Louisiana has exactly one national forest. The Kisatchie covers about 604,000 acres across seven central and northern parishes, and more of it sits in Grant Parish than in any other. This spring, a Grant Parish businessman put forward a plan to move roughly 140,000 acres of it — nearly a quarter of the whole forest — out of federal hands and into local control. Almost everyone with a formal say said no. What actually reached Congress was a three-page tax bill with no forest in it at all. And in late July, the man behind the plan said he intends to bring the full version back.
Two different documents sit at the center of this, and it is easy to blend them. One is a 12-page draft that would have transferred the land; it was never introduced in Congress. The other is Senate Bill 4584, the only thing Sen. Bill Cassidy actually filed — and it does something far narrower. This account is drawn entirely from the public record: the bill text, the draft, a state resolution, and named local reporting, each linked below. Here is what that record shows, kept in its parts.
The controversy and the law are not the same thing.
The controversy is Carpenter's 12-page draft. According to the Louisiana Wildlife Federation, which posted the draft and its own analysis, it would have conveyed the Grant Parish portion of the Kisatchie \"for public purposes, including forestry, conservation, recreation, community development, economic development, or energy generation,\" transferred the air and mineral rights along with the land, and set no bar against oil and gas, carbon capture, or data centers on it. As Verite News and The Advocate reported, it also proposed handing the federal correctional complex at Pollock over to the parish.
The law — the only piece that made it onto a congressional docket — is S.4584. Its full text runs three pages and never mentions the forest. It carries a grand name — the \"Norma Ruth Criswell Carpenter & Clovis C. Criswell Grant Parish Restoration Act of 2026\" — but its substance is two narrow tax changes, explained below. It has no cosponsors and, since May 20, has sat in the Senate Finance Committee.
Keeping the two straight matters because the argument for one is not the argument for the other, and because a plan that was pared down after public objection is now, its author says, coming back closer to its original shape.
The number at the heart of the plan — 144,962 acres, or \"about 140,000\" in round terms — comes from Carpenter and the Grant Parish assessor, not from the Forest Service. The Forest Service does not publish a Grant-Parish-specific figure; it reports by ranger district. The district covering most of the parish, the Catahoula Ranger District, totals 121,500 acres and extends into Rapides Parish. Federal land makes up roughly a third of Grant Parish either way.
The draft's premise is that all of that land is a drag on a poor parish: untaxable, off the local rolls, and — in Carpenter's telling — poorly managed by a shrinking federal agency. His fix was to move it into local ownership and open it to development, including a parish-run solar farm he has floated to power the prison. Carpenter has not been shy about the vision. \"I'm trying to save the forest for the future by reimagining it as McDonald's,\" he told a columnist for The Advocate. He has described the prison as throwing off \"$2 to $5 million a year of cash flow,\" and, per the same reporting, floated — then called \"tongue-in-cheek\" — a $10 million commission to his own advisory firm for arranging the deal.
Carpenter is a partner at Sextant Capital Advisors, sits on the Grant Parish Chamber of Commerce board, and is a former state bank examiner. He calls himself the plan's \"lead collaborative author.\" He is not a member of the parish government — a distinction the jury has been at pains to draw.
Strip away the forest and the prison, and what Cassidy introduced is an attempt to make more of Grant Parish qualify for a federal subsidy on paper.
That subsidy is the New Markets Tax Credit — a federal program that steers private investment into poor census tracts by handing investors a tax break. A tract qualifies as a \"low-income community\" if its poverty rate is at least 20 percent, or its median family income is 80 percent or less of a regional benchmark. S.4584 makes two changes to how that test is run:
The logic threads back to Carpenter's larger complaint: he argues that the prison population and federal land together make Grant Parish look better off in Census data than its residents actually are, costing it aid it would otherwise receive. By the Census Bureau's own count, Grant Parish had about 22,000 residents, a median household income of nearly $64,000, and a 21.1 percent poverty rate (QuickFacts). The bill's tax tweaks are part of that theory that survived contact with local opinion.
Cassidy, for his part, framed the underlying concern sympathetically even as he cut the forest out. Federal control of so much parish land, he told KALB, \"slows their economic development.\" After the backlash, he said in a statement reported by Verite News that \"the locals shared their concerns about the forest … so we took out those provisions.\" His office declined to comment to several outlets.
The Grant Parish Police Jury — the parish's governing body — voted unanimously against the proposal on May 14, after first disclaiming any involvement in a public statement a week earlier. \"We want that land to stay with the Forest Service and remain just like it is,\" juror Roy Edwards told the Alexandria Town Talk. \"Nobody on the jury asked for this.\" Another juror, Johnny Jamison, put it more bluntly to Carpenter directly: \"Chuck, you started all of this.\" The parish manager, Sissy Pace, said the parish \"just does not have the resources even to begin to maintain the national forest.\"
State Rep. Gabe Firment filed House Resolution 343, which memorializes Congress to oppose any effort to \"transfer, divest, privatize, or dispose of\" Kisatchie land. Firment noted the resolution \"has no binding authority\" — it is a formal statement of position, not a law — and it advanced to the House floor in late May.
The Louisiana Wildlife Federation opposed the transfer and said it forwarded messages from more than 1,400 Louisianans to the congressional delegation. \"The parish may have a problem with revenue, but this is not the solution,\" executive director Rebecca Triche told Outdoor Life. \"We're just giving away the people's assets.\"
And the Jena Band of Choctaw Indians, a federally recognized tribe with a reservation in Grant Parish, objected both to the substance and to being left out. \"We are a sovereign nation. And we are opposed to this,\" Chief Elizabeth \"Libby\" Rogers said, in remarks reported by The Advocate, noting the tribe holds stewardship agreements with the forest and was never consulted.
Carpenter did not invent the idea that federal land should change hands, and he points to a national moment to explain his timing. In 2025, Sen. Mike Lee of Utah proposed forcing the sale of millions of acres of federal land across the West, then withdrew the plan under bipartisan pressure. The U.S. Department of Agriculture moved to rescind the 2001 Roadless Rule, which had limited road-building on tens of millions of acres in national forests. And a Forest Service reorganization slated the agency's Southern Research Station in Pineville — co-located with the Kisatchie's own headquarters — for closure. Carpenter cites that closure as evidence that the federal government can no longer reliably manage the forest.
There is also a genuine local revenue question underneath the fight. Because national forest land can't be taxed, the federal government partially compensates parishes through two programs — Payments in Lieu of Taxes and Secure Rural Schools. A congressional caucus release, reported by KALB, said Louisiana missed about $1.57 million in Secure Rural Schools money during a lapse before Congress renewed the program in December 2025. How much Grant Parish itself receives each year through PILT is a specific figure worth pinning down — and one we're chasing.
This is a fast-moving, largely public-record story, and several things are unresolved:
We'll update this piece as those answers come in.
Spot an error? Receipts welcome: tips@kingfish.la.
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