The restoration of Secure Rural Schools payments, which apparently is headed toward approval from Congress, will serve as a much-needed Band-Aid for rural counties.
A Band-Aid, however, can only cover up some symptoms and does not serve as a cure for the financial plague facing many regions. While the program should be renewed, it is time for Congress to devise some long-term plans for helping counties that rely upon the harvesting of forests to generate jobs and tax revenue.
Include Skamania as one of those counties. In the 1970s, Clark County’s neighbor to the east saw as many as 399 million board feet of timber being harvested in a year; in 2000, after a series of harvest-suppressing federal policies, Skamania County felled 26 million board feet — a decline of 93 percent. This, predictably, had a dire impact on the local economy and presented a scenario being echoed in many rural counties throughout the Western United States.
In 2000, pushed by Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Oregon, Congress approved the Secure Rural Schools and Community Self-Determination Act, providing payments to timber-dependent counties that had been devastated by the downturn in the industry. Since then, the act has been a political amusement park ride, with funding levels resembling a roller coaster and counties being beholden to the whims of Congress. As The Columbian wrote editorially last year: “The federal government has limited the revenue-producing harvest of timber, telling counties it will pay them subsidies to not cut down trees — until it doesn’t pay them.”
Late last year, in approving a $1.1 trillion spending bill, Congress deemed the Secure Rural Schools program expendable and did not include funding for it. Last week, however the U.S. House of Representatives approved, by a 393-37 vote, a bill that will restore $185 million for the program over the next two years. With the measure attached to a popular bill involving Medicare reimbursement rates for physicians, it is expected to sail through the Senate (once senators return from a two-week recess) and be signed by President Obama.
That will be good news for Skamania County. The timber payments are scheduled to provide $1.5 million to the county in 2015 — a sizable chunk of Skamania’s $9.8 million general operating budget. And, as Rep. Greg Walden, R-Oregon, said: “This two-year extension gives us time to continue work on a long-term plan to reform federal forest policy.”
Therein lies the crux of the matter. While Congress for the past 15 years has toyed with funding for needy rural counties, it has not done enough to help those counties become self-sufficient. Skamania County, for example, is 80 percent owned by the federal government, with most of that being the Gifford Pinchot National Forest. Another 8 percent is owned by the state, and 10 percent is designated as private timberland that generates tax revenue only when harvested. The county has limited resources for creating tax-producing jobs, and cuts or delays in timber payments hamper its ability to provide even the most basic of services. “We will have limited capacity to respond to public requests and provide non-discretionary, state-required services,” Skamania County Commissioner Chris Brong wrote to Gov. Jay Inslee in December.
Limitations upon timber harvests have served to move Skamania County — and other rural counties — toward becoming a welfare state that is reliant upon federal largesse. That is a failure of policy and must be addressed.
