COEUR d'ALENE - Unexpected impacts of mandatory federal budget cuts, commonly referred to as sequestration, are just beginning to surface locally, but the governor's office is working to soften the potential blow.

According to the Associated Press, Forest Service Chief Thomas L. Tidwell sent letters last week to 41 states telling them they need to repay $15.6 million disbursed in January under the Secure Rural Schools Act, which since 2000 has sent billions of dollars to 700 rural counties to make up for reductions in federal logging revenue due to fish and wildlife protections. Idaho was one of those states.

Tidwell said the money needs to be repaid because it was sent out in fiscal 2013 and is included under the 5.1 percent across-the-board federal budget cuts known as sequestration.

Governor Butch Otter's office is aware of the issue and they are working to resolve it. Otter's spokesman, Jon Hanian, said the governor is planning to repay the SRS money with Resource Advisory Council funding the state receives from the Forest Service each year to do conservation projects on the federal lands in Idaho.

One of the Resource Advisory Councils that will be impacted by that move is managed out of the Panhandle National Forest and U.S. Bureau of Land Management offices in Coeur d'Alene. Efforts to reach the managers of that program were unsuccessful Friday afternoon.

While the governor's office was unsure of the exact amount of SRS funding that came to Kootenai County in January, Bonnie Butler, senior special assistant for natural resources, said roughly $29 million in SRS funding was distributed statewide, and almost $1.5 million of that would have to be repaid under the sequester.

Coeur d'Alene School District's Chief Operating Officer, Wendell Wardell, said he just learned of the SRS issue this week.

"I was going to brief the board on this issue next week," Wardell said, adding that he was happy to hear the governor had found a solution.

Wardell said the district received a total of $73,410 from the SRS program, almost $4,000 would have to be repaid.

Butler said SRS funding is apportioned to the school districts based on the amount of federal land that lies within their counties. Counties that have much larger tracts of federal land, such as Idaho County, received much more funding.

The Associated Press reported that many rural counties in the West also will be hit hard by Interior Department cuts to the Payment in Lieu of Taxes program, which reimburses counties for tax revenue they have lost by having federal lands within in their borders. The PILT program paid $393 million to more than 1,850 counties last year, and this year those payments are also being cut by 5.1 percent, or about $20 million.

Kootenai County Commissioner Todd Tondee said he has yet to hear of any cuts in the county's PILT funding, but he was going to check into it.

Hanian said the governor's office is aware of potential cuts to PILT, but so far they are not hearing anything from the counties on the issue.

The Associated Press contributed to this story.