For Oregon, it's crunch time in Congress

The Oregonian editorial board calls for Oregon's congressional delegation to get to work on the Mt. Hood Wilderness proposal, saying "it's past time...to get this job done."

Oregonians have a mountain of needs to be met by their congressional delegation after an August recess filled with town hall meetings and hobnobbing at county fairs.

Within that mountain of needs there looms, quite literally, a mountain: the long-delayed expansion of Mount Hood wilderness. It's past time, frankly, to get this job done.

Last year, Congress came tantalizingly close to passing a Mount Hood bill that would have added more than 77,000 acres of wilderness to Oregon's iconic peak. That deal fell apart, however, amid disagreements among Oregon members of the Senate and House, as well as controversy over a land exchange included in the bill.

This time around, Oregon Sens. Ron Wyden and Gordon Smith have advanced a bigger bill, designating nearly 125,000 acres of new wilderness in the state. Oregon's representatives in the House must now roll up their sleeves and work together to get this bill into law.

Both senators and all five House members from Oregon must also keep fighting for renewal and expansion of the State Children's Health Insurance Program, known as SCHIP. It is critically important to Oregon's new Healthy Kids Plan, which would provide health care to more than 100,000 uninsured children using federal SCHIP funds to match revenue raised through an increase in the state's tobacco tax.

Both the Senate and House have passed versions of a SCHIP bill, but they have stark differences that still must be reconciled. And then there's President Bush's threatened veto, which means both Wyden and Smith may be called upon to work aggressively in the Senate to produce an override vote.

Desperate rural counties in Oregon still need help in this session, too. Congress urgently needs to renew a law that once provided annual payments to Oregon counties that lost hundreds of millions of dollars in federal timber receipts as a result of changes in national forest policy. Jackson, Josephine, Douglas and about two dozen other counties are owed that money in lieu of property taxes under deals made many decades ago, but Congress last year allowed the law to expire.

Western senators, led by Wyden and Smith, both members of the Senate Finance Committee, added a provision to an energy tax bill that would extend the timber county payments program through 2011. The final energy bill sent to Bush simply must include this amendment to keep local governments from collapsing as they adjust to the curtailment of federal timber harvests in rural Oregon.

The deadly bridge collapse in Minnesota brought attention to another nationwide crisis with impact on Oregon: the neglect of our transportation infrastructure and the desperate need for a federal gas tax increase to address the crisis, one that's building ominously among this state's system of roads and bridges.

There's more, much more, that Oregon's members of Congress must fight for this fall. But if they can at least come through for Mount Hood, uninsured kids, rural counties and crumbling bridges, they will have earned thanks from the Oregonians who put their trust in them.