Timber Revenue Overhaul Unlikely Clinton Plan Would Have Boosted Funds For Counties With National Forests

Sat., Feb. 28, 1998

Associated Press

Congress probably will reject the Clinton administration’s proposal to increase spending and change the formula for federal timber aid to counties with national forests, says Sen. Larry Craig, R-Idaho.

Backers of the idea say they are holding out hope it will prevail. But they acknowledge they face an uphill battle in trying to persuade a congressional majority to go along with a proposal that primarily benefits the West.

President Clinton has proposed a $37 million increase in the payments to counties next year under a new formula that would no longer link the aid to logging levels in the forest at issue.

Traditionally, counties have been entitled to 25 percent of the timber-sale revenue to make up for lost tax base and to help pay for schools and roads.

Most of that money - the county payments totaled $233 million last year - goes to Western states because that’s where most national-forest logging occurs. In fiscal 1997, Oregon counties received $92 million; California, $34 million; and Washington, $28 million.

That’s why Craig figures Congress will reject the spending increase.

“How many Eastern states who are large private-land states or Midwestern states are going to say they are willing to use their tax dollars to subsidize Western states and Western states’ education of their kids?” Craig said this week.

“I doubt that that will happen. The illogic of what they are doing here doesn’t make a lot of sense,” he said.

Sen. Slade Gorton, R-Wash., chairman of the Senate Appropriations subcommittee on the interior that sets the Forest Service budget, hasn’t had a chance to review the administration proposal.

But Gorton finds it unlikely Congress would be able to come up with an extra $37 million in light of the administration’s other priorities at the Interior Department and Forest Service, press secretary Cynthia Bergman said Friday.

Clinton’s new budget proposes changes in the funding formula for all counties with national forests, to reflect the drop in logging levels from more than 12 billion board feet a year during the 1980s to the less than 4 billion board feet anticipated in fiscal 1998.

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