By Hal Bernton
Seattle Times staff reporter
The Bush administration on Friday proposed the largest Forest Service land sale in decades, listing 309,421 acres in more than 30 states — including nearly 7,500 acres in Washington state.
The plan, which requires congressional approval, would funnel the money from sales to rural counties, in part to replace proposed cutbacks of federal dollars that now help pay for schools and roads.
Most of the Forest Service tracts are small, isolated parcels adjacent to private or state land. Successful bidders could develop, or possibly log, these lands so long as they complied with state and local land-use laws.
"The lands we identified today are isolated and expensive to manage," said Mark Rey, undersecretary of agriculture in a Friday news conference in Washington, D.C. "In some places, they are part of Forest Service ownership more as an accident of history."
In Washington, the potential sale acreage is scattered across the state, including tracts in the Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area and the Colville, Wenatchee, Olympic, Mount Baker-Snoqualmie, Okanogan and Wenatchee national forests.
One of the largest proposed sales involves seven tracts — totaling more than 1,300 acres — in a remote Sultan River corridor in Snohomish County popular with kayakers.
The land sales are part of President Bush's new budget proposal, which seeks to pare the federal deficit. As part of those cuts, the administration seeks to phase out taxpayer payments to rural timber counties and partial replacement of those dollars with land-sale revenues.
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