Quoted from appended article in today's LA Times:
[Tom Udall of New Mexico, was more skeptical. "I think it creates an incentive that could have some very adverse consequences," he said. "If you have agencies which are starved for maintenance funds, and you create the incentive to sell assets to get maintenance funds they might very well be carrying out transactions that are not the best."]
I pitched this particular story to the LA Times in early January and provided some of the documentation upon which it was based. It's an OK article, though it soft-pedals the issue. Sales and leases of Forest Service properties are going to include much more than just surplus administrative facilities. Visitor Centers and other recreation facilities are also fair game for disposal.
I've made the USFS's internal 'Working Capital Fund Conveyance Plan' available online at www.wildwilderness.org/docs/wcfplan.pdf . Read it to see the unfiltered harsh reality that our government is already deeply engaged in the process of selling off America's tangible assets in order to fund tax cuts, wars and corporate welfare.
Today the family silver is being pawned ---
--- tomorrow the Crown Jewels will be sold.
Scott
PS.... Additional documentation explaining what is happening can be read online at: http://www.fs.fed.us/r3/measures/Prioritize/RS-FMP.htm
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www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-forest31may31,1,5455610.story?coll=la-headl ines-california
Forest Service May Sell Some Staff Facilities
May 31, 2005
The agency proposes to put 20% or more of its buildings on the auction
block to raise funds for new construction and deferred maintenance.
By
Bettina Boxall - Times Staff Writer
TRUCKEE, Calif. - Wrestling with a long inadequate maintenance budget
and facing the prospect of more funding cuts, the U.S. Forest Service
is proposing to sell a fifth or more of its staff buildings across the
country, including hundreds in California.
A Bush administration plan would allow the Forest Service to go into
the real estate business, auctioning staff facilities and the land they
sit on to raise cash for upkeep and the construction of new buildings.
Ranger stations, warehouses, residences and remote work centers could
be sold under the program, which must be approved by Congress.
Under the heading "Hot Sales!" a government website this spring
showcased several Forest Service properties auctioned under a pilot
program. Among them were two unused houses in Sierra Madre sold by the
Angeles National Forest in Southern California for nearly $1.7 million.
North of Lake Tahoe, Truckee district ranger Joanne Roubique hopes to
raise the millions needed for a new ranger complex by selling an old
Tahoe National Forest compound that sits on 82 pricey acres next to
Truckee's downtown.
Forest Service officials say that nationwide the sales would help them
chip away at a $1.2-billion building maintenance backlog by disposing
of rundown property and generating cash for new projects. They want to
get rid of facilities that are surplus, in bad shape or in the wrong
place, but, they stress, forest land itself is not going on the market.
"I think it would be a very bad thing if we were talking about selling
national forest lands, and I would be completely against that," said
Forest Service Chief Dale Bosworth. "From my perspective, these are
sites - in many places, in towns - that the public doesn't value their
national forest for."
Still, some of the properties are in isolated reaches of national
forests, and selling them could create pockets of private development,
bringing people, pets and noise to wildlife areas.
Outside the agency, some argue that the Forest Service plan is part of
a troubling effort to use the sale of public lands to finance basic
government operations.
"They all fit into a pattern where we seem to be disposing of public
lands indirectly without telling people what we're doing," said UC
Berkeley forest policy professor Sally K. Fairfax. "Part of what
they're doing is legitimate, but the other half is what scares me."
She cited two other administration proposals.
One would change a congressional spending formula so that billions of
dollars from public land auctions in the fast-developing Las Vegas
region would go to the U.S. Treasury to offset the federal deficit.
Most of the federal money is now used to finance local park projects
and to purchase environmentally valuable private holdings in Nevada.
Another plan under consideration would give the U.S. Bureau of Land
Management expanded authority to keep a portion of the income from
public land sales outside the Las Vegas area, reducing the amount
earmarked for federal land purchases.
At the same time, funding is plummeting for the main federal program
that finances land conservation acquisitions by the Forest Service and
other federal agencies.
The administration has proposed $147 million for federal land
acquisition in 2006, down from more than $400 million four years ago.
The House recently voted to virtually eliminate it in budget
legislation that now goes to the Senate.
Moreover, the Forest Service sales could erode what traditionally has
been one of the agency's primary means of acquiring recreation parcels
and wildlife habitat - its land exchange program.
If forest managers can amass cash for long-sought building projects by
auctioning a surplus town property, "there would be less chance" they
would swap it for back-country acreage, Bosworth acknowledged.
The financial squeeze is all too evident in Truckee, where over the
years Roubique estimates she has made 30 to 40 pitches to regional and
national Forest Service officials to pay for a new district complex.
