The Crested Butte News Serving the Gunnison Valley since 1999
Likely to be used for county road and bridge funding
By Katherine Nettles
The U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI) announced its annual Payment in Lieu of Taxes (PILT) this month, to be administered to individual counties around the country. Gunnison County will receive $1.34 million on behalf of the proceeds from its 1.6 million acres of tax-exempt federal lands. The funds may come close to covering other shortfalls in the budget.
The PILT funding has been steadily—and in some years sharply—increasing over the past two decades. PILT funds are further allocated by the county commissioners and can be used to pay for emergency response, public safety, public schools, housing, social services and infrastructure. Gunnison County officials say they expect to use the majority of funds for road and bridge needs.
Gunnison County finance director Linda Nienhueser wrote in an e-mail to the Crested Butte News, “We budgeted $1M in [the Road and Bridge] fund to support annual operations. We are down in HUTF (Highway Users Tax Fund) revenue $233,077 through June. If HUTF continues to be 20 percent lower than last year, the increase in PILT will not cover the decrease in HUTF revenues.”
County manager Matthew Birnie confirmed in an email, “The only part for which the use hasn’t been formally determined is the $340,000 that was more than we anticipated. Due to the decrease in HUTF revenue, staff will recommend that the additional PILT revenue goes to Road and Bridge. Though it is unrestricted General Fund revenue, we generally do allocate all of the PILT money to Road and Bridge with a couple of exceptions. We used some PILT money to fund the construction of the Public Works facility and again for the Courthouse.”
The DOI collects more than $13.2 billion in revenue annually from commercial activities on public lands, such as oil and gas leasing, livestock grazing and timber harvesting. A portion of these revenues is shared with states and counties, and $514.7 million will be distributed to 1,900 counties nationally this year. The remainder is deposited in the U.S. Treasury.
PILT payments are computed for each county or jurisdiction based on its number of acres of federal land and on its population. Payments can vary from year to year as a result of changes in acreage data, prior-year federal revenue-sharing payments reported annually by the governor of each state, and population data from the U.S. Census Bureau.
PILT payments are made annually for tax-exempt federal lands administered by DOI agencies including the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), the National Park Service (NPS) and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS); for lands administered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s U.S. Forest Service (USFS); and for federal water projects and some military installations.
According to the online DOI payment records, Gunnison County received $587,195 in 2015 and in 2010 it received $541,000. Nienhueser has records going back as far as 1997, when Gunnison County received $156,938. The acres have remained relatively unchanged, ranging within 200 acres of the current count of 1,632,003 acres. The population and the commercial land uses, however, have increased significantly.
Under the law, local officials retain the authority to allocate these funds. However, the DOI stated in a press release that federal support tied to public spaces can be withheld if it is determined that local governments have “failed to protect public monuments, memorials and statues from destruction or vandalism” as a result of President Donald Trump’s executive order on “Protecting American Monuments, Memorials and Statues and Combating Recent Criminal Violence” in response to the national events of recent weeks.
The press release also states, “Any recipient of funding pursuant to this program agrees they will enforce the rule of law and defend these important public monuments, memorials and statues.”
County commissioner Jonathan Houck said specifics would be determined this fall when the 2021 budget takes shape. There will be many budget shortfalls this year, he pointed out, such as the HUTF revenue, and historically the PILT payments have been made to Gunnison County in an unpredictable schedule.
Since PILT payments began in 1977, the DOI has distributed more than $9.7 billion to states and the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, Guam and the U.S. Virgin Islands. A full list of funding by state and county, by year, is available at www.doi.gov/pilt.
