February 13, 2012
By The Oregonian Editorial Board

Oregon's timber counties are running out of money and time. Last week, Lane County Sheriff Tom Turner announced cuts that ought to be unthinkable for one of Oregon's most populous counties -- closure of half of the local jail beds and slashing patrol staff from 16 to just four deputies.

This is the only the beginning of the untenable cuts in public services anticipated now that Oregon counties have received the last round of federal timber payments. Oregonians may be about to experience something that has never happened in the century and a half of this state -- entire counties sinking into insolvency and pitching responsibility for protecting their citizens and other basic services to neighboring counties or the state.

You don't have to live in Curry or Josephine or Lane counties to feel the anxiety about what lies ahead. If efforts in Congress to renew county payments at a reduced level and to generate more county revenue by accelerating logging on federal lands don't come through, the effects are going to be felt everywhere in Oregon.

There's a worrisome silence emanating from the Oregon congressional delegation on these issues. Sen. Ron Wyden, who created the original Secure Rural Schools program that has supplied hundreds of millions of dollars to timber counties, is working to extend the payments, but he's had little to say recently about the prospects for renewed support.

Moreover, Reps. Peter DeFazio, Greg Walden and Kurt Schrader still have not publicly shared the details of their much-anticipated plan to divide several million acres of federal forest in Southwest Oregon into separate trusts emphasizing conservation and active management, in theory increasing logging and throwing off revenues to help fund county services. Supporters and critics of this approach have rushed into the void of information, spurring an increasingly heated debate about a bill no one has actually seen.

Seven conservation groups recently put out their own plan for funding county services. One of their ideas is a non-starter (jacking up taxes on the owners of private forests) and another an illusion (claiming that shifting forests managed by the Bureau of Land Management to the U.S. Forest Service would save more than $100 million a year). But the conservation groups are surely right about one thing -- there is a "shared responsibility" for solving the county funding crisis.

We support the outlines of the DeFazio plan, but no forest legislation, assuming it can even get out of Congress, is going to provide more than $100 million annually in revenues to counties. And Wyden, for all of his past successes on this issue, will be fortunate to win an extension of reduced federal payments.

Oregon needs it all -- a new forest plan and an extension of payments -- and it needs the people of rural Oregon to agree to do more to fund their own public services. Many of the timber counties have property tax rates far below the statewide average; small increases in local tax rates have to be part of the solution, too.

Of course, that won't go over well in counties struggling with double-digit unemployment. Lane County voters have shot down 14 straight revenue proposals. But none of this is easy. The federal budget is deep in the red, many lawmakers are skeptical about direct payments to counties and a new, only-in-Oregon forest policy is a tough sell, too. Saving timber counties is a heavy lift. Everybody has to pitch in.

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