RESERVE, N.M. — A federal program that began as a safety net for Pacific Northwest logging communities hard-hit by battles over the spotted owl in the 1990s has morphed into a sprawling entitlement — one that ships vast amounts of money to states with little or no historic connection to timber, an analysis by The Associated Press shows.
Nicknamed “county payments,” the timber program was supposed to assist counties shortchanged when national forests limited logging to protect the northern spotted owl and other endangered species.
Since becoming law in 2000, the program has distributed more than $3 billion to 700 counties in 41 states with national forests and helped fund everything from schools to libraries to jails.
A four-year renewal of the law, passed last year, authorizes an additional $1.6 billion for the program through 2011 and shifts substantial sums to states where the spotted owl never flew. While money initially was based on historic logging levels, now any state with federal forests — even those with no history of logging — is eligible for millions in Forest Service dollars.
The biggest winner under the renewal is, in fact, Nevada, where payments jumped by 1,132 percent. Doling out all that taxpayer money is based less on logging losses than on the powerful reality of political clout. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., called the timber program a personal priority that supports “the lifeblood of communities all across America, and particularly in the West.”
Critics of the program do not see it through that patriotic lens. Steve Ellis, vice president of Taxpayers for Common Sense, a watchdog group, called it “the ultimate political log roll,” an irrational subsidy program that serves up cash bonuses for states with forest land.
“When you are staring down the barrel of a $1.4 trillion budget deficit, it’s deals like this that got us into that mess,” Ellis said.
In Catron County, the part of western New Mexico where Butch Cassidy and his Wild Bunch gang once holed up, the program distributes the highest per capita payment in the nation — $1,883 per person.
Pioneers settled this remote frontier town more than a century ago to log ponderosa pine. By the late 1980s, timber production had dwindled, and in 1990 the town’s sole remaining mill shut down.
The county, which sits along the Arizona border, is larger than three Eastern states, yet has fewer than 3,500 residents. The public high school in Reserve, the county seat, has just five seniors. The handful of businesses lining Main Street close early each evening, save for a quiet bar frequented by a few locals.
“We have more elk than we do people,” said longtime resident Jim Kellar.
Of much more important note: New Mexico’s two senators served as chairman and ranking Republican on the Senate committee that rewrote the timber payments formula.
New Mexico’s increase under the new formula was 692 percent.
Five Western states — Oregon, California, Washington, Idaho and Montana — pocketed more than 80 percent of the total timber payments from 2000 to 2007.
Many Oregon counties receive more money annually from county payments than from timber sales during all but the peak logging years of the late 1980s.
Under the renewal, included as a sweetener in the $700 billion financial bailout program, the five Western states saw their share of the timber money drop to about 62 percent in the first year, with further drops scheduled in each of the next three years.
The reason? Politics.
Reid was among four powerful Western Democrats who shepherded the new timber law, which he and others have touted as an accomplishment of the Democratic-led Congress.
Talk to us
> Give us your news tips.
> Send us a letter to the editor.
> More Herald contact information.
