Schools Demand Continuance of Old Taxpayer Scam

“Rural schools in California already struggle with declining enrollment, staffing shortages and wildfires,” says Carolyn Jones, writing for Calmatters, a left-leaning policy web site. “Now they’re facing the possible loss of money they’ve relied on for more than a century.” What Jones doesn’t say is that the counties have been scamming federal taxpayers for that money for decades and they’d naturally rather continue the scam than have to raise the money locally.

No children live in the Trinity Alps Wilderness Area, which imposes no costs on the Trinity Alps School District. Yet the school district superintendent somehow finds it “mind boggling” that Congress might not force federal taxpayers to pay the district for every acre of wilderness area and other national forest lands that happens to be in Trinity County, California. Photo by Kee Yip.

Federal lands aren’t taxable by state or local governments. When Congress began setting aside national forests, it decided to make it up to local governments by giving them 25 percent of any revenues the forests earned. In some places, the counties got 50 percent. Congress specified that national forest payments to counties had to be spent on roads and schools.

When Congress passed this law, it never imagined that national forest revenues would someday be well in excess of a billion dollars a year. By the 1970s, many counties, particularly those in Washington, Oregon, northern California, Idaho, and a few other places were getting far more money in 25-percent funds than they would have gotten if they had been able to collect property taxes.

An Oregon State University professor calculated in the 1970s that some counties were getting close to $30 million a year more than property taxes, and the nationwide total was in the hundreds of millions. This was so much money that the dean of the OSU College of Forestry took the professor aside and said, “There’s been a lot of people murdered for a lot less money than that” and told him never to publicly speak or write about it again. (Instead, he quit the university.)

When national forest timber sales declined in the 1990s, the counties protested that they were losing money that they somehow deserved. But they didn’t deserve it any more than counties that didn’t have public lands in them deserved a huge federal taxpayer subsidy. It’s not as if the national forests are sending a lot of children to schools. Unlike the Park Service, the Forest Service doesn’t maintain employee housing, so any Forest Service employees who do have children are paying property taxes on their homes that support the schools.

Nevertheless, western members of Congress twisted enough arms to pass the Secure Rural Schools Act guaranteeing the counties some money — still more than property taxes in many cases — for a number of years. When senators and representatives from other states protested, they were told that this was just to help the counties transition to local funding and that the money would be phased out. Although the law sunsets every three years, western delegations get it renewed every time.

Another left-leaning web site comments that “more than one in five U.S. kids attends rural schools.” Maybe so, but only a small percentage of those rural schools are funded by the Secure Rural Schools program. All the rest of them seem to do fine without it. If the program is not renewed, the schools will still get some money from federal taxpayers, and while that will be less than what they have been getting it will be no less than they deserve.

This is a scam pure and simple. It was a scam when counties were receiving 25 percent of timber receipts even if 25 percent was far more than the property taxes would have been if the lands were private. It is even more of a scam today when the national forests aren’t making as much revenues. It has been a quarter of a century since national forest timber sales dropped. It is time for to learn to live off of their own resources like schools in the rest of the country.