Plan proposed for areas hurt by logging cuts

WASHINGTON – Senate Democrats pushed Friday for a $5 billion, five-year plan to extend payments to rural counties across 39 states hurt by cutbacks in federal logging.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada said he would seek to add the timber money to a measure funding the Iraq war, despite a veto threat by President Bush.

“We can’t overlook the needs of rural America – especially the rural West – while we are reconstructing Iraq,” Reid said. “We need more than a one-year program.”

Reid was referring to a vote in the House last week that includes $425 million to extend the timber payments through the end of the budget year. The House stripped out a Senate-approved plan to extend the timber payments through 2011.

The House bill also separates the timber spending from the more controversial bill to pay for the Iraq war – a move House leaders said was designed to help ensure its passage.

But Reid said Friday that Senate leaders will seek to include the timber money in the war-spending bill. Reid called the timber payments a personal priority and said he would hold up the war-spending bill if necessary to include the timber money.

“I’m optimistic we’re going to have a bill with a multiyear fix,” he told reporters on a conference call Friday with other Western Democrats.

“The White House doesn’t like it because they didn’t suggest it,” Reid added, calling White House objections to the timber money an excuse “for not doing it.”

Reid’s remarks came as Western lawmakers, including Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and Rep. Greg Walden, R-Ore., pressed Bush about the timber payments at a meeting at the White House. The pair were among about two dozen lawmakers from both parties invited to the White House for a courtesy visit Thursday night.

Wyden and Walden used the opportunity to press Bush for the timber money, which they called crucial to their state’s economic health.

Walden brought with him a newspaper featuring a front-page story on library closures in Oregon caused by uncertainty over the federal funding. He showed the paper to Laura Bush, a former librarian.

“That got her attention,” Walden said Friday, adding that later, during a tour of the Lincoln Bedroom, he and Wyden buttonholed the president over the timber payments.

“You work every angle,” Walden said.

The president listened to the men’s pitch but made no promises, Walden and Wyden said.

Wyden said he and other Western senators would work over the weekend to push for the five-year solution in a Senate bill to be voted on next week.

“We’ve got to have a long-term appropriation,” Wyden said, calling potential rejection of the timber money “a death sentence for the rural West, rural children and rural public safety.”

Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., said the House bill would terminate the timber payments at the end of September – barely four months from now. “Unbelievably, the White House position is even worse – it doesn’t see the real hardships facing rural counties,” Bingaman said.

Western lawmakers have pushed for nearly two years to extend the timber program, formally known as the Secure Rural Schools and Community Self Determination Act. The program, which reimburses 700 rural counties in 39 states hurt by federal logging cutbacks imposed in the 1990s, expired in September.

Schools and counties throughout the South and West have scrambled to cut spending to make up for the expected loss of federal money.