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Foresters Suffer From Budget Ax

If you are a regular reader of this column, you may want to sit down for this. I am siding with the bureaucracy — a little bit.

I will try not to let it happen again. But this time, the folks at the Capitol Complex in Charleston may have a limited point.

It all started a few days ago as I was preparing to write one of those easy bureaucrat-bashing columns. I’d had just about enough from the West Virginia Division of Forestry. I was going to expose them for being alarmist whiners.

A few weeks ago the agency announced it would be laying off 37 foresters as a result of cuts in its budget for the fiscal year that began July 1.

Then the division said it wouldn’t be able to fight as many forest fires as in the past, nor would it be able to enforce all the regulations on timbering operations.

The last straw was a few days ago, when the agency revealed it wouldn’t be releasing its regular fall foliage reports.

All of this was blamed on budget cuts. I decided to expose the bureaucrats for crying wolf.

After all, the state’s general fund budget spent $4,102,679,000 during the just-ended fiscal year. The general fund budget for this year is $4,187,373,287 — an increase. So what’s the problem? There shouldn’t be any lack of money for the Division of Forestry.

But there is. Last year, the agency was budgeted for $5.46 million (rounded off) in general revenue funding. This year the amount is $2.5 million.

It’s not quite as bad as that makes it appear. The agency receives money from a variety of sources, including a big chunk of federal dollars. But the total budgeted for Forestry this year was $16.25 million — compared to $19.39 million last year. That’s a much bigger cut, about 16 percent, than most other agencies of state government suffered.

Is it as bad as the bureaucrats want to make it seem? Probably not. The folks in Charleston have a long, sordid record of trying to scare West Virginians into paying higher taxes.

Still, the Forestry folks took a bigger hit than most others in state government. In February, legislators — after separating the scare tactics from the genuine budget crunch at the agency — may want to reconsider the comparative magnitude of the cut.

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