The End of Logging Subsides?

By Jeff Barnard
the Associated Press
March 9, 2007
TALENT — The end of a little-known federal subsidy that funneled millions of dollars to rural counties to compensate them for restrictions on logging is forcing communities in the West to close libraries, reduce police patrols and put off road repairs.
“We’re building libraries in Iraq and we are not funding libraries in Jackson County,” Dana Rayburn grumbled as she looked for a book for her first-grader in the brand-new Talent branch library, one of 15 in Oregon’s Jackson County now slated to close.
For generations, revenue from the cutting of timber in national forests allowed many rural counties in the West to build roads and schools and cover other expenses. The money enabled some counties to keep their property taxes extraordinarily low.
In the 1990s, though, restrictions aimed at protecting spotted owls, salmon and other wildlife led to severe cutbacks in logging, and Congress authorized subsidies to timber communities to cushion the blow.
Now, those subsidies are coming to an end. Late last year, Congress refused to renew the Secure Rural Schools and Community Self-Determination Act of 2000, which has paid out $2.9 billion over the past six years to 700 counties in 39 states. The last checks are going out this month.
To make up for the lost revenue, Lane County, home to the University of Oregon, has instituted an income tax. And three other counties in Oregon’s rugged timber country have put property tax increases on their May ballots.
But rural Oregon has a reputation for hating taxes and is not afraid to vote down increases even for such things as schools and libraries.
“We wouldn’t need these taxes if we went back to sustainable logging,” she said. Because of logging cutbacks, “the social and economic welfare of people I know in the past 20 some years has gone straight downhill. I’ve seen people have to go on welfare. The drinking starts. The divorces.”
The federal government has been sharing timber revenue with rural counties for nearly a century, under an arrangement worked out by President Theodore Roosevelt to gain their support for the creation of national forests.
National forest timber production hit highs of more than 12 billion board feet a year in the late 1960s and late 1980s, but plummeted 80 percent to 2.3 billion last year, in part because large swaths of the woods have been declared off-limits for environmental reasons. Last year’s harvest brought in just $221 million.
To make up for the downturn, Congress started giving Northwest timber communities subsidies in the 1990s to tide them over while they came up with new sources of revenue. After that expired, Congress passed the Secure Schools Act, which spread the safety net to all counties with national forests.