Friday, October 12, 2007

Congress messing with school funding

unedited oct. mt. news short

School funding bill in Congress’ hands


By Kathryn Reed

A flurry of visits by area officials to the Capitol could mean the difference of hundreds of thousands of dollars for local school districts.
James Parsons, superintendent of Alpine County Unified School District, spent the first week of October in Washington lobbying folks to pass the Secure Rural Schools bill and fund it for five years.
The legislation affects about 4,400 school districts in 40 states; with Lake Tahoe Unified and Douglas County among those. LTUSD received $214,783 for the 2006-07 school year, while DCSD got about the same.
However, the $425,000 allocation to Alpine County’s district accounts for more than 20 percent of its unrestricted funds in a total budget of $3 million.
“This really needs to be solved at the federal level. Or give back the federal lands to the local areas and let us manage it,” Parsons said as he was packing for his trip. “But that is not going to happen.”
At issue is a law from 1908. The federal government took forest land away from local jurisdictions, which meant tax dollars went with it. Congress agreed to give the areas 25 percent of the revenues generated off the lands from things like timber, grazing, mining, agriculture and recreation.
In the mid-1990s logging was curtailed – which was the bulk of where the money came from. A bill was passed in 1993 that dealt with spotted owl habitat that led to money for California, Oregon and Washington.
In 2000, Congress passed the Secure Rural Schools Act that expired in 2006. It restored the funding to all districts.
“In those six years Congress was supposed to come up with another way to mitigate the loss (from timber sales). Nothing was done,” Parsons said. “Suddenly we are out of money again.”
Politicians are working on getting an amendment attached to another bill so money would flow again to schools. Parsons said he’s heard a decision could come as early as this month or it may happen at the end of the year.
Douglas County Commissioner Nancy McDermid and County Manager Dan Holler were in Washington Sept. 18-21 working on garnering support for schools.
“We are trying to get a permanent solution instead of scrambling all the time,” McDermid said. “Western states are by and large owned by the federal government, so payment in lieu of taxes is a way to offset what you could be collecting if it were in private ownership.”
About 67 percent of Douglas County is owned by the feds.

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