush administration may have bitten off way more than it can chew with its recent proposal to sell Forest Service lands to raise money for a costly, but necessary, county reimbursement program.

The administration could have managed the potential for land sales far better than it did. In fact, the proposal revealed by Department of Agriculture Undersecretary Mark Rey last week seems designed to appeal to, well, nobody.

Rey outlined a "candidate list" of hundreds of Forest Service tracts across the country, including 29 on the Flathead National Forest and 37 on the Kootenai National Forest. The tracts supposedly have the common characteristics of being isolated and detached from consolidated chunks of national forest, being expensive to manage, and no longer serving Forest Service interests.

Well, it was pretty clear that the Department of Agriculture simply did a GIS database search to find isolated tracts, judging from the response of Flathead Forest officials who clearly had no advance input into the candidate list.

Had the administration taken the time for some internal discussion with district rangers, the nationwide list could have been whittled down substantially, along with the controversy and stiff opposition that has quickly developed.

So far, we have yet to hear from or read about anybody who supports the proposal. Conservation groups and hunters and anglers have already geared up their opposition. And Western lawmakers, Republicans and Democrats both, have blasted the plan.

"I cannot and will not support a land grab that threatens access to our public lands," said Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., in a Tuesday press release.

Rep. Denny Rehberg, R-Mont., called it "top-down" management. "In natural resource issues, bottom-up is a lot better than top-down."

To be clear, there's nothing outrageous or wrong or new about particular government land sales, especially if one considers that the Forest Service acquires new lands every year as well. The Flathead's Hungry Horse Ranger District, for instance, is in the process of closing a sale of about 90 acres near the old ranger station with the proceeds expected to pay for a new ranger station.

And no doubt it's a safe bet that there are tracts on the candidate list that are suitable for sale. But the Department of Agriculture's wholesale list seems tailor-made for generating opposition. In fact, the proposal requires that folks provide official expressions of their opposition during an upcoming 30-day comment period.

Ag officials should count on lots of mail. Particularly from rural areas, like Flathead and Lincoln counties, where the proposal adds insult to injury.

Not only does the government want to sell off public lands, but it wants to do so to provide just half the amount that was disbursed to rural counties and schools over the last five years. That program, set to expire this year, was designed to compensate and stabilize communities that have suffered the economic consequences of sharp declines in the federal timber sale program.

Lincoln County, with its recent mill closures, surely fits that description. And under the current proposal, Lincoln County's reimbursements would be stepped down to zero by 2013.

So that's a triple whammy. First lose the timber sales that help fund the timber economy. Then lose the funding that was meant to compensate for the declining timber sales. And then sell off some of the land that had recreational uses for many of the residents affected by the first two.

Not exactly a political winner. And because of the opposition already expressed by lawmakers, we think this is a proposal that is going nowhere in Congress.