President calls for sell-off of Western public land

From the Denver Post:

President Bush wants to sell more public land across the West to raise money for schools, conservation and deficit reduction.
Bush's proposed 2007 federal budget, sent to Congress on Monday, calls for granting the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management new authority to sell off land. Those agencies together control hundreds of millions of acres in Western states.
Democrats and environmentalists compare the idea to recent proposals by Tom Tancredo and other Republicans in Congress to sell federal land to pay for hurricane relief and invigorate the mining industry...The Forest Service proposes selling 150,000 to 200,000 acres to raise $800 million over five years. The agency is trying to maintain a program that supported rural schools with timber proceeds but ran into financial trouble when logging declined.
The BLM doesn't have an estimate of how many acres it might sell under the plan, but it expects to sell land worth $40 million to $50 million per year.


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--Tom Hayes