More than 2,600 acres in the Superior National Forest have been added to a national list of public land the Bush administration wants to sell to help balance the federal budget.
The land -- 65 scattered tracts on the periphery of the national forest -- would be sold at public auction, probably later this year if the plan advances.
The Bush administration last Friday proposed the sale of nearly 310,000 acres in 30 states, but that list did not include any acres in Minnesota's Chippewa or Superior national forests. However, Jim Sanders, supervisor of the Superior forest, told the News Tribune on Tuesday that 2,622 acres are included in the proposed sale.
"We should have been on the list last week, but it was omitted somehow," Sanders said.
The 2,622 acres are mostly 40- and 80-acre tracts in the Pigeon River and Kabetogama Purchase Units on the eastern and northwestern edges of the Superior National Forest, and on the southeastern portion of the Laurentian Ranger District northeast of Two Harbors, said Diana Soland, lands specialist for the Superior National Forest.
The tracts are isolated and surrounded by state, county or private lands, Sanders said. Most were already on a U.S. Forest Service inventory of land that might be exchanged in future years to consolidate federal land closer to the center of the forest. The land has not yet been appraised.
The Superior forest's boundaries -- established a century ago -- include3.26 million acres, 2.01 million acres of which is owned by the U.S. government. There are no plans to increase federal ownership, so the forest will never grow to fill its boundaries, Sanders said.
No tracts on the Chippewa National Forest in Minnesota are included, and only one 80-acre tract on Wisconsin's Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest, in Langlade County, is on the list. In Michigan's Upper Peninsula, about 5,800 acres of the Ottawa and Hiawatha national forests could be sold.
With the skyrocketing increase in value for raw forest land in northern Minnesota, land experts say the federal land could sell for nearly $2,000 per acre. The average price for undeveloped forest in Minnesota has increased from about $200 per acre in 1989 to nearly $1,400 per acre today, a University of Minnesota study found.
Mark Rey, undersecretary of agriculture in charge of Forest Service policy, said the small parcels are expensive to manage and not critical to the Forest Service's mission.
The 309,000 acres amount to less than 0.2 percent of the 190 million acres now under U.S. Forest Service management. But conservation groups say the sale is another misguided effort by the administration to privatize public lands.
With more private forest land being sold, parceled and developed for second homes, opponents of the sale say undeveloped public tracts are even more important for maintaining wildlife habitat, timber access and public recreation.
"We shouldn't have to pay for schoolbooks and chairs by selling off our public lands," said Joshua Davis, forest program coordinator for the Sierra Club in Minnesota. The Forest Service will publish a notice in the Federal Register around Feb. 28 requesting public comments on the land sale. The preliminary list of tracts to be sold is available at http://www.fs.fed.us/land/staff/ruralschools.shtml.Duluth News Tribune
