EDUCATION ECONOMICS
States Wait on Rural School Funding
By Headwaters News, 1-30-07
As logging on federal lands diminishes in the West, many states are wondering what is going to fund the mechanism that helps their counties pay for rural schools. For decades, rural counties received payments from the federal government in lieu of taxes those counties couldn’t collect on federal land within their borders. Those payments primarily came from timber and other revenue-producing resources on those federal lands, but as logging continues to decline, the counties’ share of revenue also grows smaller.
Legislative fixes are in place to make up that difference, including the Secure Rural Schools and Community Self-Determination Act, also known as the Craig-Wyden bill, after its sponsors, Republican Sen. Larry Craig from Idaho and Oregon Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden. This bill creates a stable payment structure for county road and school districts, and according to the Associated Press, paid out $385 million for schools and roads to rural counties last year. But it expires this year.
Wyden is again pushing the law to be reauthorized for another six years (it was passed in 2000), but last week, Sen. Craig said he wouldn’t support its reauthorization, because he said the pay structure needs to change. A story in the Coeur d’Alene Press today reports that Idaho Gov. Butch Otter does support reauthorization, but also reported that he said a more permanent source of income for rural schools needs to be found.
That source, Otter said, is timber — the original source of funding for rural schools. As quoted in the Press: “if you’re [Congress] not going to give us the Craig-Wyden, then for gosh sakes let us go forward with a cut/sustain yield management plan. Let us go ahead and harvest these forests so that we can, No. 1, bring in some revenues and, No. 2, protect ourselves from wildfire disasters.”
Oregon Senator Gordon Smith is threatening a filibuster on the big Senate spending bill (13 agency budgets) if the county timber funds are not restored. Oregon gets the lion's share of the funds, and suffered the lion's share of impacts of no Federal lands logging. I would like him to find a way to tax Weyerhaeuser, et al, as they are the beneficiaries of the no logging mandate. The EcoLuddites think they are the winners in the no logging on public lands. Wrong! Weyerhaeuser was the winner. The real Big Timber Barons danced in the street when timbers sales ended. They had the market to themselves. The day Weyco decides they want to cut US public timber instead of the 28 million acres of Crown timber concessions they own in Canada, it will happen, just as fast as it was shut down. And yes, I know that you would never find a senator to challenge Weyco. Too politically risky.
Weyerhaeuser bought Willamette Industries a few years back, and has now logged all their timber reserves, and is closing mills up and down the Willamette Valley. They possess all the qualities of a monopoly, act like a monopoly, and leave the destructive trail of a monopoly, which is probably why they lost two private lawsuits saying just that, and were judged to owe many millions to the wounded competitiors. Of course, the suits ended up in the US Supreme Court, where the Bush Justice Dept. has filed an Amicus Brief on behalf of Whorehaeuser. The fix is in. Ya just gotta love 'Merica today. The monopoly driven economy is just roaring. What is good for General Bullmoose is good for America!!!
The real object of this rant is that there are no sawmills left to cut any logs that might be developed from thinning or salvaging or restoring tree spacing to reduce fire threats and intensity. That is just what Whorehaeuser wanted. They were well served by their investments in the environmental lobby. Cut off the public timber competition, buy the best companies and gut them, and by doing so, increase your profits from cutting vast expanses of Canadian timber, all of which goes to market in the good ole HEW HESS HAY......all of which makes the USFS "let 'er burn" audit and direction viable and acceptable.
Don't blame the Piss Fir Willies and Wilmas. They have no mandate, expertise, or will to keep the forests in their charge from becoming an exercise in charcoal. Whorehaeuser would not have it any other way. America got what it wanted. It got rid of all those timber barons, and ended up with a timber dictator. If they had only known the timber barons were really a few geriatric grandaughters in St. Paul, Chicago or Tacoma. You have to laugh when common stockholders of Potlatch sued the Board of Directors because Potlatch had continued to pay great dividends to preferred stock holders while the company was losing a lot of money. Those preferred stock holders are mostly Weyerhaeuser heirs from when WTC had to divest itself of Potlatch Lumber Company.
Without the dole, the welfare check from Congress, there are going to be a lot of school teachers, sheriff deputies, librarians, road crews looking for work this year. The counties can't tax federal lands, and when the Feds own 62% of your State, property taxes cannot fund governments in rural areas on an equal basis with urban areas. So, now that we no longer subsidize those timber barons, we can own up to the responsibility to subsidize the public safety, schools, and roads of those counties that once lived without the dole because the timber barons kept buying your wilderness heritage, your wolf habitat. Do the right thing. Email your favorite environmental lobby and have them ask the Congress to vote to add back the timber counties welfare funds. It's the least you can do.