Mineral, Sanders counties get $900,000 in federal payments

Mineral and Sanders counties will receive more than $900,000 this year from the federal government under a long-running program that compensates local governments for nontaxable federal land.

Sanders County is set to get $563,625 while Mineral will receive $338,149 in fiscal year 2020. For Sanders, it’s a slight increase over the $544,846 it got in fiscal year 2019. Mineral’s portion is a healthy increase over the $250,251 it got a year ago.

Sanders County has 917,326 acres of federal land and Mineral has 642,118, all administered by the U.S. Forest Service.

A total of $514.7 million will be distributed to more than 1,900 local governments around the United States to help pay for critical needs such as emergency response, public safety, public schools, housing, social services and infrastructure.

Flathead County’s payments-in-lieu allocation of $3 million is the largest among Montana counties. Ravalli County will receive $2.67 million this year; Lewis and Clark County will get $2.7 million; Missoula County will get just over $2 million. Lincoln County’s allocation is $698,006, while Lake County will receive $474,568.

Tax-exempt federal lands include those administered by the Bureau of Land Management, the National Park Service, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the U.S. Forest and for federal water projects and some military installations.

Since payments-in-lieu-of-taxes payments began in 1977, the Department of the Interior has distributed nearly $9.7 billion dollars to states and the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, Guam and the Virgin Islands.

The department collects more than $13.2 billion in revenue annually from commercial use of public lands, such as oil and gas leasing, livestock grazing and timber harvesting, the Department of the Interior said in a press release.

Using a statutory formula, the annual PILT payments to local governments are computed based on the number of acres of federal land within each county or jurisdiction and on the population of that county or jurisdiction.

Individual county payments may vary from year to year as a result of changes in acreage data, which is updated annually by the federal agency administering the land; prior-year federal revenue sharing payments reported annually by the governor of each state; and population data, which is updated using information from the U.S. Census Bureau.