Flathead Forest could sell up to 3,000 acres of land
Hungry Horse News
If this Forest Service land sale goes through, it would make the recent Hungry Horse deal look like small potatoes.
The Forest Service last week released a list of Flathead National Forest land that could possibly sold to make federally-mandated payments to the county.
Already the Flathead National Forest Service is receiving calls about the plan. Spokeswoman Denise Germann said she's had about a dozen calls. Some were from private landowners who live adjacent to the Forest, others were from real estate agents looking for maps of parcels.
The Forest Service currently makes a payment-in-lieu of taxes to the county for holdings here.
Under a Bush Administration plan, the federal government would sell off about $1 billion in public lands in the next 10 years.
That includes 29 parcels in the Flathead National Forest, ranging from just under an acre to 200 acres in size.
All told, the list amounts to about 3,000 acres of land in the Flathead.
The Bush plan addresses the reauthorization of the Secure Rural Schools and Community Self-Determination Act of 2000.
The act is designed to make payments to counties with Forest Service and other federal lands because the counties have to expend money to support those lands - namely in the form of infrastructure such as roads.
Those payments, earlier this century, were based on timber sales receipts. But in 2000, Congress recognized that timber harvest was far less in many western states because of environmental concerns, most notably the spotted owl in the Pacific Northwest.
So it crafted a bill that allowed counties to base the payments on either actual timber sale receipts, or on a high average of past receipts.
Now the Bush administration is proposing selling some 300,000 acres of land nationwide to raise about $800 million to keep the payments going another six years.
Last year the county received about $1.34 million from the Forest Service.
Germann noted that things are still in the preliminary stages. The Flathead hasn't even created a local map yet. That should come the end of this month.
The demand for land here comes as no surprise. An auction of Forest Service land in Hungry Horse last year netted $2.381 million for 90 acres of land. That's about $26,000 an acre.
That land was sold under a special act by Congress that allowed surplus lands to be sold so, in this case, the Hungry Horse Ranger District could build new offices.
While no map of the potential sale has been produced, the Forest has released a list of lands that could be sold. It can be viewed at: