Sen. Bill Cassidy faces backlash with bill to break up Louisiana’s only national forest

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A Republican U.S. senator’s proposal to break up Louisiana’s only national forest is drawing widespread outrage, including from the local government set to receive the land.

Sen. Bill Cassidy has quietly drafted legislation to transfer about 140,000 acres of the Kisatchie National Forest to Grant Parish. That’s nearly a quarter of Kisatchie, a national forest with one of the South’s largest expanses of longleaf pine habitat and more than 300 miles of trails used by hikers, hunters and mountain bikers.

The draft bill aims to give locals control of federal land and boost the region’s economy, but the Grant Parish Police Jury is strongly opposed. On May 14 , the jury, which serves as the parish’s governing body, voted unanimously against the proposal.

“We want that land to stay with the Forest Service and remain just like it is,” Roy Edwards, the jury vice president, said on Tuesday. “Nobody on the jury asked for this.”

Transferring the land would strip federal protections and open critical wildlife habitat to development, said Rebecca Triche, executive director of the Louisiana Wildlife Federation.

“Kisatchie has a very unique habitat for central Louisiana, and it protects many threatened or endangered species,” she said. “This is a public property that’s been well managed by the Forest Service, and it provides outdoor access and a lot of value to the region. There’s no reason to change this.”

The federation sent Cassidy more than 1,200 comments against the proposed transfer.

Cassidy’s office declined to comment on the proposed bill.

Triche said there’s been a recent upswing in proposals to transfer federal or state public lands to local or private management. Last year, a Republican-backed proposal would have sold off millions of acres of federal land, but the measure was strongly opposed and eventually withdrawn.

Cassidy, who lost his re-election bid in Louisiana’s Republican primary on Saturday, has not formally introduced the measure, dubbed the “Grant Parish Restoration Act,” in Congress. His term is set to end on Jan. 3.

A 12-page draft of the bill has been circulated by Grant Parish business leader Chuck Carpenter, who identified himself to the jury as the bill’s “lead collaborative author.”

The proposed bill would also transfer a federal prison, the Federal Correctional Complex Pollock, to the parish and expand certain tax incentives in rural areas.

The bill’s overall aim is to support rural economic development in low-income areas that have a high percentage of federal land ownership. The U.S. Forest Service owns about a third of Grant, a mostly forested parish in central Louisiana with about 22,000 residents. The region’s logging industry has waned in recent decades and now supports only about 450 jobs in the parish.

In a Facebook post, Carpenter called the jury’s vote against the proposal a “hatchet job against Grant Parish residents aspiring for our community to be better.”

He said local control of the Grant Parish portion of Kisatchie would generate more tax revenue to improve local water systems and schools.

Edwards, a former logger who has hunted and fished in Kisatchie most of his life, agreed that having such a large federal landowner has its downsides.

“It limits us,” he said. “There’s not a lot of room for (developments) to expand, and we don’t get a lot of the tax base because we can’t tax federal land.”

But, he notes, the parish doesn’t have the capacity to manage Kisatchie as well as the federal government.

“It’s too overwhelming,” he said. “Grant can’t take all that on.”

Kisatchie was founded in 1930 after the Forest Service purchased several clearcut timberlands from Gulf Lumber and other companies that had abandoned dozens of mills in Louisiana during the 1920s. The forest is divided into five ranger districts that cover just over 600,000 acres.

The forest draws about 350,000 visitors each year. The Catahoula Ranger District,  which covers much of east Grant Parish, is known for its piney woods trails, deer hunting and fishing at Stuart Lake, a five-acre reservoir developed by the Civilian Conservation Corps.

The Forest Service has spent decades restoring Kisatchie’s longleaf pine ecosystems. The native pine once dominated Louisiana and large areas of the South but was greatly reduced by logging and replantings of tree species favored by the pulp and paper industries. Triche said these efforts have helped support species that depend on mature longleaf habitat, including the red-cockaded woodpecker and the Louisiana pinesnake, both protected under the Endangered Species Act.

“Before the 1930s, this whole area had been clearcut, and the Forest Service has spent a long time recovering it,” she said. “What happens to this if it’s transferred? What happens to public access? We don’t have enough public lands in Louisiana. They’re an asset we need to keep.”

This article first appeared on Verite News New Orleans and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.