Forest Service decision puts The Last Best Place up for sale

To the Editor:

The Last Best Place might be up for sale. This past Monday the Forest Service announced at a news conference a Bush Administration plan to sell off 200,000 acres of Forest Service land in order to help fund the Healthy Forest Initiative and the Secure Rural Schools and Community Self-Determination Act.

Even before the announcement this past Monday the Kootenai National Forest had already identified roughly 5,000 acres that would meet the criteria for selling land parcels (basically areas that are in the county road and private land infrastructure which are surrounded by private lands). 5,000 acres may not sound like much out of over 2 million acres in the Kootenai, until you realize that much of this land is in small 10-40 pieces, which means possibly 125-500 parcels, which also means possibly over 500 Lincoln and Sanders County residents affected who have land that abuts the for sale parcels.

Impossible you say? Not at all. For the past few years rural counties in the west have had various public lands sold off in collaborative agreements that included wilderness designation. In one rural county in Nevada with the same name as ours — Lincoln County — 14 wilderness areas totaling 768,000 acres were designated, along with close to 90,000 acres of public land in the rural infrastructure sold off for development.

President Bush was happy to sign the congressional bill because he loves private ownership. The county commissioners loved it because it increased tax revenue in a rural county. Environmental groups loved it since it designated as wilderness land they had been fighting to preserve for decades.

So if you're a realtor you may want to reconsider "backs up to Forest Service land" as a selling point. This will impact all of us in Montana. Our opportunities to access fishing and hunting areas will be severely limited for one thing. Those of us who own land in rural areas will see our privacy, property values, etc., change drastically.

As for wildlife, we all know that the valley bottoms that may be up for sale are generally the most productive land as far as food sources. This can impact every animal from songbirds to grizzly bears. And of course, if grizzly bear habitat changes in the valley bottoms we can expect more road restrictions elsewhere to mitigate the impacts.

This is a quality of life issue that will impact all of us in Montana regardless of our political affiliations. I urge anyone who is concerned about selling off public lands to contact Senators Baucus and Burns and tell them you are against the sale of public lands. Also, contact your county commissioners and tell them you support collaborative efforts to solve land management problems, but not if any proposal includes the sale of public lands.

And if you own land adjacent to forest service lands I would strongly encourage you to contact the Supervisor's office in your county and find out what parcels are being put up for sale.

Randy Beacham

Yaak