These are the last checks.
Word came last week that Congress has approved one last batch of federal payments to hard-hit rural counties dominated by federal lands.
For Oregon counties flirting with the prospect of insolvency, the deal (part of the compromise on that massive federal transportation bill) means a final infusion of some $100 million. Oregon gets the lion’s share of the total $346 million pot — which by itself might explain some of the increasing opposition that the program has generated in Congress over the past few years.
As the Associated Press reported, the money is the last anyone expects to see from the Secure Rural Schools Act, which since 2000 has provided $3 billion to rural counties to make up for their declining shares of federal logging revenues.
So, at best, the money buys us a year to develop some long-term tools to help Oregon’s rural counties fight their way to solvency. That’s not a lot of time, especially when you consider that we’ve known this has been coming for years — and haven’t made a whole lot of progress.
We’re fooling ourselves if we believe that the timber cuts on federal forestlands ever will return to the levels of a quarter-century ago. As a nation, we have a different view of our federal forestlands now; for better or for worse — and we think this is for the better — we do not think of them merely as timber factories.
Yet it also is undeniable that part of the solution is figuring out ways to get workers back into the federal forests. We still think there’s promise in identifying thinning projects that help to improve forest health — and get workers back into the forests, earning paychecks.
And we think a proposal by Rep. Peter DeFazio deserves close examination: The DeFazio proposal would turn over 2.6 million acres from the so-called O&C lands in western Oregon to a trust, and then log them under state (not federal) forestry rules to provide the most revenue possible to Oregon counties. The proposal is backed by Republican Rep. Greg Walden and Democratic Rep. Kurt Schrader.
But one thing is for certain: The time is now to start serious work toward real solutions.
Well, actually, the time probably was a decade ago. But there’s nothing like a hard-and-fast deadline to trigger some creative thinking. Set the clock for 12 months. When the alarm sounds a year from now, time’s up.
