“We're nervous,” said Mineral County Commissioner Judy Stang. “This could be a huge hit to our budget all at once.”
“Our county, like most rural counties, depends on that source of funding,” Stang said. “If it disappears, the local taxpayer will have to pick up the tab.”
The administration's proposed budget would reauthorize the Secure Rural Schools program for five years. But the proposal calls for lowering funding levels each year until the program is finally zeroed out.
The Bush proposal also calls for selling up to 300,000 acres of Forest Service land - about 14,000 acres of it in Montana - to raise about $800,000 to help offset costs of the program. That idea has been controversial.
U.S. Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont. - who opposes the land sale - will host a town hall meeting in Missoula on Thursday to begin creating a “game plan” to defeat the land sales portion of the proposal. Baucus supports reauthorizing the Secure Rural Schools Act.
“This is really a call to arms,” Baucus said of the meeting. “We need to formulate a game plan and get everyone pulling in the same direction to stop this land grab in its tracks. We have to work together and bring all the parties to the table to fight this.”
For more than 90 years, the federal government has been compensating counties that have large tracts of public land.
Since 1908, the Forest Service has shared 25 percent of its receipts for activities like timber sales and grazing with counties. Counties with lots of federal land - like those in western Montana - depended on those monies to fund a variety of services.
When the state's lumber mills were running full bore, many Montana counties counted on large payments from the federal government to help fill their coffers. But with the onset of environmental concerns over timber harvest on Forest Service lands in the 1990s and the subsequent downturn in timber sales, that source of funding dried up.
For instance, Ravalli County received $469,000 in 25 percent funds in 1986. By 1999, that funding had dropped to $99,000.
“In the 1960s, we were harvesting about 60 million board feet in the Bitterroot forest,” said Ravalli County Commissioner Alan Thompson. “Over the last five years, we've harvested about 3-4 million board feet a year. It's down to just 5 percent of what we were traditionally harvesting.”
“It's really hard to budget when you don't know how much money is going to come in each year,” Thompson said.
So in 2000, Congress passed the Secure Rural Schools and Community Act to stabilize that source of funding for counties and rural schools. Counties could choose whether to stay with the 25 percent option or the more stable new program; most in the West chose the latter.
Last year, Ravalli County received $381,657 through the program.
One component of the act allowed counties to use a portion of the funds to develop projects on public lands, but there was a catch. Before any project could be completed, a committee of diverse interests had to agree the project was worthwhile.
The creation of Resource Advisory Committees, or RACs, was an effort to bring a polarized public together, and it worked.
Last year, Ravalli County set aside $57,248 for projects selected by the RAC.
“We put together a diverse group of people that included Friends of the Bitterroot and the log home industry,” said Thompson. “One benefit was it gave people an opportunity to sit down with someone with a totally opposite point of view and work to find consensus. That's what the legislation intended.”
If the Secure Rural Schools and Communities Act fails to be reauthorized, then counties will revert back to the 25 percent funding levels. If that occurs, nearly every county in Montana will feel the impact in cuts from another federal payment called Payment in Lieu of Taxes, or PILT.
PILT payments are allocated according to formulas that include population and the amount of federal lands within an affected county. The formula also includes a deduction for existing revenue-sharing programs, like the 25 percent forest receipts fund.
Every year, Congress allocates a certain amount to the PILT fund, to be allocated to counties nationwide.
If Congress fails to reauthorize the Secure Rural Schools Act and counties are forced to fall back to funding levels they received under the old 25 percent program, the PILT fund is going to get stretched even further, said Paul Beddoe, an associate legislative director with the National Association of Counties.
If the Secure Rural Schools monies disappear, counties that have been receiving that funding will be eligible for increased PILT payments. The result will be more counties asking for the finite amount of money allocated to PILT.
On top of that, the Bush administration has also proposed to cut the PILT program by $35 million in 2007.
“Eastern Montana counties that are now benefiting from a larger amount of PILT payments are going to feel the decrease,” said Beddoe.
The National Association of Counties estimates Montana will lose $10.9 million a year in PILT and forest receipt funds if the Secure Rural Schools Act isn't reauthorized.
Montana's schools will also feel the crunch if the Secure Rural Schools program isn't reauthorized.
Schools receive a third of the monies distributed under the program. In rural counties, that can mean some substantial savings for county taxpayers.
Lincoln County may be the best example. Timber has traditionally been big business there and the county counted on large checks each year from the 25 percent receipts.
In the mid-1990s, Lincoln County schools were receiving about $1.5 million as their share of forest receipts. By 2000 - just before Congress implemented the Secure Rural Schools program - their share dropped to $785,852 because of decreased logging on federal lands.
“It has quite an impact to our taxpayers,” said Lincoln County School Superintendent Ron Higgins. “If we were to lose the amount we receive now, we'd have to increase taxes by 22.5 mills to make up for the difference.”
The school district has averaged about $1.6 million a year under the Secure Rural Schools Act program. A bit more than $1 million of that is passed on to the state to help with school equalization funding. The remainder is spent offsetting transportation and teacher retirement costs.
“I've been surprised that the state hasn't jumped on the bandwagon,” said Higgins. “The loss of those funds could have quite an impact statewide.”
Reporter Perry Backus can be reached at 523-5259 or at pbackus@missoulian.com
Get involved
Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., will host a town hall meeting on the Bush administration proposal to sell 300,000 acres of public land. Open to all, the meeting is at 10:30 a.m. Thursday in the Missoula Children's Theatre, 200 N. Adams St. The session was originally planned at another location, but was moved to accommodate a larger-than-expected crowd.
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