Senator Lisa Murkowski, on Wednesday March 26, 2015, pressed U.S. Forest Service Chief Tom Tidwell on the agency’s failure to address the needs of Southeast Alaska communities affected by federal forested lands in its 2016 budget request.
Murkowski, chairman of the Senate Appropriations Interior Subcommittee, criticized the Forest Service’s commitment to rural communities who depend on revenues from timber activities on federal forested lands.
“The Forest Service should manage our forests for multiple-use and sustained-yield and it doesn’t. While I appreciate the idea of the Forest Service mantra – ‘caring for the land, serving the people’ – it doesn’t feel like the service is living up to it in Southeast Alaska or across our country,” Murkowski said.
Significant reforms of federal management practices are needed to help rural communities survive, especially now that the roughly $300 million Secure Rural School program – which for years masked the problem of declining timber receipts by paying communities, including $14 million to communities in Southeast and Southcentral Alaska, directly from the federal treasury – was not reauthorized for fiscal year 2014. The current budget request calls for slightly more than $50 million to be shared with rural communities nationwide through the Payment to States program. Alaska’s share of that smaller program for the current fiscal year is $537,000.
“It is not a false choice to pursue both healthy local economies and healthy forests. We can have both through the active management of our national forests,” Murkowski said. “Doing so would reduce hazardous fuels loads and cut the hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies we currently pay our logging communities in lieu of letting them harvest timber.”
Via akbizmag.com
