[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 151 (2005), Part 17]
[House]
[Pages 23108-23109]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                EDUCATION FUNDING SOLUTIONS FOR THE WEST

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Utah (Mr. Bishop) is recognized for 5 minutes.

[[Page 23109]]


  Mr. BISHOP of Utah. Mr. Speaker, a couple of weeks ago I had the 
opportunity of addressing this body and illustrating a problem that we 
have, especially in the West. I think that problem can be illustrated 
best by two charts that we have here.
  The first chart, everything that is in blue in this chart is the 
amount of land that is owned by the Federal Government in each State. 
The second one is everything that is in red are the States that are 
having the difficult time of actually funding their own education 
systems. Those are the States having the slowest growth in education.
  Now, I do not think it takes a rocket scientist to realize there is a 
correlation between the red States having problems funding education 
and the blue States that are controlled by the Federal Government with 
all their land. It is not because these red States do not have high 
taxes. In fact, they have a higher tax than the yellow States. It is 
not because they do not have a commitment to education; they actually 
spend a greater percentage of their budget on education than the yellow 
States. The difference is, we have a cavalier attitude about public 
lands that we should realize hurts kids and it hurts their education in 
the West.
  Now, there is a solution to it; and it comes with a simple fruit, it 
is an apple, which stands for the Action Plan For Public Lands and 
Education. I wish I could say I was smart enough to have thought of it, 
but it was actually designed by some State legislators working the 
Council State Governments West that recognized this problem and came up 
with a solution to it.
  There are two bills that we have which can deal with those solutions. 
The first one would say, all right, take all this blue land and allow 
the Federal Government to pay property tax on it. If the Federal 
Government paid the lowest rate of property tax on the land that is 
owned and controlled by them in the West, in fact, in the entire 
Nation, they would add another $4 billion every year to the funding of 
public education. That is a whole lot of money for us to come up with, 
although you could also look at it as the fact that the Federal 
Government prohibits States from raising $4 billion to solve their own 
problems and fund their own education processes with the way we control 
public lands.
  Now, since that is going to have a difficult time, there is a second 
bill. This bill is number 3463, which says that this map was never 
intended to be the way it was supposed to be forever. When the western 
States, those from Montana down to New Mexico that have all the blue 
space in there, the Federal land, when they were originally admitted as 
States, everyone except one had in their enabling act the idea that the 
land should go to the Federal Government until such time as the Federal 
Government shall, not might or if or may, but shall dispose of the 
land, and 5 percent of all of the proceeds were to go back to the 
States for a permanent education fund to fund their education. To be 
honest, actually three States did not have that. They said their 5 
percent was supposed to go for infrastructure and roads. But everyone 
was supposed to get something back from the Federal Government.
  In the mid-1970s, this Congress changed the rules of the game without 
consulting these States and passed legislation that said our official 
policy will now be to keep the land and not pay the 5 percent. What 
bill 3463 intends to do is say, okay, fine, let them keep the land, 
except have the States choose 5 percent of the land that is available, 
and we will take some things off the table, like national parks, 
monuments, reservations, military installations, things that are not 
valuable to the States anyway. But of the remaining land that is there, 
let them choose 5 percent of that land for their own to put it in for 
the purpose of building education funds in each of those western 
States.
  If these western States could take the 5 percent of their land that 
is available and couple it with the school trust lands already open to 
them, they could create amazing economic zones, especially in rural 
parts of their States, which would not only build the economy, but 
which would also pay for the education of their kids. Since we are in 
an energy crisis, much of this land would be dealing with the growth 
and energy and potential for that growth.
  One of the things we have is a cavalier and sometimes a flippant 
attitude about these lands in the West. I had an administrative 
official say, Why are you worried about all this land? It is a bunch of 
useless land where nobody lives anyway, or it is all our land, so we 
recreate on it. What we have to realize is that this policy has 
actually hurt kids. The educational ability of kids growing up in the 
West is depressed because of this land policy.
  What we need now to do is to realize that and take constructive 
efforts to try and change that. Allow the States in the West to have 
the vehicle and the ability to raise the money to fund their education 
system in the way they wish to do it, and House bill 3463 would 
actually do that.

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