While the effort to sell U.S. Forest Service lands to raise money for schools probably is dead this year, Mark Rey, Department of Agriculture undersecretary, expects it will be resurrected in some form next year.

"I think we've run out of time this year," Rey said on Friday. "I think the real issue is can we find an alternative that is acceptable? Should land sales be part of the mix?"

The sale of public lands is nothing new -- only a few years ago, Montana's Congressional delegation created legislation that forced the Bureau of Reclamation to sell 265 sites to cabin owners who had leased the land around Canyon Ferry Reservoir.

But when President Bush's 2007 budget proposed identifying 300,000 acres of National Forest lands that could be offered for sale to raise money for the Rural Schools and Community Self-Determination Act, the plan was widely criticized, even though Rey said the administration only anticipated selling about 175,000 acres to raise $800 million, and that was only a fraction of the 193 million acres managed by the Forest Service.

In Montana, 13,948 acres were potentially for sale in the Beaverhead, Bitterroot, Custer, Deerlodge, Flathead, Gallatin, Helena, Kootenai, Lewis and Clark and Lolo forests.

He said the administration knew the plan would be a "sensitive" issue, but felt they had successfully included three characteristics of land sales Congress previously had approved.

"The first characteristic was precision -- explaining exactly what you are talking about with very little room for ambiguity for what might be sold and what might not be," Rey said. "The second is transparency, in that everybody needed an adequate amount of time to look, think, scream and talk about the proposals. This was not the time to slip something into a bill at the 11th hour. The third was that it had to be a broadly embraced, widely agreed upon public purpose for which the money would be used, not some vague desire to reduce the deficit."

However, the public and members of Congress apparently disagreed with his assessment. Both Democrats and Republicans opposed the Bush plan, saying the long-term loss of public lands would offset any short-term gains. It also was panned by the four men who ran the U.S. Forest Service from 1979 to 2001, as well as dozens of environmental groups, backcountry outfitters, anglers and hunters and thousands of people from across the nation who sent letters protesting the plan.

Rey notes that reauthorization of the Rural School Act has widespread support, but they're still at a loss as to how to fund it. The act, designed to provide transitional assistance to rural counties affected by declining revenue from timber harvests on federal lands, is set to expire at the end of this year unless Congress renews it.

Rey said he doesn't expect that to happen, but noted that the last payment to counties will be made at the end of this fiscal year, so the dollars will carry through for at least a short period of time.

"So if they enact legislation early next year, there will not be any effect in funding for the schools," Rey said. "Another option is a one-year extension of the act. But the broader question is what alternatives have surfaced for paying for the reauthorization?"

Reporter Eve Byron can be reached at 447-4076 or at eve.byron@helenair.com