PORTLAND, Ore. – Rural counties and schools across the West are quietly gearing up for an expected battle over the renewal of billions of dollars in subsidies from the federal government, designed to compensate for the loss of timber harvests on thousands of acres of publicly owned land.
The program, pushed through Congress in 2000 by Oregon Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden and Republican Sen. Larry Craig of Idaho, expires in 2006, and signals about its future from Washington, D.C., have been mixed.
County commissioners and education officials in the rural West were already concerned about potentially wavering support from the Bush administration. Now, new concerns are surfacing that the bill might fall prey to those trolling for ways to pare the federal budget, as legislators search for a way to afford administration-backed tax cuts, the costs of rebuilding the Gulf Coast after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita and the war in Iraq, all at once.
The measure has provided nearly $2 billion to mainly Western states since 2000, including $273 million for Oregon, $67 million for California, $45 million for Washington and $24 million to Idaho.
The money, which goes to schools, public safety agencies, and counties, pays for education programs, road improvements and infrastructure. It’s designed as payback for federal laws that put caps on logging to protect endangered species.
Last week, commissioners in Lane County, Ore., unanimously passed a resolution calling on President Bush to extend the subsidy program, known locally as the county payments bill, and include it in the budget proposal the administration will release in February.
Officials from the Red Bluff, Calif.-based National Forest Counties and Schools Coalition, meanwhile, returned this week from a lobbying trip to Washington, part of an ongoing attempt to line up House and Senate members in support of the bill, said Bob Douglas, the group’s president.
“There’s a huge lobbying effort going on as we speak,” said Don Robertson, a Douglas County, Ore., commissioner who sits on the coalition’s board. “We are doing everything we can to get into the president’s budget.”
Sherry Krulitz, a Shoshone County, Idaho, commissioner who has testified in Congress in support of the Craig-Wyden bill, said she’d been told that the bill might be reauthorized – but at reduced levels. And signals are that even if the timber payments are reauthorized, this would be the final six years for the program, she said.
Speculation over the bill’s future began mounting last winter, when Agriculture Undersecretary Mark Rey – who helped craft the bill as a former Craig staffer and who now oversees the Forest Service – offered qualified support for its renewal, saying the administration supported it as long as equivalent cuts could be made elsewhere in the budget.
In an interview this week, Rey said that’s still the agency’s position and that he was well aware of the “considerable interest in getting an early start on the reauthorization effort.”
“I attribute that to the fact that the sponsors know this is a more difficult budget environment than was the case when the bill was first enacted in 2000,” Rey said. “We have to spend more time to do a comprehensive review.”
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