FSEEE won a huge victory in Congress at the end of last year! Thanks to phone calls and postcards from FSEEE members, the recently passed "Secure Rural Schools and Community Self-Determination Act of 2000" (HR 2389 and S. 1608) was stripped of its worst anti-environmental measures.

At the eleventh hour, thousands of FSEEE members rang phones off the hook in the U.S. Senate. The timing couldn’t have been better. Immediately the bill’s chief sponsor called FSEEE to ask, "What do you want?" FSEEE said, "A clean bill." And that’s what we got.

FSEEE has never seen as broad a coalition of interest groups as we were up against in the fight over the Secure Rural Schools and Community Self-Determination Act. Arrayed against us were the National Education Association (which had its eyes on more school funding, regardless of what the bill did to the National Forests), the U.S. Chamber of Commerce (which didn’t care about school funding, but supported the timber industry), every major and minor timber company in the nation, and the National Association of Counties (they wanted money and timber, both), among hundreds of others.

The behind-the-scenes directorate of this coalition was a small group of Congressional staffers who saw school funding as an opportunity to return National Forests to the timber industry’s control. These folks do the day-to-day work for Senators Larry Craig (R-ID), Frank Murkowski (R-AK), and Representative Ron McInnis (R-CO) – three of the best friends the timber industry has in Congress.

Here’s how the story unfolded. Two years ago, a few school superintendents and county commissioners from rural northern California went to Capitol Hill to seek help. Their historic source of revenue from National Forest logging had dried up as timber sale levels dropped on National Forests due to environmental protections. (Since 1908, local counties and schools nationwide have shared in 25% of the timber revenues produced from National Forests within their states.)

The Congressional staff from the three aforementioned offices told them to go home and build a coalition with the timber industry, otherwise they would not lift a finger for them. Thus was born the National Forest Counties and Schools Coalition, which immediately hired a former National Education Association lobbyist to push its agenda. The fledgling Coalition adopted a set of mom-and-apple-pie principles and set about gaining co-sponsors.

The Coalition’s bill, HR 2389, was introduced first in the House of Representatives where it sailed through the Agriculture Committee with little opposition. However, on the night before the vote on the floor, the Agriculture Committee Chairman substituted his own version of the bill (one kept hidden from the public) for the original.

The new bill had within it an obscure provision that would allow local citizen committees -- dominated by the timber industry -- to gain control over most of the Forest Service’s budget. Under the guise of helping rural schools (who could argue against that?), the timber industry’s Trojan Horse would allow it to regain supremacy over your National Forests.

FSEEE quickly alerted key Senate staff and the Administration to the problems with the new bill. FSEEE then set about educating hundreds of county commissioners in 20 states that would actually lose money for schools under the new bill.

On the eve of the Senate’s consideration of the bill, phone calls from FSEEE members saved the day. The bill’s chief Senator sponsor, Ron Wyden (D-OR), agreed to make the changes FSEEE wanted. And, with those changes, the bill sailed through Congress without further opposition.

In sum, FSEEE members helped put in place a new law that guarantees rural schools and county government a fixed payment from the federal government regardless of whether any timber is logged from National Forests at all.

But it doesn’t end with the passage of the bill. FSEEE’s going to do an audit at the end of one year to see what’s happened following the passage of this law. And if we have funding to support it, we’ll prepare a citizen’s handbook that will advise interested persons on how to deal with local committees that are formed under the new law, to ensure that people are aware of their rights and options.