Idaho Sen. Larry Craig says he will not allow a Bush administration proposal to sell 300,000 acres of national forest land to make it through a subcommittee he controls and which has to approve the idea.
"It's bad policy to sell land to fund programs," Craig's spokesman, Dan Whiting, told The Spokesman-Review newspaper of Spokane, Wash. "That's not a road he wants to go down. I don't really see it going anywhere in Congress."
Craig, a Republican, is chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Public Lands and Forests, and his support would be needed for the plan to go forward.
The Bush administration wants to sell the land to raise $800 million for rural schools and road maintenance to replace money being lost from a proposed phasing out of the Secure Rural Schools and Communities Self-Determination Act.
The act is also referred to as the Craig-Wyden act for its sponsors, Craig, and Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore. The 6-year-old act has pumped more than $2 billion into rural states hurt by logging cutbacks on federal land.
Funding for the program expires this year. If renewed, the Craig-Wyden act is expected to be cut over the next five years, eventually putting an end to the program that was designed to help communities that relied on timber revenue to transition to more broad-based economies.
But officials in some rural areas that receive money as a result of the act say their communities will be hurt if the program is phased out.
Mark Rey, Agriculture Department undersecretary and a former Craig staffer, said that if the land sales are stopped then the school and road funding program would also be killed.
"So far nobody has come up with an alternative funding source," Rey said in a telephone interview from his office in Washington, D.C. "Until we start seeing alternatives, there's really no debate. We're not willing to rule out land sales prematurely."
Some alternative funding sources the Bush administration has considered include speeding up the gas and oil drilling permit process, and using money raised by drilling in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
The proposed sale of national forest land includes 26,000 acres in Idaho. Last week, the Idaho Senate voted 34-1 to oppose the plan. On Tuesday, a House committee unanimously passed a resolution urging the congressional delegation to oppose the Bush administration plan.Associated Press via The Times-News
