SALT LAKE CITY (AP) - More than 5,000 acres of federally-owned forest land in Utah could be sold under a proposal in President Bush's budget.

The U.S. Forest Service identified 5,398 it manages in Utah for potential sale, part of a Bush administration plan to sell more than 300,000 acres nationally to reimburse states for money lost due to decreased timber harvest fees.

The sales could include land in Weber, Cache, Morgan and Utah counties, as well as in central and southern Utah, according to a Forest Service Web site Friday. Congress must first decide if it will approve the plan.

Nationally, the sales would raise an estimated $800 million over the next five years for rural schools and communities that would have benefited from timber sales.

"These lands are in most cases isolated parcels," said Erin O'Connor, spokeswoman for the Intermountain Region of the U.S. Forest Service based in Ogden. "Because they are isolated parcels, they are difficult to manage as national forest system lands."

O'Connor said the federal lands would be sold at fair market value.

The Forest Service said that because it is acquiring land through other programs, the proposed sale will result in no net loss of public lands.

Utah properties that could be sold are east of Porcupine Reservoir in Weber Canyon, near the Deer Creek Reservoir dam at the top of Provo Canyon, near Causey Reservoir in Weber County, west of Wellsville in Cache County, and south of Pineview Reservoir in Morgan County.

The proposal also calls for the disposal of Bureau of Land Management federal lands. Joe Incardini, BLM lands and real estate branch chief in Utah, said no overall acreage for Utah property has been determined.

Environmental groups, including the Sierra Club and the Wilderness Society, oppose the proposed sales.

"Our national forest lands are places where Utah families go to hunt, fish and picnic and if these lands pass into private hands, they will no longer be available for those activities," said Lawson LeGate, Sierra Club spokesman. "This marks a disturbing trend of legislative proposals dealing with land use in parts of the West, which call in some cases for the wholesale disposal of tens of thousands of acres of land. And, in most cases when these sales do occur, the revenue does not get plowed back into conservation."

LeGate said the proposals to sell public lands often occur near sprawling communities, encouraging further sprawl.

Agriculture Undersecretary Mark Rey, who directs forest policy, said the parcels no longer meet the needs of the national forest system. Only about 200,000 of the 300,000 acres are expected to be sold to meet goals to fund schools, he said.

"These are not the crown jewels we are taking about," Rey said. "This is a reasonable proposal to take a small fraction of a percentage of national land that is the least necessary and use it for those in need and achieve an overarching public purpose."

The U.S. Forest Service's own long-term strategic plan lists loss of open space to development as a major threat to forest health.

"Across the nation, forests and rangelands are being broken up into smaller parcels, leading to the loss of habitat, affecting air and water quality and reducing economic viability of farming, ranching and forest management enterprises," the agency said on its Web site.

The Forest Service said that approximately 8.7 million acres of open space were lost to development between 1997 and 2001. It manages 193 million acres nationwide.

On the Web: www.fs.fed.us/

Information from: The Salt Lake Tribune, http://www.sltrib.com and Deseret Morning News, http://www.desnews.com.