Forest Service May Sell Some Staff Facilities
TRUCKEE, Calif. — Wrestling with a long inadequate maintenance budget and facing the prospect of more funding cuts, the U.S. Forest Service is proposing to sell a fifth or more of its staff buildings across the country, including hundreds in California.
A Bush administration plan would allow the Forest Service to go into the real estate business, auctioning staff facilities and the land they sit on to raise cash for upkeep and the construction of new buildings.
Ranger stations, warehouses, residences and remote work centers could be sold under the program, which must be approved by Congress.
Under the heading "Hot Sales!" a government website this spring showcased several Forest Service properties auctioned under a pilot program. Among them were two unused houses in Sierra Madre sold by the Angeles National Forest in Southern California for nearly $1.7 million.
North of Lake Tahoe, Truckee district ranger Joanne Roubique hopes to raise the millions needed for a new ranger complex by selling an old Tahoe National Forest compound that sits on 82 pricey acres next to Truckee's downtown.
Forest Service officials say that nationwide the sales would help them chip away at a $1.2-billion building maintenance backlog by disposing of rundown property and generating cash for new projects. They want to get rid of facilities that are surplus, in bad shape or in the wrong place, but, they stress, forest land itself is not going on the market.
"I think it would be a very bad thing if we were talking about selling national forest lands, and I would be completely against that," said Forest Service Chief Dale Bosworth. "From my perspective, these are sites -- in many places, in towns -- that the public doesn't value their national forest for."
Still, some of the properties are in isolated reaches of national forests, and selling them could create pockets of private development, bringing people, pets and noise to wildlife areas.
Outside the agency, some argue that the Forest Service plan is part of a troubling effort to use the sale of public lands to finance basic government operations.
"They all fit into a pattern where we seem to be disposing of public lands indirectly without telling people what we're doing," said UC Berkeley forest policy professor Sally K. Fairfax. "Part of what they're doing is legitimate, but the other half is what scares me."
She cited two other administration proposals.
