Over the past century, shared federal timber harvest revenues have become the backbones of Oregon county budgets.
BLM
Federal timber payments to counties in the Pacific Northwest may be a thing of the past, after funding failed to make it into a Congressional spending bill this week.
The program has been in place for nearly 15 years. It's been a lifeline for many counties, especially in Oregon.
For the past century, when timber was logged on federal land, the county where that land was located would get a cut of the profits. The reason: counties couldn’t collect property taxes on federal lands, yet still had to provide services there.
“The program’s been around for a very, very, very long time and the taxing system in Oregon grew up around that program being available,” says Douglas County Commissioner Susan Morgan.
But counties in Southwest Oregon, like Morgan's, were hit especially hard financially in the 1990s, when endangered species protections for spotted owls required that the birds' old-growth habitat be made off-limits to chainsaws.
Less logging meant less money for timber-dependent counties. Then in 2000 Congress established a safety-net program called Secure Rural Schools and Community Self-Determination Act, which provided steady funding for education, roads and other county services.
Counting on the Stop-Gap
Washington, Idaho and Oregon all received money through the program, but Oregon’s share was by far the highest. Oregon counties received about $107 million from the Secure Rural Schools program for this year.
The money became a significant portion of county budgets in the state, even though it was only intended to help them transition to a more stable funding model.
Morgan listed more than a dozen county divisions and programs – including the sheriff’s and district attorney’s office and the library – that are paid for in part by about $9.1 million general fund dollars from the federal aid program.
“You can go down though through the line of all the services the county provides, and safety net plays a role, and most often a major role in almost all of them,” she said.
Now the Secure Rural Schools funding has not been renewed -- putting counties in the same situation they've faced in the past before Congress eventually extended the aid program.
This time around, it's because the program was not included in a House spending bill. Unless something unexpected happens, counties won’t have that money come July 1, 2015.
Worst-Case Situation
In facing this situation, Douglas County is actually in a much better shape than some. Eric Schmidt with the Association of Oregon Counties says many counties saw the writing on the wall for started working on budgets that did not rely on continued federal aid.
“The impact will be fairly minimal in some counties. The services have already been cut, the people have already been laid off. We’ve already seen the impacts,” he said.
Josephine and Curry counties are not among those counties that found ways to survive without that safety net.
Curry County, located in the Oregon’s southwest corner, has experienced the double-whammy of declining timber harvests and having one of the lowest property tax rates in the state.
Even with federal aid coming in, Curry County has half as many employees now as it had just five years ago, according to Commissioner David Itzen.
“All of our departments are skeletonized,” he said, adding that the county is down to down to six sheriff’s deputies to patrol nearly 2,000 square miles.
And without some relief, Itzen said there’s a good chance closing the jail is next on the chopping block.
Best Case Scenario?
For Itzen, there are a few options for the county going forward. He’s been an advocate for raising taxes to pay for basic services. But that isn’t a popular position in his rural part of the state. It’s so unpopular, he lost his reelection last month and is on his way out of office.
The other option, echoed by many at the county level, is increasing logging. But just how and whether to increase harvest rates is a difficult and much-politicized question.
Conservationists continue to advocate for the protection of wildlife habitat on federal lands – something that often runs counter to commercial timber interests. Legislation has been before Congress that aimed to increase timber revenue to counties by changing the rules for how certain public forestlands are managed. But that bill governing the so-called O&C Lands (named for the Oregon and California Railroad that once owned them) appears as dead as Secure Rural Schools.
Itzen is banking on another potential solution: establishing forest collaboratives. The idea is to bring local stakeholders (representative from environmental groups, the timber industry, American Indian tribes, and local, state and federal governments) together to make joint decisions about what timber should be cut.
Itzen worked to form a collaborative in Curry County. He expects money to start flowing from such efforts in the next couple years.
“We’re on our way to rectifying, to maybe dealing a little bit with the problem,” he said.
Back to Politics
the Association of Oregon Counties' Schmidt is looking to lawmakers for an answer. He said the landscape will change entirely when Republicans take control of Congress next year. But even so, he’s not optimistic that the federal government can increase revenues for rural counties by relaxing logging restrictions on public lands.
His group is planning to lobby the 2015 Oregon Legislature for money to help pay for mental health services and public safety programs in cash-strapped counties. He said the apparent end of the Secure Rural Schools program is providing a renewed urgency for action.
“I think the new year is going to bring a new look at how we do this," he said. "Wwe’re hopeful that we’ll find some solutions for 2015 that we haven’t been able to find for some time.”