Bill Fails to End Fight Over School Funds, Timber Sales

For nearly a century there has been a direct connection between how many trees are chopped down in federal forests and how much money is spent on students in surrounding school districts.

As timber cutting has dramatically declined in recent years, that formula has wreaked havoc on rural school budgets and sparked a passionate debate on whether logs and lesson plans should have anything to do with each other.

Bailout legislation passed this month in the U.S. House of Representatives hasn’t ended the controversy and--some contend--may not have even solved the money problems.

The House bill, which will be taken up in the Senate next year, would provide supplementary aid to financially strapped counties with large chunks of national forest land.

Since 1908, they have received 25% of local federal timber sale receipts for their school and road budgets to make up for the loss of tax income on federal land. But those payments have shriveled as U.S. Forest Service policy has become more environmentally sensitive and has de-emphasized logging.

The Clinton administration and environmentalists saw the funding crisis as a chance for reform, proposing to sever what they term an inappropriate link between timber cutting and school budgets. But they were rebuffed by a powerful coalition of county, education and timber interests that is expected to hold sway in the Senate.

“With this Congress, it’s pretty clear they are not going to support decoupling,” said U.S. Department of Agriculture Undersecretary Jim Lyons, who is highly critical of the House bill.

The legislation, approved 274 to 153, is a compromise that retains the funding tie to local timber receipts but authorizes additional federal appropriations to make up for the decline in timber sales.

It would roughly double the amount of county payments nationally from the current $200 million to $400 million. Funding to the 39 California counties with national forest land would rise from $30 million to about $65 million a year.

“We’re quite pleased with it,” said Bob Douglas, Tehama County school superintendent and president of the National Forest, Counties and Schools Coalition, which was formed this year to lobby for more money.

“This will be a real shot in the arm for rural school district budgets and rural county road budgets,” added Douglas, whose district now gets $800,000 a year from timber sales, compared to a high of about $2.4 million annually in the mid-1980s. Under the House bill, he said, the district would receive about $1.5 million a year.

Rep. Nathan Deal (R-Ga.), a leader in the movement to continue the timber-classroom linkage, has said of the House action: “Children in forest counties deserve the same educational opportunities as those in the rest of America.”

The bill, as passed by the House, provides that counties receive funding equal to the average of the three highest timber payments they got between 1984 and 1999.

But the supplemental appropriations that will be needed to reach that sum are not guaranteed under the legislation. The money would have to be approved annually by Congress. That’s a shortcoming that the proposal’s backers say will be fixed in the Senate and that critics say undercuts the changes and threatens to siphon funding from other environmental projects.

“Every year the counties are going to have to fight for the money,” said Steve Holmer, campaign coordinator for the American Lands Alliance, an environmental group.

The alliance and other environmental organizations also find any continued link to timber sales troublesome, saying it promotes harmful logging levels.

“We think it’s a perverse incentive that forces good county commissioners and good forest service personnel to make bad resource decisions in order to generate money for counties and schools,” said Michael Francis of The Wilderness Society.

Another controversial provision of the House bill sets aside 20% of the payments to counties for projects on national forest land that are suggested by local advisory committees and approved by forest service officials.

“This is the camel’s nose under the tent,” asserted Francis, “a little local control that could wind up with real local control of public lands.”

Undersecretary Lyons said the local committees will create another layer of advisory groups when “we’re trying to simplify the system we have now.”

The 20% set-aside could be used for a range of projects on national forest land--including recreational, environmental or forest thinning. Critics predict the local groups will favor more tree cutting to boost the local economy. But others disagree.

“To say it’s catastrophic for forests is a bit of a stretch,” said Rep. Peter DeFazio, an Oregon Democrat who helped broker the compromise. “Nothing can happen under this bill that can’t happen under existing law.”

The issue involves far more than school funding. It is yet another forum for the contentious debate over timber cutting levels in national forests and their effect on communities.

“There is an agenda out there that would remove rural people from the forest entirely,” said Alpine County School Supt. James Parsons, who has been forced to cut staff and extracurricular activities because of the dip in timber revenues.

“This is our history, our culture,” he continued. “We don’t want to be cut out of the decision-making process in our communities, and that’s what decoupling does. It says, ‘Here’s the money. You no longer have a say.’ ”

Based on the House action, Parsons doesn’t have much to worry about.

DeFazio said he could round up only about 20 co-sponsors for his original proposal to completely sever county and school funding from timber sales. “There was an underwhelming level of support.”

Along with environmentalists, DeFazio faulted the Clinton administration for not making a greater push for his initial bill. “I think they could have worked this proposal a lot harder than they did,” the congressman said.

“We pushed like hell,” retorted Lyons. “I think largely this issue is not one that resonates with a lot of members. It’s viewed as a rural issue.”