February 11, 2000

Environmentalists Move to Block Sales of Public Land

Proposed in Clinton Plan
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By Jim Carlton
Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal

President Clinton's budget plan contains a proposal giving the U.S. Forest Service wide
authority to sell public lands, a move that environmentalists are scrambling to block.

The proposal ostensibly is designed to enable the government to use the funds to swap
public tracts for more desirable private land. However, environmentalists fear that
wholesale swaths of land could be liquidated under a conservative administration.

Environmentalists say that under this proposal, the nation's public forests would become
as vulnerable as they were two decades ago, when James Watt, Interior secretary under
President Reagan, suggested the government sell vast parts of its forests and ranges. That
proposal died amid opposition from environmentalists and Democratic lawmakers.

"The problem with this Clinton proposal is that if it gets in the wrong hands, it could
result in a wholesale disposal program," said Janine Blaeloch, director of Western Land
Exchange Project, a Seattle environmental group.

Officials of the American Lands Alliance, a conservation group in Washington, and the
Sierra Club, of San Francisco, also have expressed concern. The environmentalists plan
to lobby Congress to delete the budgetary language, which was discovered this week
when the budget went to Capitol Hill.

White House officials defended the proposal, saying it is designed to improve the
government's ability to get rid of surplus or marginal forest land. "We certainly wouldn't
be proposing legislation for the wholesale sell-off of America's public forests," a White
House spokesman said.

Under the budget plan, the Agriculture Department's Forest Service would be instructed
to propose administrative and legislative changes giving it "increased authority for land
sales and acquisition" to more efficiently swap public lands for private lands. The
legislation, which would include limits to avoid potential land-sale abuses, likely would
appeal to many Western congressmen who are pushing for more local control of public
lands.

By contrast, the Clinton administration has come under fire from some of these
congressmen and others for such actions as the recent expansion of national monuments
in the West. Administration officials came up with this plan, environmentalists say, in
response to criticism over the way recent land exchanges have been handled across the
West. These critics have complained of such problems as overlogged private land being
traded by a timber company for untouched public forests.

Under the administration's plan, increased authority by the Forest Service to conduct land
sales would help it ensure "increased environmental benefits and government value." The
Forest Service now is limited to making small sales, such as parcels of as many as 80
acres to resolve property disputes.