Letter to President Bush requesting a meeting to discuss additional PILT funding in the FY 2007 budget request to Congress |
| August 25, 2005
Dear Mr. President: We are writing to request a meeting with you to discuss your administration’s position on the Payments-in-Lieu-of-Taxes Program (PILT). Because local government cannot tax federal lands or facilities, PILT was created nearly 30 years ago as a method for the federal government to at least partially compensate county governments for the costs they bear as a result of services they provide on federal land located within their counties. Counties use these PILT funds to help pay for such things as road maintenance, law enforcement, search and rescue, garbage disposal and all other services required for private as well as public lands. In its entire history, PILT has never been fully funded. The current year PILT funding level of $227 million represents only about 66% of full funding for PILT. We were particularly concerned that the FY 2006 Budget you sent to Congress requested only $200 million for PILT funding. This proposed reduction in your FY 2006 Budget of $27 million from the actual FY 2005 appropriation, if it had been approved, would have represented the largest year-to-year cut in PILT funding in the history of the program. While we realize that your entire proposed budget provided very little funding increases overall, you did request $212 million in your FY 2006 Budget for land acquisition by the Interior Department alone. Clearly, acquiring more federal land at the same time that PILT is not fully funded, and, indeed, proposed for reduction, only exacerbates the funding shortfall problem. It frustrates those counties which would have had to make up the difference by increasing taxes on private property to pay for the costs of providing these services on public lands. We site the land acquisition program because the requested amount illustrates a fundamental point about the PILT program. Except in the most unusual emergency circumstances, federal land acquisition is discretionary. On the other hand, these costs imposed on county governments by the federal presence are not discretionary. Roads must be repaired, the law enforced, lost or injured people found and rescued, garbage disposed of and all the other responsibilities of county government still must be met. The overwhelming cost of providing these services on public lands is paid by county taxpayers. They are literally subsidizing the federal government in the amount of the shortfall between a given year’s PILT payment and the actual cost of providing these essential governmental services. This is not fair or justifiable under any circumstances. In light of the facts that in many cases the counties affected, especially in the West, are sparsely populated, relatively poor and often have a very small private land tax base to generate revenue, it thus creates a completely unacceptable situation. We think there is no justification for not fully funding PILT. The federal government has an ethical and moral obligation to pay these costs and not continue to shift a significant portion of them to local taxpayers. Even within your current fiscal year budget, this would not have been difficult to do. Simply cutting the proposed land acquisition budget by half and applying that amount to PILT would have fully funded it with no net budget impact. It would seem that an underlying policy issue here is why the federal government, which already owns about 1/3 of the total land area of the United States, should be increasing that amount through these additional acquisitions. But regardless of how that policy question is eventually resolved—and this is not a topic that we are proposing be covered in our meeting—we assert that adequately funding the management and paying for the costs created by the land already in the federal inventory, including full funding of PILT, should take precedence over acquiring even more land. We request this meeting with you while there would still be time to adjust your proposed FY 2007 budget. Initially, we are requesting this meeting on behalf of the member counties of the Western Counties Alliance. However, we are circulating this letter to other public lands counties around the country, as well as to other interested organizations and individuals asking for their endorsement. We are confident that we will receive wide support for this meeting and as we receive additional endorsements we will forward them on to your staff. We would be pleased to work with your staff to coordinate such a meeting. Of course, we will meet at any time and place convenient for you. We look forward to discussing with you in the near future this issue that is so critical to so many counties and their residents in our country.
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