Page 23 - Flathead Beacon // 7.16.14

FLATHEADBEACON | JULY 16, 2014
cal idea with tenuous political support that would saddle the state with exor- bitant and crippling management costs, and perhaps lead to the sale of at least some public lands to private interests.
“I personally think it is preposter- ous but there seems to be a gathering of momentum and interest,” said state Sen. Ed Lieser, D-Whitefish, a member of the 16-member EQC and a retired forester. “Look at all the candidates. Every single candidate at a debate earlier this year pledged to support it. So we can’t just dismiss this anymore.”
Sen. Jennifer Fielder, R-Thompson Falls, has supported the transfer idea, and last year sponsored the legislative resolution to study federal land manage- ment and identify risks and solutions re- lated to what some perceive as the mis- management of resources in the state.
Earlier this year, she helped organize the Legislative Summit on the Transfer for Public Lands in Salt Lake City, which was attended by more than 50 legisla- tors, county commissioners and other leaders of the 12 western states most af- fected by the federal government’s siz- able footprint on the western landscape.
In Northwest Montana alone, 2.3 million acres of national forest fall un- der the management of the Flathead National Forest, with an additional 2.2 million acres under federal jurisdiction in the Kootenai National Forest. State- wide, nearly 30 million acres of land are managed by federal agencies such as the
Forest Service and Bureau of Land Man- agement.
Proponents of a land transfer cite a flagging natural resource industry, envi- ronmental degradation, loss of tax reve- nue, and numerous other reasons for the effort; however, based on the legislative council’s decision, the transfer would be considered only after all other options are exhausted.
But Fielder and other proponents say Montana residents are better poised to manage their lands than Washington bureaucrats, and that the federal agen- cies have been struggling for decades to effectively manage lands against litiga- tion and plodding analysis procedures.
“The idea is that it would be Montan- ans making the decisions more quickly,” Fielder said of a transfer. “To me it is not a partisan issue and it should not be a partisan issue because the lands affect all of our lives in so many ways. Mon- tanans care about these lands a lot more than folks in Washington D.C. Every- thing about why we love Montana is af- fected by how we manage these 30 mil- lion acres and we have got to do better. We are past the point of this being an emergency.”
But critics argue that the transfer would be an unreasonably heavy lift for the state to shoulder – an expensive millstone that would cost untold mil- lions of dollars while jeopardizing ac- cess to public lands, which repeated sur- veys show are important to the majority
of Montana residents.
“I think they pursue this at their per-
il. In my opinion the majority of people don’t support this,” Lieser said.
In Montana, the Department of Nat- ural Resources and Conservation man- ages 599,000 forest acres, compared to the U.S. Forest Service’s 17.1 million acres in Montana, with state timber sales generating an average of $8.9 mil- lion per year for the former, and an av- erage of $1.6 million a year for the latter, according to the EQC working group.
The revenue disparity between Mon- tana’s state and federal land agencies is significant and alarming, but Depart- ment of Natural Resources and Conser- vation Director John Tubbs says it’s an apples-to-oranges management juxta- position.
The federal land takeover proposals gloss over the practical realities, he said, like whether state or local agencies have the capacity to manage millions of acres of public land or the tax increases that would be necessary to finance all the ac- tivities they envision.
Currently, the state employs one for- ester per 7,500 acres of land, and would have to hire scores of trained workers to effectively manage such a significant up- tick in acreage, Tubbs said.
“If we get all these millions of acres you are going to need a lot of foresters. We are not built for that today,” Tubbs said. “None of the challenges that the federal agencies face today would go
FEDERAL LAND | 23 away just because you put the state of
Montana’s name on it.”
The DNRC has a constitutional mis-
sion to maximize revenues from school trust lands – a singular charge far less complex than the Forest Service’s “sus- tainable multiple-use management con- cept” to meet the diverse needs of people while protecting the resource, he said.
Further, land transfers would re- quire an act of Congress, which crit- ics say would only further gum up the transfer process, while wildland fire- fighting costs and payroll costs would fall to the taxpayers.
“If the state were to own the land the citizens of Montana as taxpayers would have a heavy burden ahead of them,” Tubbs said.
As the DNRC’s state forester, Bob Harrington directly oversees 4 percent of Montana’s forestland, which seems insignificant compared to the U.S. For- est Service’s 59 percent share.
“That allows us to be a little more nimble with our management practic- es,” he said.
Harrington says comparing the state’s management policies and its rel- ative dearth of litigation and “analysis paralysis” is not a fair analogue to the Forest Service’s, which is painted with a larger target.
“Both myself and the administration are not supportive of this concept. We
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