Oregon is about to commit school trust lands to 70 years of conservation — without paying the schools.
This week OASTL sent a formal demand letter to the Board of Forestry, the State Forester, and the Forest Trust Land Advisory Committee: exclude the school lands, or make the trust whole.
The Forest Trust Land Advisory Committee meets July 16 to take up the process for final approval of the Western Oregon State Forest Management Plan — the last advisory step before the Board of Forestry acts. The plan implements the state's habitat conservation plan, with a 70-year permit term, across roughly 640,000 acres of state forestland west of the Cascades, with about half the area dedicated to habitat and riparian set-asides.
Most of that land belongs to the Board of Forestry, and how the Board balances timber, habitat, and recreation on its own land is its policy call to make. OASTL's letter takes no position on it.
But approximately 28,000 acres inside the permit area are not the Board's land. They are Common School Forest Lands — held in trust, since statehood, for Oregon's schoolchildren. Trust law is not complicated on this point: a trustee cannot give away trust assets to serve other public purposes, however worthy. When the public wants a public good from trust property, the public pays for it.
Oregon has run this experiment before. The Elliott State Forest received its own habitat conservation plan in 1995. Restrictions tightened, harvests collapsed, and by 2013 the schools were paying money to own a forest — the first recorded net loss in these trusts' history. The state's answer was to attempt a capped-price sale, and finally to remove the forest from the trust altogether. The losses fell on the schools.
So the letter demands one of two honest outcomes: exclude the Common School Forest Lands from the plan's conservation dedications, or compensate the Common School Fund at full fair market value for every acre committed — paid by the public that elects the benefit, exactly as it would be if the land were private.
The Committee accepts written testimony from anyone. Send a few sentences in your own words to ftlac.comment@odf.oregon.gov by 3:00 p.m. Tuesday, July 14, with "Western Oregon State Forest Management Plan" in the subject line and your name and town at the top. The Committee meets virtually at 3:00 p.m. Thursday, July 16.
The message is simple: conservation is welcome — and the public pays for its public goods. Exclude the school trust lands from the plan, or make the Common School Fund whole.