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Rep. Taylor's subcommittee kills land sale

Any future sales must have local support, Taylor says

By Michael Lewis, News Editor

Western North Carolina Representative Charles Taylor told U.S. Forest Service Chief Dale Bosworth last week that the administration's proposal to dispose of 300,000 acres of national forest lands was "not going to happen."

According to a release from Taylor's office, the exchange came during Bosworth's testimony on the Forest Service's Fiscal Year 2007 budget request before the House Interior Appropriations Subcommittee, which Rep. Taylor chairs.

"Any sale of forest land affects the communities and counties in which those forests are located," said Taylor. "You cannot put out a plan to sell off this much land all across the nation, without first sitting down with each of those local communities and talking about their priorities and their goals. They cannot be cut out of the process."

Taylor's position up until the release had been that the proposal would not happen this year. Over the last several weeks, the congressman has advocated an analysis of each tract piece by piece to see what lands can be auctioned and which are too lose to sensitive parts of the National Forest as a whole.

The administration's proposal was intended to generate revenues to pay for reauthorization of the Secure Rural Schools and Community Self-Determination Act of 2000. Under this program, counties that had historically received 25 percent of the Forest Service's timber harvest revenues were compensated for the enormous declines in harvests under the Clinton Administration. The program is set to expire at the end of September of 2006. In his remarks, Rep. Taylor further noted that the Administration's proposal would send a disproportionate amount of land sale revenues to school districts in the Pacific Northwest; while more than a third of all the acreage to be sold lies in the South and Midwest regions, their school districts would receive only 10 percent of the revenues.

In Macon County, nearly 3,000 acres of public land are proposed by the Bush administration for sale to the public and as a result, the possible measure has been a magnet for criticism from virtually every elected official.

Last Monday, Macon County commissioners unanimously approved a resolution opposing the sale of any land in any form.

"I cosponsored the Secure Rural Schools bill because so many of the counties in Western North Carolina depend on those revenues," said Taylor. "We can - and we will - reauthorize the program this year, but we will not sell off national forest lands to pay for it."

Rep. Taylor is a cosponsor of HR517, legislation to reauthorize the Secure Rural Schools program that is currently pending in the House.

On other issues, Rep. Taylor commended Chief Bosworth for the Forest Service's attention to forest issues, including control of the southern pin beetle and hemlock woolly adelgid, and active fuels reduction efforts to improve the forests' resistance to wildfire.