Feds lack cost analyses on lands being sold

GRANTS PASS, Ore. – The U.S. Forest Service has no specific documents supporting the argument that isolated parcels of land it wants to sell to maintain payments to rural schools are expensive to manage, according to the agency’s response to a Freedom of Information Act request.

“The Forest Service has undertaken no analyses of the management costs associated with each parcel of land proposed for sale in the Secure Rural Schools Bill,” Gregory C. Smith, the agency’s director of lands, wrote in an April 19 response to a Freedom of Information Act request filed by the Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics.

“It’s a scam,” Andy Stahl of Eugene, director of the environmental group, said Wednesday from his office in Eugene. “In the main, these lands are less managed than the contiguous national forest lands, and therefore cheaper.”

The Bush administration wants to sell more than 300,000 acres of national forest to raise $800 million to help maintain payments to rural schools in 41 states over the next five years. A bill is pending in Congress. The payments started six years ago to make up for lost timber revenues that are shared with counties after logging on national forests declined in the 1990s.

Lawmakers from both parties have argued that the permanent loss of public lands isn’t worth the short-term gain to schools, particularly when most of the land is in the South and Midwest and most of the schools are in the West.

Mark Rey, undersecretary of agriculture in charge of the Forest Service, has argued that the parcels are isolated, expensive to manage or no longer needed in the national forest system.

Rey did not immediately return a call, but Forest Service spokesman Dan Jiron said Forest Service budgets do not detail expenditures acre by acre.

“There are ways this can be measured,” he said. “It can be looked at through surveying costs, how far they are away from the rest of the national forest.”

Mike Dombeck, chief of the Forest Service in the Clinton administration, said the Forest Service typically spends little or nothing to manage small isolated parcels of land.

“It’s my impression these small isolated parcels receive very little or no management, hence there would be a minimal outlay of cash,” Dombeck said from his office at the University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point, where he teaches global conservation policy.

Rather than selling off the land, he said, it would be better used to trade for privately held parcels within national forests, known as inholdings, which drive up the cost of managing national forests by creating problems when laying out timber sales or planning prescribed burns.

“It does the opposite of what they say they are trying to do,” Dombeck said of the land sales.

The environmental group sent letters to 83 national forests asking for documents “identifying the dollar amount of federal expenditures necessary for management of each parcel of land proposed for sale.”

The Forest Service consolidated the requests into one, and responded that “the searches revealed no records responsive to your request.”

“Cost estimates developed to date are programmatic in nature,” Smith wrote.