Free Republic

Flathead, Lincoln counties could lose millions if Secure Rural Schools is not reauthorized. Congress recently passed a $1 trillion spending bill to keep the United States government in operation, but missing from that bill are the funds that many counties in Montana have come to rely on in their annual budgets. The budget bill dropped $330 million in funding from Secure Rural Schools, a federal program run through the U.S. Forest Service providing funding for counties and schools. Last year, Flathead County received just over $1.6 million in SRS funding; roughly $1,067,000 went toward the county’s road department, and the...

When the new West is won, will there be cowboys? In light of what her neighbors are up to, Double O Ranch owner Vicki Olson isn’t so sure. “I guess the point that I keep hammering at is that if they succeed, that means all of us third- and fourth-generation ranchers are gone,” Olson said. She is the average Montana rancher, 56 going on 70, working a spread gouged from the pebbly soil by her grandparents 100 years ago. Her neighbor, the nonprofit American Prairie Foundation, is methodically acquiring ranches and crafting a 3.5-million-acre wildlife reserve out of private property...

The Senate removed a provision from the energy bill that would have extended for four years payments to rural counties that once depended on federal timber money to pay for schools and libraries. A House bill approved last week would set aside more than $1.5 billion to compensate 700 rural counties in 39 states -- mostly in the South and West -- that were hurt by federal logging cutbacks in the 1990s. An additional $350 million would have gone to rural states through a program that reimburses state and local governments for federally owned property. The timber plan had support...