Peg Reagan wasn’t a typical Western county
commissioner. For starters, she’s an
environmentalist.
“I was in the minority on any
land-use issue,” she says of her four-year term on the Curry County
Commission in southwestern Oregon.
After leaving
office in 1995, she decided it was time for the minority to get
organized. She founded the nonprofit Conservation Leaders Network,
a grassroots campaign to increase county support for environmental
issues.
Now, her group is joining an effort to
break the connection between county coffers and federal timber
contracts, a plan known as “decoupling.” Environmental groups say
decoupling would undercut county incentives to support public-lands
logging, and the Forest Service and an Oregon congressman say it’s
a way to protect counties from a timber-production “roller
coaster.” But Reagan’s former colleagues don’t
agree.
In the past, the Forest Service sent about
one-quarter of its logging receipts to timber counties, earmarking
the money for roads and public schools. Although the annual
windfall was erratic, it often made up more than half of county
budgets, helping to cement local support for bigger and bigger
logging operations.
Things changed for the
Northwest in 1993, when Congress approved the Northwest Forest Plan
and timber production in the region dropped by 80 percent. The plan
temporarily stabilized the counties’ yearly payments, giving them
10 years’ respite from the effects of the logging downturn. Reagan,
who was a county commissioner at the time, thought the change was
positive. “It was much better for counties to know how much revenue
was coming to them,” she says.
If the Forest
Service payments could be stabilized indefinitely, she says,
timber-producing counties would be able to depend on a constant
source of income, and local officials might not be so enthusiastic
about unsustainable logging on federal
lands.
Reagan isn’t the only one who thinks
permanent, nationwide decoupling is a good idea. “Clear-cuts for
kids don’t make a whole lot of sense,” says Amelia Jenkins, a
forest economist from the Association of Forest Service Employees
for Environmental Ethics and a former staffer at the American Lands
Alliance.
Tryg Sletteland of the Oregon-based
Pacific Rivers Council, an environmental group lending support to
the effort, says, “If you’re trying to change federal land
management, it’s going to be a lot easier when the (local) politics
aren’t stacked against you.” Most counties would still want the
jobs and tax revenues associated with logging, he says, but
decoupling would get rid of the direct link between the size of the
timber harvest and the size of federal
payments.
The Forest Service has proposed a
decoupling plan in its 1999 budget request, asking for counties to
receive Treasury payments instead of timber dollars. “We want to
stop the roller coaster and stabilize these payments,” says Chris
Woods, spokesman for Forest Service Chief Mike Dombeck. “Why should
the wealthiest country in the world, with one of the highest
standards of living in the world, be funding the education of rural
schoolkids on the back of the federal timber program?”
Even a congressman from the heart of timber
country has signed on to the effort. Rep. Peter DeFazio, D, has
introduced a bill (H.R. 4267) similar to the Forest Service’s
request, but it has been “left in the lurch” by this year’s
Congress, says DeFazio spokesman Jeff Stier. Decoupling “is hugely
important for counties in our district,” he says. “It’s silly for
counties to tie their fortunes to the hope that we’re going to go
back in time in terms of forest management. That’s just not in the
cards.”
With the support of environmental groups
such as the Portland-based Oregon Natural Resources Council and the
American Lands Alliance, the Conservation Leaders Network has
recently started drumming up county officials’ support for a
nationwide decoupling plan. Two timber counties in Oregon have
expressed support during the last several weeks, and the group will
soon extend its efforts to other states.
Reagan
thinks county-level endorsement of decoupling is the most important
piece of the puzzle. “Local elected officials have more clout than
any environmental activist or environmental group,” she
says.
But many county officials are still
suspicious of the idea, fearing they would lose their sizable sway
with federal agencies. “We’d rather stay involved with the process
of managing the timber,” says Gordon Roth, a Coos County, Ore.,
commissioner. “Counties have a long-standing cooperative
arrangement with the Forest Service, and these lands provide jobs
for our constituents.”
The National Association
of Counties wants to see some major changes made to the Forest
Service proposal, including an “either/or” clause that would
establish a minimum annual payment but allow counties to cash in on
big harvests.
And others worry that stabilized
payments would be even less dependable than a cut of federal timber
revenues. Republican Sen. Larry Craig from Idaho has opposed the
idea, arguing that counties would have to rely on the long-term
goodwill of Congress – a risky proposition at
best.
The push for decoupling “is still in its
early stages,” admits Tryg Sletteland. “But this is something that
makes obvious sense. This is an idea whose time is coming.”
* Michelle
Nijhuis
Michelle Nijhuis is an
HCN staff reporter.
You can
contact …
* Conservation Leaders Network,
541/247-8079;
* Rep. Peter DeFazio,
202/225-6416;
* Sen. Larry Craig,
202/224-2752.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline A tie that binds: county income and timber.
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