CNCounty News

New PILT, SRS advocacy tools now available online

As Congress begins to firm up its appropriations bills, NACo has prepared a bundle of advocacy tools and resources, available online, to help counties seek congressional support for FY16 Secure Rural Schools (SRS) and FY17 Payments In Lieu of Taxes (PILT) payments.

Counties can access a customizable sample letter telling their congressional delegation how inaction would impact their residents.

Likewise, there are custom op-eds and sample press releases to send to state and local media. On the social media front, there are sample tweets to alert the public and Congress about a county’s support for SRS and PILT funding.

Learn More

View PILT, SRS profiles, PILT-specific advocacy toolkits

More than 60 percent of America’s counties contain federal public lands. 

While the counties cannot collect property taxes on the land, they must still provide essential services for their residents and for visitors to the federal holdings within their boundaries.

Services such as road and bridge maintenance, law enforcement and solid waste disposal remain the local government’s responsibility.

Congress established the PILT program to compensate counties for the tax losses they incur because of public lands within their jurisdictions. President Gerald Ford signed the program into law in 1976.

The Secure Rural Schools payments are an outgrowth of another federal program which shared 25 percent of the revenue from timber sales on public lands with so-called forest counties. Counties used the money to support schools and roads, principally.

As timber sales declined steeply in the ’80s and ’90s due to new federal regulations about species habitat and the environment, timber receipts also plummeted.

In 2000, the Secure Rural Schools and Community Self-Determination Act was enacted to offset the timber harvest losses.

In 2015, the program provided $278 million for 732 mostly rural counties scatted throughout the U.S. The last authorization expired on Sept. 30, 2015. 

Tagged In:

Attachments

Related News

bike
Advocacy

U.S. Department of the Interior announces PILT funding of $644.8 million to be distributed to counties

On June 24, the U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI) announced that over 1,900 state and local governments nationwide will receive $644.8 million in Payments in Lieu of Taxes program (PILT) funding for 2025. A complete list of funding by state and county is available here. You can also check NACo’s County Explorer for detailed county-by-county information on 2024 PILT funding levels.

Bureau of Land Management Acting Director John Raby speaks to the WIR Board of Directors during the 2025 NACo Legislative Conference in March. He addressed a workshop remotely during the 2025 WIR Conference in Pennington County, S.D. in May. Photo by Denny Henry
County News

BLM, HUD target public lands for housing

A multi-agency push could open up hundreds of thousands of BLM acres near towns and cities to development for attainable housing.

The Western Interstate Region Executive Committee meets for the first time in 2025 during the WIR Conference in Pennington County, S.D.. From left: Immediate Past President John Espy, Carbon County, Wyo.; President John Peters, Mono County, Calif.; Dwayne McFall, Fremont County, Colo. and Second Vice President Derrick DeGroot, Klamath County, Ore. Photo by Rebecca DeWitt
County News

WIR grows membership, offerings in South Dakota

Members of NACo’s Western Interstate Region learned about and fueled the work being done by the National Center for Public Lands Counties at the WIR Conference in Pennington County, S.D.