With all of the hysteria about Michael Moore’s SiCKO, I wanted to show you a clip from another documentary that will not have the same reach as the Moore film, but covers just as important a subject.  And the focus is right here in California.

Susanville, California is a small rural town tucked into the northeast corner of the state that is one of many cities which has had to make the choice to take in a state prison as a means of economic survival.  The extent to which the town has become dependent on the prison is chilling.  The consequences of building municipal economies on the backs of the prison-industrial complex are obvious: public policy obviously would never want to REDUCE the number of inmates as that would necessarily reduce the number of workers, and support structures, and facilities to cater to inmate visitors.  And remember, the governor and the legislature are about to build these places out, adding 53,000 beds to the corrections system.  Those beds need space, and small rural towns while family farmers can be bought out provide the best opportunity.

This film is showing as part of the Los Angeles Film Festival next week.  You can see it by visiting the LAFF site and typing in “Prison Town” under “individual tickets.”

As you know Take Back Red California
works with rural counties and districts to elect Democrats. I am a member of the co-ordinating council of TBRC.  Our friends in red California need for you to phone and email Speaker Pelosi asking her to bring her leadership to bear on the reauthorization of the Secure Rural Schools and Communities Self-Determination Act (HR 2207) for five years.  The rural counties in northern California and other western states are facing a funding crisis for their schools and roads that only Congress with the leadership of Speaker Pelosi can remedy.  must be reauthorized for five years.

By a House vote on May 10th  the Act has been extended for only one year.  It is attached to the Supplemental Bill on Iraq funding.  Some might call this “pork”, but these funds are critical to schools and transportation in the northwest.

But, one year is not enough.  The Act has been extended twice before for five years and must be again.  Furthermore, every time Bush vetoes the Supplemental Funding Bill, the inclusion of the Secure Rural Schools Act is threatened.  No school superintendent nor county road department can operate efficiently with funding as insecure as it currently is.  This is certainly an extra price rural counties are paying for the Iraq war.

Contact information for Speaker Pelosi:  phone: (202) 225-0100 and http://speaker.gov/….. .  Thank you for encouraging our Speaker do the right thing.  And, please circulate this information widely within the next few days.

The following is a synopsis of the funding history with respect to the decrease in the timber harvest from John Rapf in Trinity County, John is also a TBRC council member.

  In California, the counties from Mendocino and Lake Tahoe including foothill and mountain counties, all the way up through Oregon and into Washington and Idaho have significant amounts of Federal Timber lands.  Most is National Forest, some is BLM.  Here in Trinity County, 90% of the land is owned by the Federal Government.  When Congress created National Forests about 100 years ago, they realized that they needed people to live here in order to harvest the timber, but that the counties would lack the tax base to support local government. So they instituted the Payment-In-lieu-of-Taxes (PILT) system whereby counties received a percentage of receipts from the sale of timber harvested.  In Trinity County approximately 40% of the Public School budget and 60% of Road Department budget comes from PILT.

  This worked fine (unless you were a forest ecosystem) until late the 1980’s and harvests began to decline as a result of the enforcement of various environmental laws.  The timber harvest is now about 10% of what it was in 1988, with a corresponding loss of income to County Government.  There has been a corresponding loss of jobs as well.

  Recognizing this problem, the Clinton Administration and Congress instituted a series of temporary funding measures intended to fill the funding gap.  That is what the Secure Rural Schools and Communities Self-Determination Act does.  We are trying to get Congress to reauthorize for a third 5-year period.

More background http://www.wildernes… 
The Wilderness Society 

This is such a serious matter for rural counties in a post-timber world. 
It should not have come to the point that it is tangled up in Iraq.