Thumbnail photo by Amanda Dockter
Pointing out that Del Norte County’s apportionment is a significant part of its general fund, District 3 Supervisor Chris Howard said continuing to lobby hard for the Secure Rural Schools program is important, even though Congress didn’t include it in the budget it approved last month.
Howard, whose district includes the Smith River National Recreation Area and parts of Redwood National and State Parks, called the loss of nearly $1.4 million to the community huge. It’s huge for Del Norte County and huge for Del Norte County Unified School District, he said.
But, while he urged Del Norters to let their elected representatives know where they stand on funding for infrastructure and schools, DNUSD Superintendent Jeff Harris said the district has learned not to count on those SRS dollars.
“We never rely on this money for operational expenses,” Harris told Redwood Voice Community News on Tuesday. “We tend to use it more for cash flow. In the event the state withholds cash for a certain amount of time, we have money that covers that. If we get a grant we use those funds to pay for expenses as we wait for the reimbursement for that grant.”
More than a century old, the Secure Rural Schools program was originally enacted to compensate counties that have large tracts of U.S. Forest Service land, making up for lost timber receipts and tax revenue. More than 700 counties receive those funds, including 39 in California, CalMatters’ Carolyn Jones reported in June 2024.
It was expected to bring at least $33 million to counties in the Golden State, Jones reported last week.
In the fall, the United States Senate unanimously approved the program’s reauthorization. But it didn’t get a hearing in the House of Representatives and wasn’t included in the temporary budget Congress approved in December.
Advocates tried in February to get Congress to approve a new bill that included reauthorizing the Secure Rural Schools program, Jones reported. At a March 13 school board meeting, DNUSD Trustee Michael Greer told his colleagues that there were enough votes for it to pass. But, again, it wasn’t in the legislation Congress approved and President Donald Trump signed on March 15.
In her March 25 CalMatters article, Jones reported that the new bill advocates had lobbied for in February likely won’t pass on its own.
Last year, $1.18 million in SRS Title I money was split between Del Norte County and Del Norte Unified School District, Assistant County Administrative Officer Randy Hooper said in a Thursday email to Howard. Each received nearly $591,000 with the county’s allocation typically going to its roads division.
A total of $111,228 in SRS Title II dollars went to the U.S. Forest Service for projects within Del Norte County approved by the local Resource Advisory Committee, Hooper said.
Del Norte County also received about $97,324 in SRS Title III dollars. According to Hooper, those funds have been “increasingly for limited county activities.” They have been allocated to the county Community Development Department for “‘planning’ on and around federal lands,” though Title III funds the county doesn’t use are to be returned to the U.S. Treasury, he said.
“Future SRS payments (beginning with FY24) will not be made unless it gets reauthorized,” Hooper said.
Hooper told Howard that he had spoken with Greg Burns, of Thorne Run Partners, Del Norte County’s advocate in Washington D.C., who said that if the program gets reauthorized payments to counties will be disbursed retroactively.
On Tuesday, though he said that he has advocated for Secure Rural Schools, even traveling to Washington D.C. to meet with lawmakers, Harris said the situation isn’t as critical for Del Norte schools as it is in other communities.
On March 13, DNUSD’s director of fiscal services, Greg Bowen, told trustees that he had removed the $475,000 in anticipated SRS funding from the district’s 2024-25 budget.
Still, Harris said, it’s important to continue to lobby for the continuation of Secure Rural Schools. When it was originally approved in 1908, the program was meant to be an “in-perpetuity piece of legislation,” the superintendent of schools said. More recently it’s been attached to budgets advocating for a variety of things including a roll-your-own-tobacco tax as well as helium regulations, Harris said.
“We’ve been trying to get Congress to do one of two things: Either do a longer-term approval or do something, which is relatively unique, like setting up a trust fund that those finances would go into and the trust would be self-funded over time,” he said. “And it wouldn’t have to be appropriated by Congress.”
Howard, who represents Del Norte County at the California State Association of Counties and the National Association of Counties, said he’s hoping that a NACo coalition of counties in western states will step up advocacy work too.
Howard pointed out that NACo’s Western Interstate Region recently created a nonprofit organization, the National Center for Public Lands Counties, that seeks to keep SRS and Payment in Lieu of taxes off the Congressional chopping block. In May 2023, the Del Norte County Board of Supervisors approved the donation of $35,777 to the National Center for Public Lands Counties.
“That’s where our energy and our focus needs to be at this time,” he said. “We have a terrific opportunity to make some real headway into focused efforts that lets Congress know why western states rely so heavily on these funds.”
Howard said he too advocated for the Secure Rural Schools program on a recent trip to Washington D.C., speaking with staff belonging to U.S. senators’ Alex Padilla and Adam Schiff’s offices as well as Congressman Jared Huffman and staff with Congressman Doug LaMalfa’s office.
Howard said the elected officials he spoke with strongly supported Secure Rural Schools, but it’s not enough to get their support.
“There’s the entire eastern half of the United States that doesn’t have any of these public lands,” he said. “You have to convince the folks in the east why these funds are so important. Our Congress has a great deal of debating still to do.”
LaMalfa, whose district includes neighboring Siskiyou County, had authored the most recent SRS legislation, Jones reported.
As for DNUSD, it’s “gotten as much of an assurance as I think anybody can get” that grant funding it’s been allocated as well as its apportionment in federal Title funds won’t be slashed, Harris said.
This statement came after Director of Nutrition Services Julie Carter Bjorkstrand said cuts to a U.S. Department of Agriculture program that helps districts purchase local foods won’t affect DNUSD because she didn’t apply for the grant. DNUSD is also expected to continue participating in the USDA’s Community Eligibility Provision program, which provides free meals to students.
But, Harris said, he’s concerned about what happens in future years.
“Typically the federal government does no-cost extensions if you haven’t expended grant money, but we don’t know if that’s going to happen,” he said. “There are some grants we look forward to applying for like a Department of Justice policing grant to help support school resource officers and our partnership with probation [for a] truancy officer. Those grants have been pulled down from the website and haven’t been put back up.”
Harris said district officials have also seen a decrease in the number of grants that the district has historically relied on.
“We don’t know what some of those are going to look like in the future,” he said, “but we’re just keeping an eye on all of that.”
