Forest plans and county funding update

Rep. DeFazio's proposal for the O&C lands still shrouded in mystery while Oregon Wild advocates for solutions that don't jeopardize public lands.

The timber trust plan that Congressman Peter DeFazio has been talking about has been causing consternation among those in town more prone to hugging trees than cutting them down.

DeFazio has said, “The bottom line is: How can we get counties adequate funding for essential public services?” But Chandra LeGue of Oregon Wild says, “There’s other things that can be done rather than recoupling timber harvests and county payments.”

O&C lands are BLM lands, which amount to about 2.4 million acres in Oregon, that came from a land grant given to build the Oregon & California Railroad, and later taken back. The 1937 O&C Lands Act tied logging on these lands to county revenues, but as logging has decreased, so has the money. The gap has been filled in with funding from the Secure Rural Schools Act, but that money has come to an end, leaving Lane and other counties with a large amount of federal land hurting for money for essential services.

LeGue says, “No one likes to talk about taxes in these economic times.” But she points out rather than just focusing on increasing logging, an export tax on raw logs could generate over $200 million every year, a lot of which would come to O&C counties.

DeFazio says his plan would be to split the lands between conservation and logging and have each of the two sections managed by a board of trustees creating a conservation trust and a timber trust. The congressman’s office has been waiting on a land inventory of the area in question before coming up with legislation. The lands inventory is reportedly being done by The Nature Conservancy.

LeGue says she thinks about one million acres could be given over to logging under the DeFazio plan. “What I think those maps will show is when you look at all the values for this land in context, there’s no way you can find a million acres that can be sacrificed,” she says.

“Some of it will be political because we are talking about funding counties, and county funding trumps science,” she adds.

LeGue says there have been rumors that the DeFazio trust plan will be added into a separate House proposal called the National Forest County Revenue, Schools and Jobs Act of 2011, which seeks to increase commercial timber harvests on national forests as a way of replacing the expired federal county payments.

That proposal didn’t address the O&C lands, though a press release for the legislation says it “provides for future inclusion of proposals to address other federal forest lands affected by declining timber production,” and references those lands.

According to Headwaters Economics, a nonpartisan research group, among other issues, “the cost of implementing the County Revenue Act would require significant new federal spending — from $1.8 billion to as much as $5.9 billion annually above current Secure Rural Schools appropriations — based on the current cost of preparing and administering timber sales.”  — Camilla Mortensen

Oregon Wild and Cascadia Wildlands will host an event called “Will Rep. DeFazio Sell Out Public Lands in Western Oregon” at 6pm Nov. 29 at the downtown library.