Senators Push Timber Receipt Plan Proposals Give Schools, Roads, Tourism Payments

FROM FOR THE RECORD (Wednesday, September 22, 1999): Correction Wrong person quoted: In a Sept. 18 article about a plan to restore falling timber receipts to schools, a comment from Craig Gehrke of the Wilderness Society was attributed to the wrong person. Gehrke was critical of forest payment legislation that he said would “sneak in” land management changes.

Senators from Idaho and Oregon on Friday unveiled a plan to restore falling timber receipts to schools.

While the proposal from Larry Craig, R-Idaho, and Ron Wyden, D-Ore., is just one of several pending in Congress to sharply increase and stabilize the payments, it’s the only one that also uses the issue to open a door to local management of federal forests.

“I’m excited Sen. Wyden and I have found a way to restore these funds, while building stronger local consensus for enlightened federal resource stewardship,” Craig said.

Added Wyden, “Under our bipartisan legislation, counties will be connected to federal lands not just through the cutting of timber, but also through important road maintenance plans, projects to improve watersheds, and programs to promote tourism and recreation.”

Here’s how the plan would work:

Current payments to counties of 25 percent of timber proceeds in national forests would be supplemented with additional federal money. Each county would be guaranteed an annual amount equal to the average of its three biggest years since 1985 - which in most cases would more than double the current payments.

Out of the new, larger payments, three-quarters of the money would be distributed just as it is now. In Idaho, that means it passes through the state to the counties, which then distribute 70 percent to highway districts for roads, and 30 percent to school districts for education.

The remaining quarter of the money would go to counties to undertake “investments in resource management and restoration on federal lands.” Those projects could involve resource management, stewardship, restoration or development, and would have to comply with all environmental laws and forest plans. If those projects make money, the profits would be split between the county and the Forest Service.

A special “Investment Project Advisory Committee” for each national forest would suggest and approve the projects, which would also need approval from the secretary of agriculture. The committees would include local resource users, environmental interests, forest workers, labor representatives, county elected officials, school administrators, teachers and possibly others.

If counties didn’t use the money for such projects each year, they’d have to give it back.

Several other plans have proposed upping the payments, including an offer to Congress last month from the Clinton administration and a House bill introduced by Reps. Allen Boyd, D-Fla., and Nathan Deal, R-Ga.

The administration’s offer was contingent on disconnecting the county payments from logging levels in the future. The House bill would increase the payments for five years, while a longer-term solution was studied; in the meantime, the extra money would come out of the Forest Service’s budget.

Past proposals included a rider pushed by Craig in April of 1998 to offset a logging road-building moratorium by requiring the Forest Service to find more timber to cut, so school payments wouldn’t suffer. The debate is about more than just the money, said Boise State University political scientist John Freemuth, an expert on public lands.

The issue of locals, or states, taking a hand in managing federal lands is tied in to frustration with the slow pace of timber-cutting under the current system. But, Freemuth said, “The environmental laws are what’s making everything go slowly. I don’t think that’s going to be any different if it’s the feds doing it or the states or the counties.”

Freemuth said a larger national debate is re-examining the whole purpose of national forests, and there’s no longer any consensus that timber harvesting should be a primary purpose.

The Craig-Wyden bill allows for various types of commercial and non-commercial projects to be initiated by counties on forest lands, but timber cutting is clearly the one most likely to make money.

Freemuth warned that the same appeals and lawsuits that hold up many federal timber sales could stall any county-initiated project. Craig Gehrke, regional director of the Wilderness Society in Boise, said he wasn’t surprised by the proposal.

“Craig’s been working on that for a while, so I’m not surprised to see him try to sneak it in on something kind of motherhood and apple pie like forest payments,” Freemuth said.

Idaho currently has a state task force working to come up with a way to persuade Congress to give the state a chance to manage some federal forest land as an experiment. State officials figure they can make more money harvesting timber, and use it to benefit Idaho schools.

Freemuth said one thing the Craig-Wyden bill does that the others don’t is address the social and cultural loss that timber-dependent communities feel when logging starts fading away. Replacing the forest payments eases the counties’ immediate budget needs, he said, but doesn’t answer a county commissioner’s concern “about whether some of my neighbors who are loggers are going to keep logging.”

Wyden and Craig said the measure would create a new, consensus-based partnership between local interests and federal forest managers.

“It’s time for Congress to enact a new program that combines secure funding for county services with a fresh approach to the management of federal lands in rural communities,” Wyden said.

Craig is the chairman of the Senate’s Subcommittee on Forestry and Public Lands, and Wyden is the ranking Democrat on the committee.