One way to tell an urban Coloradan from a rural one is to ask, “What’s a school section?” The rustic will know that it’s about one square mile of land, owned by the state and presumably managed for the benefit of public schools.
When Colorado attained statehood in 1876, the federal government donated land “for the support of common schools.” This land could be “disposed of only at public sale and at a price not less than two dollars and fifty cents per acre, the proceeds to constitute a permanent school fund, the interest of which to be expended in the support of common schools.”
Other Western states got similar grants. At a press conference last week, Colorado House Republicans said our state ranks sixth among nine Western states in revenue from school trust lands. House minority leader Mike May of Parker pointed out that “There is a fiduciary responsibility to manage those lands for the schools. They could do better.”
The five-member state board of land commissioners probably could do better. But we should consider how other states make money.
New Mexico’s state trust lands provide 14.3 percent of the state’s K-12 education budget, the highest ratio in the nation.
But some of that is mere good fortune, not something Colorado could duplicate. There are huge reservoirs of oil and gas under some lands that New Mexico got at statehood, and the state kept those mineral rights when it sold the surface rights.
Arizona’s school lands are making money, too, partly by happenstance. When it became a state in 1912, much federal land in the north had already been set aside for Indian reservations, national monuments and the like. So the state got “in lieu” land in the south.
It was worthless desert until Phoenix began some serious sprawl toward the state land. Now it’s valuable development property, and the state land office conducts some lively auctions. The trust fund has gone from $500 million in 1992 to about $2 billion now.
We can certainly sprawl in Colorado, but we don’t have big blocks of state land next to growing cities.
Utah has taken a similar course in “Little Dixie,” the southwest corner of the state with rapid growth around St. George. Its land board has nearly 90,000 acres in the area, and it’s working to enhance the value of school lands before selling them off.
Another Utah strategy is to trade scenic school land for federal land with coal or oil. The schools get income, and the feds can manage the scenery.
Utah went after increased school income thanks to some political pressure that began with a woman named Paula Plant, a PTA member in Salt Lake City who wanted better school funding and discovered that “Hardly any money was coming in from school trust land.” The state changed things, and the permanent trust fund went from $95 million in 1994 to $600 million at the end of fiscal 2005.
Colorado voters addressed school sections by passing Amendment 16 in 1996, so that the land board managed for “reasonable and consistent income” instead of “maximum possible amount” from school trust lands. Plus, 300,000 acres were put into a “stewardship trust” for habitat, scenery and the like. There was litigation, but it was upheld by a federal court.
That should have settled the issue. But now some legislators are calling for more money from the school sections – even though we voted to honor other values 11 years ago. Maybe it just takes a while for the message to get through.
Ed Quillen of Salida (ed@cozine.com) is a former newspaper editor whose column appears Tuesday and Sunday.
