The Price of Indecision
By Scott R. Cooper, Crook County Judge
This column originally appeared in the Central Oregonian in August 2006
In 2000, Oregon Democrat Ron Wyden and Idaho Republican Larry Craig pulled off a coup.
The pair of senators successfully championed legislation in Congress to pay nearly $1.6 billion payments to Oregon counties and schools. The bill was intended as a stopgap to deal with losses sustained by rural communities as a result of the “timber wars” being fought between politicians and interest groups over how much timber to harvest from federal lands. Harvest off federal lands for decades was the principal source of funding for local communities and schools in the West. The idea behind the Wyden-Craig bill was that while the various groups worked to find some sort of balance between timber harvest and forest health, the federal government would make payments to affected communities to offset their losses.
The concept wasn’t bad. It follows a general line of thinking that citizens of both Oregon and the nation seem to have been embracing in recent years—the idea that if the government is the source of economic damage, the government ought to pay for the privilege.
With strong support from Rep. Greg Walden, passage of the county payments bill was legislation of major magnitude. The $1.6 billion appropriation is the same amount Congress appropriated to restore educational services in the South in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. It’s the amount the federal government recently spent on energy assistance for low-income households nationwide. It was a godsend for rural Oregon, and the benefit rolled up to urban Oregon when the state legislature decided to make all 191 schools districts in the state beneficiaries of the schools-portion of the payments.
In Crook County, the impact of the legislation was significant. County payments comprise about 40 percent of the annual county road budget (with the rest coming from gas tax, grants and earnings off the county road fund.) Last year’s payment was just over $2.3 million. By contrast, the last year the county received payments based on actual timber cutting, receipts had declined to a mere $41,215. Clearly, County payments not only matter; they matter A LOT!
The downside of the Wyden-Craig legislation was an agreement the sponsors were forced to make to get the bill passed: the “poison pill” in the bill is that it expires on September 30, 2006, unless Congress votes to reauthorize it.
In case you were counting, that’s 61 days from now, which means that after this year’s payment is received, there will be no more money without Congressional action.
That could be a big problem, especially considering that when Oregon’s delegation tried hard to push a replacement bill through Congress last year, they didn’t even get the bill out of committee.
The reason for the congressional change of heart is simple. In 2000 when the original bill was passed, the federal government estimated its year-end surplus at $230 billion. Six years later, the government is projecting a deficit of $423 billion. That’s quite a gap.
On the one hand, the $1.6 billion that Oregon needs to keep its road safe and schools running is a drop in the bucket compared to the trillion dollars in deficit spending run up by Congress and the Administration in the last three years. On the other hand, as Sen. Everett Dirksen once was famously supposed to have said, “A billion here, a billion there and pretty soon you’re talking real money.” The question now is whether one of those billions is going to be our money as the government struggles to try and find a way to rein in excess federal spending that threatens the economic security of the entire nation.
I along with other Oregon officials don’t believe our state should be Congress’ sacrificial lamb in the battle of the budget, especially considering that it was Congress, not Oregon, that failed to craft a resolution to the basic problem.
It doesn’t seem to me that it is too much to ask that the federal government figure out a policy that preserves forest health and allows some level of sustainable timber harvest. Doing so will create jobs, improve the environment, renew the flow of self-sustaining funding for Western roads and schools and reduce the amount of money now expended on very expensive efforts to suppress wildfires (something we are keenly aware of this week in particular as broad swaths of merchantable timber are, literally, going up in smoke.) At the same time, such a policy could go far to help balance the nation’s books—something all of us want Congress to figure out a way to do.
Unfortunately, while the answer seems clear to those of us who live amidst some of the nation’s most magnificent forests, it’s anything but obvious to some folks in Washington, D.C. Six years after county payments were adopted as an interim solution, feuding parties remain intractably stuck in an indecisive political fog about what to do next. That’s one choice that as owners of the underlying lands it is within the ability of the federal government to make. But the question I ask is, if the government simply can’t or won’t decide, then why should Oregonians and other Westerners have to pay the price for that indecision in the form of continuing deterioration in public roads, inferior schools and declining forest health?
That’s exactly the point I hope to leave with 535 members of Congress during one week in September when we will be joining our county colleagues from other states in Washington, D.C., for two days of intensive lobbying as part of a last-ditch effort to get the county payments bill reauthorized. With $2.4 million in annual payments hanging in the balance, we’ve got to try to resolve this issue in our favor.
We certainly are going to make the effort. How much the federal government cares about Oregon and the rest of the West is the question in the balance. One way or the other, we’re going to be there in person in the nation’s capital face to face with the people who make the decisions to find out once and for all what the answer really is.
