| The proposal to sell public
land to fund the Secure
Rural School and Community Self-Determination Act
is a bad idea that, fortunately, seems to be going nowhere.
It had little chance of surviving from the moment it
was broached, and once U.S.
Sen. Conrad Burns, R-Mont., announced his opposition,
the odds grew even larger. As chair of the Interior
Appropriations Subcommittee, Burns is probably in a
position to bury the proposal.
The Act itself was a good idea when it was passed six
years ago, and it was, moreover, a tribute to Mark Rey’s
legislative skill. Rey, now the Agriculture Department
undersecretary with jurisdiction over the Forest Service,
was then the Republican Senate staffer who negotiated
the bipartisan accord between U.S. Sens. Larry Craig,
R-Idaho, and Ron Wyden, D-Ore., that produced the legislation.
As timber harvests from national forests had declined
throughout the 1990s, so had the payments in lieu of
taxes that had traditionally been made to counties containing
those national forests, to support local schools and
roads. The “Craig-Wyden Bill” sought to
stabilize those payments by decoupling them from timber
receipts, while at the same time providing some funding
for locally selected projects to enhance forest ecosystem
health.
The Act was not perfect, but it was a step forward,
something that does not often happen these days in the
public lands arena. Bipartisanship is the key to making
any sustainable progress in that intensely contentious
arena. Now, as the discussion about reauthorizing the
Craig-Wyden legislation turns from fantasy to practicality
(and from the administration to Congress), the question
will be whether constructive bipartisanship can again
be brought to bear.
Bipartisanship is always hard to come by in Washington,
and it’s especially elusive during any election
year, but there may be a window of opportunity here.
That window might be broadened by looking beyond the
particular piece of legislation that has occasioned
the current furor.
While selling public land to help fund roads and schools
is a bad idea, it may not be a bad idea to engage in
some carefully chosen and closely monitored experiments
with innovative ways of providing the support to rural
communities that federal payments in lieu of taxes have
traditionally provided.
Sometimes the best new ideas are old ideas. There
is a time-tested old idea practically begging to be
noticed and brought off the bench. It’s the idea
of public lands held in trust for the benefit of local
schools. This was the idea behind the system of state
trust lands, a system familiar to all westerners. Beginning
as early as the 1780s, but with substantial increases
in acreage following the Civil War, a portion of the
public domain in each new Western state was set aside
in trust for the benefit of the new state’s public
schools.
The history of the state trust lands is itself a matter
of some considerable disagreement, but the point here
is not to turn more land over to the states. The idea
of trust mechanisms, though, is one that arises insistently
in the discussion about how to do a better job of managing
the federal estate, and in particular how to provide
both accountability and flexibility in public land governance.
A broad-based collaborative, the Forest Options Group,
for example, put heavy emphasis on this approach in
its "Second
Century Report" a few years ago. Brian Yablonski,
in a paper commissioned by the Property and Environment
Research Center (PERC) calls the trust approach
"A New Paradigm for Federal Lands."
In 2000, Congress put its toe in this water when it
was persuaded to acquire for the national government
a large working ranch, the Baca Ranch, in northern New
Mexico, now known as the Valles
Caldera Preserve. Rather than simply add the ranch
to the holdings of the Forest Service or the Bureau
of Land Management, Congress mandated the creation of
a board of trustees, a majority of whom must be from
New Mexico, to manage the property. This, again, was
a bipartisan effort, inconceivable without the support
of both New Mexico's Republican Sen. Pete Domenici and
Democratic Sen. Jeff Bingaman.
Like the Craig-Wyden “Secure Schools” bill,
the Valles Caldera Preserve is a far from perfect mechanism,
but again, it is a step forward, in that it, along with
the Presidio Trust in California, puts to the test a
promising mechanism for combining accountability with
flexibility in the management of federal lands.
But there is a very real danger in putting too much
weight on one or two such experiments. There are too
many collateral circumstances that can produce failure
(or for that matter success) in any one instance. It
would be unfortunate indeed if the future of trust approaches
were left to depend on either the success or the failure
of the Valles Caldera and the Presidio.
This brings us, then, to another bipartisan initiative
in the public lands arena that has lain dormant for
the last few years, but might be brought back into focus
as Congress considers how to reauthorize the Secure
Schools Act. In the summer of 2002, a bipartisan working
group from the House Resources Committee began working
on legislation to reconstitute Region 7 within the Forest
Service.
Because of past regional consolidation, there has not
been a Region 7 in the national forest system since
1965. The reconstituted, non-geographical Region 7 would
house experimental projects on national forest lands,
testing new, innovative approaches to forest management
(such as trust structures) to overcome some of the problems
that beset the current system of national forest governance.
Such an experimental approach would not attempt to change
the entire national forest system but would recognize
problems and invite and test innovative solutions in
a few carefully chosen settings.
The first step would be to conduct a national competition
for the selection of experimental projects to test new
models of management or governance. A “blue ribbon”
commission would be organized to solicit proposals for
alternative approaches to public land management and
governance, select promising projects, and guide the
implementation process. The projects selected would
make up the new Region 7.
This idea got sidetracked when the forest fires of
2002 made “Forest Health” the congressional
flavor of the month. But with the passage of time, with
the brouhaha over reauthorization of the Secure Schools
Act, and with the need to expand experimentation with
trust and other collaborative mechanisms beyond the
Valles Caldera and the Presidio, the time may be right
to revisit a promising bipartisan initiative.
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