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Tom Power - April 03, 2006
Public Lands Privatization
Holding Rural Kids Hostage for Public Lands Privatization
President Bush has proposed that the federal government begin selling off federal forest- and grasslands in order to fund federal assistance to rural schools and other basic rural infrastructure. This proposal simply dramatizes the financial corner into which the Bush Administration has purposely driven the nation in order to fund its generous tax cuts for a tiny sliver of the most well-to-do Americans.
The federal rural school and road program at issue was originally intended to help counties where the federal government owns a significant portion of the land base. The idea was that the federal government should make payments in lieu of taxes to local governments since, if the land had been privately owned, local and state governments could have taxed it to fund local services.
But the Bush Administration wants to make the federal land management agencies, primarily the US Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management, fund these payments in lieu of taxes by either expanding private commercial access to those lands or simply selling them off.
To the Bush Administration it is very simple: The federal budget deficit is growing; these lands are not generating money; yet local governments want financial support for their schools and roads. The solution is simple: Support our kids by either clear-cutting or strip-mining the land or selling it off altogether to private commercial ventures. If that federal land is not currently generating a substantial dollar flow, it must be useless. Get rid of it.
There are two mind-boggling assumptions behind this policy.
The first is that it is more important to cut the taxes on that portion of our population that over the last two decades has gobbled up almost all of the net gains from improvements in the productivity of our economy. Those that have benefited the most from economic expansion should be given even more even if we have to take funds away from the poorest of our schools, let roads deteriorate in the poorest of our counties, cause more environmental damage in our rural areas, or sell off our century-old public lands heritage. The rich need more; the rest of us and nature can get along with less.
The second assumption driving this latest of the Bush public lands sell-off efforts is that only commercial activity contributes to our well being. If federal lands are not generating a cash flow, they must be unproductive. Strangely, at the very same time the Bush Administration has been trying to get rid of public lands, one community after another has been authorizing the expenditure of public funds to purchase lands or the development rights to lands in order to protect open space, recreational areas, and wildlife habitat. The rest of us know something that the opponents of public lands do not: namely that the health and quality of the natural landscapes that surround our communities are crucial to the health and quality of our lives and that of our communities. Those natural landscapes are continuously producing a flow of valuable environmental services that improve the quality of our lives and the well being of our families: clean water, climate stabilization, wildlife, open space, dispersed recreation, and scenic beauty.
Commercial development of those natural landscapes, rather than being an economic boon is often a threat to the quality of our lives. Each year about 1.5 million acres of wildlife habitat are lost to commercial development. As our natural landscapes are gobbled up for commercial purposes, publicly protected landscapes become ever more important. That is why hundreds of communities have voted to raise their taxes to protect open space. The Bush proposal, of course, runs in the opposite direction. It wants to sell lands already in the public domain, lands whose natural area values to surrounding communities can only increase over time as commercial development changes permanently more and more of the privately-owned landscape. At the same time, Bush has drastically cut expenditures from the Land and Water Conservation Fund that was intended to protect important natural areas by bringing them into the public domain. Those expenditures have been cut by 90 percent, implicitly freeing up those trust dollars to also finance tax cuts for the wealthy.
The current federal deficit was politically created by a combination of tax cuts and an abandonment of fiscal controls on federal spending. Having arranged this by either negligence or design, Bush now tells us that we cannot publicly afford things we previously took for granted, including public lands. Bush’s proposal begins with a little nibble at the public domain, “only” 300,000 acres. But there are large federal budget deficits as far as the eye can see. If approved today, the same logic can be used in coming years to nibble a little bit more and a little bit more until our public land heritage is a thing of the past and our landscapes are nothing but sprawling subdivisions, endless strip malls, and industrial wastelands. This may bring smiles to the faces of the anti-government ideologues surrounding Bush, but it would represent a tragic reversal of a century-old conservation effort aimed at preserving a significant part of the natural landscapes that have defined this nation’s history, culture, and values.
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| Northwest Area Foundation Grant Funds News Reports on Poverty Issues |
Through 2008 the Montana Public Radio News Department will be presenting regular feature stories about issues of poverty in Montana. This project is made possible with a two-year, $78,500 grant from the Northwest Area Foundation. The funding will enable Montana Public Radio to add a half-time reporter to its staff for the duration of the project, as well as cover costs for field recording equipment and travel throughout western and central Montana. News Director Sally Mauk says, “I’m excited about the project and the opportunity to get our news staff out to many Montana communities to report on such an important and timely topic.”
The Northwest Area Foundation approached Montana Public Radio with this opportunity for funding coverage of poverty issues, after beginning successful projects with Minnesota Public Radio and Seattle’s KUOW. The Northwest Area Foundation’s mission is to help communities in an eight-state region (including Montana) reduce poverty. www.nwaf.org.
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