This column originally appeared in the Central Oregonian in August 2006
Failure of Congress To Reauthorize County Payments Has a Pricetag
In 2000, Oregon Democrat Ron Wyden and Idaho Republican Larry Craig pulled off a coup.
The pair of senators successfully championed legislation in Congress to pay nearly $1.6 billion payments to Oregon counties and schools. The bill was intended as a stopgap to deal with losses sustained by rural communities as a result of the “timber wars” being fought between politicians and interest groups over how much timber to harvest from federal lands. Harvest off federal lands for decades was the principal source of funding for local communities and schools in the West. The idea behind the Wyden-Craig bill was that while the various groups worked to find some sort of balance between timber harvest and forest health, the federal government would make payments to affected communities to offset their losses.
The concept wasn’t bad. It follows a general line of thinking that citizens of both Oregon and the nation seem to have been embracing in recent years—the idea that if the government is the source of economic damage, the government ought to pay for the privilege.
With strong support from Rep. Greg Walden, passage of the county payments bill was legislation of major magnitude. The $1.6 billion appropriation is the same amount Congress appropriated to restore educational services in the South in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. It’s the amount the federal government recently spent on energy assistance for low-income households nationwide. It was a godsend for rural Oregon, and the benefit rolled up to urban Oregon when the state legislature decided to make all 191 schools districts in the state beneficiaries of the schools-portion of the payments.
In Crook County, the impact of the legislation was significant. County payments comprise about 40 percent of the annual county road budget (with the rest coming from gas tax, grants and earnings off the county road fund.) Last year’s payment was just over $2.3 million. By contrast, the last year the county received payments based on actual timber cutting, receipts had declined to a mere $41,215. Clearly, County payments not only matter; they matter A LOT!
The downside of the Wyden-Craig legislation was an agreement the sponsors were forced to make to get the bill passed: the “poison pill” in the bill is that it expires on September 30, 2006, unless Congress votes to reauthorize it.
In case you were counting, that’s 61 days from now, which means that after this year’s payment is received, there will be no more money without Congressional action.
That could be a big problem, especially considering that when Oregon’s delegation tried hard to push a replacement bill through Congress last year, they didn’t even get the bill out of committee.
The reason for the congressional change of heart is simple. In 2000 when the original bill was passed, the federal government estimated its year-end surplus at $230 billion. Six years later, the government is projecting a deficit of $423 billion. That’s quite a gap.
On the one hand, the $1.6 billion that Oregon needs to keep its road safe and schools running is a drop in the bucket compared to the trillion dollars in deficit spending run up by Congress and the Administration in the last three years. On the other hand, as Sen. Everett Dirksen once was famously supposed to have said, “A billion here, a billion there and pretty soon you’re talking real money.” The question now is whether one of those billions is going to be our money as the government struggles to try and find a way to rein in excess federal spending that threatens the economic security of the entire nation.
I along with other Oregon officials don’t believe our state should be Congress’ sacrificial lamb in the battle of the budget, especially considering that it was Congress, not Oregon, that failed to craft a resolution to the basic problem.
It doesn’t seem to me that it is too much to ask that the federal government figure out a policy that preserves forest health and allows some level of sustainable timber harvest. Doing so will create jobs, improve the environment, renew the flow of self-sustaining funding for Western roads and schools and reduce the amount of money now expended on very expensive efforts to suppress wildfires (something we are keenly aware of this week in particular as broad swaths of merchantable timber are, literally, going up in smoke.) At the same time, such a policy could go far to help balance the nation’s books—something all of us want Congress to figure out a way to do.
Unfortunately, while the answer seems clear to those of us who live amidst some of the nation’s most magnificent forests, it’s anything but obvious to some folks in Washington, D.C. Six years after county payments were adopted as an interim solution, feuding parties remain intractably stuck in an indecisive political fog about what to do next. That’s one choice that as owners of the underlying lands it is within the ability of the federal government to make. But the question I ask is, if the government simply can’t or won’t decide, then why should Oregonians and other Westerners have to pay the price for that indecision in the form of continuing deterioration in public roads, inferior schools and declining forest health?
That’s exactly the point I hope to leave with 535 members of Congress during one week in September when we will be joining our county colleagues from other states in Washington, D.C., for two days of intensive lobbying as part of a last-ditch effort to get the county payments bill reauthorized. With $2.4 million in annual payments hanging in the balance, we’ve got to try to resolve this issue in our favor.
We certainly are going to make the effort. How much the federal government cares about Oregon and the rest of the West is the question in the balance. One way or the other, we’re going to be there in person in the nation’s capital face to face with the people who make the decisions to find out once and for all what the answer really is.
Labels: Failure of Congress To Reauthorize County Payments Has a Pricetag
posted by Scott Cooper | 10:11 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home