Friday, November 14, 2003

Here is a map of the land trusts that the DNR manages in Northern MN: It pretty much follows the poor ag land.  You can also see boundaries of indian reservations and certain treaties that were, ahem, in existence when the act was passed.  The checkerboard pattern in some areas shows how the land trusts were uniformly assigned to sections 16 and 32 of each township. 2:25:07 PM    comment []

DNR Land Trust Theresa of DNR Lands and Minerals gave a great presentation this morning at our speaking club about Land Trust Funds, a little DNR program with a lot of history behind it and a fair amount of present day controversy. Land Trust Funds have roots back to English law. A certain portion of land is set aside to pay for the schools in the area. In the early days of our country the same practice was instituted.  Schools were partially paid for by revenue generated by land set aside for that purpose. For Minnesota and most other western states, they instituted a grid system uniformly across the land. Each county is made up of townships. Each township has 36 1 square mile sections. Each section is made up of 16 "40s", which was a 40 acre plot of land. and a before the advent of 40 oz bottles of beer, a 40 was known as a unit of land. "My back 40". "40 acres and a mule", etc. The Homestead Act of 1862, the same law that created the land grant universities, gave sections 16 and 32 of each township to the states to be used to generate revenue for education. This revenue was generated by leasing the land to a farmer, harvesting trees, mining. A lot of schools were built on these sections. Even today, if you are wandering around in rural MN or Iowa or Dakota and you find yourself at an old one room school house, chances are you are at section 32 or 16 of the township. In Minnesota, all the good farm land was gradually sold off and the money from the sales went to the state fund for schools. Farmers were hungry for land and political pressure built to sell off these lands. Today in northern MN, there are still a lot of state trust fund lands generating a little bit of income for the schools. 7 tenths of 1 percent of the state school budget comes from these sources. These are being slowly sold off in auctions. One political complication is that some of these trust fund lands are located in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness and so are federally controlled.   There is a fight to see if the state can arrange a land swap with the feds to make up for the fact that some state owned land deliberately set aside to raise revenue for the schools cannot be touched. 1:44:19 PM    comment []