Editor's Note:  The Abysmal Road Ahead

Last February, the Oregon State University Rural Studies Program published a study that reveals much the abysmal economic future that awaits rural western communities that, since the end of the Second World War, have been receiving a share of the revenue generated by the harvest of federal timber.

The study, titled "Economic Impacts on Oregon Counties of Termination of Secure Rural Schools and Community Self-Determination Act: An Update," speculates on what might have happened had the Congress not renewed the Act last October for another four years. But the Act will very likely sunset for the last time in four years, and when it does rural western counties all over the west face the real possibility of economic collapse, if for no other reason than the fact that their struggling economies will not be able to absorb the local tax increases that will be necessary to make up the shortfall.

The Rural School Act was intended to compensate counties for economic losses they suffered under the litigation-driven collapse of the once robust federal timber sale program. The federal government pays no property taxes it owns on national forests that lay within western counties. Perhaps it is time that they do, just like private forest landowners do.

Click here to go to "Forest Science & Policy" and the OSU study.

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