"We've had this dream for a while," she said this spring, standing
beside a large sketch of the planned compound, which would include
ranger offices, barracks and a fire station constructed on a Forest
Service parcel next to Interstate 80, a few miles away.
A cluster of ordinary 1930s buildings, the old complex is tucked among
towering pines on a rise above downtown. Modern equipment can't fit in
the garage bays. To get to forest blazes, the fire crews and seasonal
workers who bunk there have to navigate a main street clogged with
tourists drawn to Old West storefronts featuring wine, bistro dinners
and $300,000 residential lots.
Around Truckee, the Forest Service sale is not controversial. Local
conservationists agree that the ranger district needs new facilities
and see no reason for the agency to hold on to the 82-acre town parcel,
which is expected to fetch $8 million to $10 million.
"For them to sell the existing site and have development on it . would
be pretty much infill," said Perry Norris, executive director of the
Truckee Donner Land Trust.
But selling the parcel means the Forest Service won't ever use it in
the sort of land swap that the Tahoe National Forest has undertaken in
the past, when it traded several tracts it owned near Truckee for
11,000 private acres it needed to establish a recreation area around
the Boca and Stampede reservoirs.
There is, if anything, more of a need for such land acquisitions now in
the 870,000-acre Tahoe forest, which remains checkered with private
tracts originally given to the railroads more than a century ago. Once
thought too remote for anything but timber production, the parcels are
increasingly vulnerable to development.
"In this part of the Sierra, that is the most looming environmental
threat," Norris said. "Once those sections get sold off and broken off,
you'll never be able to reconfigure it and you'll have what we call
rural sprawl in the Sierra."
Roubique is trying to acquire private parcels around another lake west
of the Stampede Reservoir, but she says she didn't have much of a
choice between selling the Truckee site or trading it. She could let go
of the 82 acres only if she got the money to replace the buildings on
the land. And the only way she could get the money was to sell.
She won approval for the sale last year when her project was included
in a congressionally authorized pilot program that allows the Forest
Service to auction a limited number of staff properties around the
country and pocket the proceeds for maintenance and new construction.
It is that approach that the administration wants to permanently adopt
for the entire national forest system - a move that the Forest Service
estimates could reap $125 million to $175 million over the next decade.
As part of the pilot program, the Kootenai National Forest in
northwestern Montana earlier this year offered a bunkhouse complex on
78 acres next to a reservoir near the hamlet of Noxon. The parcels went
for $850,000.
Under legislation authorizing similar deals in Arizona, the Coconino
National Forest put on the auction block 21 acres and a historic ranger
compound consisting of some of the oldest buildings in Sedona. Bidding
had reached $8.3 million by last week. As in Truckee, Coconino and
Angeles forest managers intend to use the proceeds to build new offices
in locations they say would better serve the public.
"Construction money is scarce," said Raina Fulton, recreation officer
for the Angeles National Forest, which is planning a new complex in
Acton for the Santa Clara/Mojave Rivers Ranger District. "We could ask
for it, but we probably wouldn't get it."
It could get even scarcer. The president's 2006 budget proposal slashes
the Forest Service's capital improvements and maintenance funding by a
quarter, to $381 million. The cut would be offset by income from
selling "unneeded" Forest Service facilities, according to budget
documents.
The recent House appropriations bill restores some of the reduction, but proposed funding remains less than last year's.
In a related move backed by the administration that could further
pressure managers to sell property, the Forest Service wants to start
charging for office space.
Every staff program, whether it be firefighting, wildlife biology,
timber management or a visitor center, would have to dip into its
budget to pay a square foot assessment, which would fund building
maintenance.
"We believe it improves personal accountability," said Vaughn Stokes,
the agency's engineering director. "If you have to pay for
[maintenance] year after year from your project funds, you'll think
hard about" whether you need the space.
The maintenance fee and sales program proposals would have to be
approved by Congress, which may be hesitant to give the Forest Service
such carte blanche.
"I think there is some good to come out of a facility sales program,"
said Republican Rep. Greg Walden of Oregon, chairman of the House
resources forest subcommittee. "There are surplus structures they
shouldn't own anymore."
But, he added, "We don't want to see this become a shell game to sell off assets and drive their current service budget."
His Democratic colleague on the subcommittee, Tom Udall of New Mexico, was more skeptical.
"I think it creates an incentive that could have some very adverse
consequences," he said. "If you have agencies which are starved for
maintenance funds, and you create the incentive to sell assets to get
maintenance funds . they might very well be carrying out transactions
that are not the best."
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- Privatization 
