A House Natural Resources Committee bill would turn national forests into fiduciary trusts mandated to produce both a minimum amount of timber and a minimum amount of revenues for the counties in which the forests are located. Thus, the Antiplanner’s original proposal to turn federal lands into fiduciary trusts become increasingly warped.
A fiduciary trust requires a trustee (who manages the trust), a beneficiary (who gets the benefits of the trust), a trustor (who sets up the trust), and a trust corpus or assets that are to be managed. Trusts differ from ordinary government agencies in that the trusts are obligated to manage the assets solely for the beneficiaries, which is a lot simpler than the multiple jobs of most agencies (create jobs, help local clients, keep politicians happy, etc.).
The Antiplanner’s original idea was that public lands would be managed by two trusts. One would produce maximum revenue by selling, leasing, or otherwise permitting various land uses. Some of the revenues would go to the Treasury but some would go to the second trust which would be obligated to maximize the value of any non-revenue producing resources such as endangered species. The amount of revenues the first trust would produce would depend on how much it could profitably produce without harming the long-term productivity of the land (which trustees are also obliged to protect). The second trust could use some of the revenues to buy or lease resources from the first and not use them if it felt that would be the best way to achieve its mission of maximizing non-market values.
