With "the vast majority" of comment running against the Bush administration's plan to sell national forest land, the administration is extending the comment period another month.

Mark Rey, undersecretary of agriculture, announced Wednesday that the comment period, originally scheduled to end today, won't close until May 1.

The administration has identified 309,000 acres it says are isolated from other forest service land, are difficult to maintain or no longer meet forest service needs. About 1,000 of those acres are in the Roanoke and New River valleys.

Rey said the sale of 150,000 to 175,000 of those acres could raise the $800 million needed to fund a program that supports schools, roads and other projects in rural counties. The federal government will give counties first crack at buying the land, but supervisors in Roanoke and Montgomery counties have passed resolutions saying they want the federal government to keep the land.

Rey said the forest service is open to other ideas for funding, but he hasn't heard any since the land sale proposal first surfaced.

"It's now been two months now and nary another alternative has surfaced," he said.

Rep. Rick Boucher, D-Abingdon, has consistently argued the program should be funded as it has been since its inception in 2000 -- out of the general fund.

Rey said federal law requires that the program have a dedicated funding source. Boucher said that's hogwash. The requirement, he said, is in a budget resolution that is in the process of being written.

"Right now they're rewriting the rules," Boucher said. "There is nothing new in this. This is just another little device that they're utilizing."

Rey, a former logging industry lobbyist, wouldn't say how many of the 4,000 comments the forest service has received are opposed to the sale. But he did say, "The vast majority are expressing their opposition."

He credited environmentalist groups for the one-sidedness of the responses.

"The people who are for it are less well-organized," Rey said.

The plan has been criticized for several reasons, including the disparity between what many states stand to lose in national forest land and what they could gain under the program. For example, a quarter of the money generated from sales would go to Washington and Oregon, but only 6 percent off the land identified for sale is in those two states.