Lane County Commissioners are set to approve the county’s budget today without nearly $50 million dollars in federal timber money.
Lawmakers did not renew a funding package of $238 million to rural counties in Oregon, which has left two-thirds of the state’s county governments looking to replace the funding.

And state officials have released a report only offering alternatives that may not be feasible.
Gov. Ted Kulongoski presented a report that offered 54 recommendations to the 24 counties facing critical conditions, including Lane County, which has cut numerous jobs, programs and public safety services.
According to the report, issued by a Kulongoski-appointed task force, Oregon counties will face bigger financial woes than experienced during the state’s 2001-03 recession, and possibly the worst since the Great Depression of the 1930s.
The 24 counties affected are predominately rural, but they also include the fourth and sixth most populated counties, Lane and Jackson. And help is hard to find for many of them.
“We have made progress toward developing a long-term plan in the absence of federal forest payments, but we need more time,” Kulongoski said in a press release.
The task force, which was commissioned to address the impending loss of federal revenue, offered three main solutions to make up for the missing money: increase property taxes, increase logging and persistently lobby federal lawmakers to renew the funding.
However, all three options fall on the less-than-possible side of hopeful.
In Lane County, voters have rejected increased tax measures more than a dozen straight times, and county commissioners have given up any initiative to propose a new tax.
During the last few months of the county’s budget process, commissioners said they would definitely not impose any new tax unless it came from a grassroots citizen level, which hasn’t happened yet.
“I agree that the citizens have to step up to the plate, but so far they are in the dugout,” Lane County Commissioner Bill Dwyer said in an e-mail.
From 1997 to 2007, only 38 percent of ballot tax measures passed in Oregon counties.
“A tax is absolutely unacceptable,” said Jason Williams, executive director of Taxpayer Association of Oregon. This is the third plan to fix a problem with a tax proposal by the governor in the last year, Willams said, referring to a proposed increase in the tobacco tax to aid uninsured children and a gas tax to provide for road repairs.
A second major alternative calls for an increase in logging.
The lost $283 million in federal funding was part of an annual payment plan by the federal government. The plan was meant to offset the falling timber revenues that threatened Oregon counties in the 1990s when production declined by 90 percent by the end of the decade.
The task force called for double or triple the current level of logging, which could make up around one half of the lost revenue in some counties.
However, one local conservation group is calling the logging plan a “wish list of the timber industry.” “What the task force is looking for is the same thing the logging industry wants,” said Steve Pedery, spokesperson for the conservation group Oregon Wild. “The public will not stand for logging on the scale experienced in the ’70s and ’80s of over-harvesting that led to endangering the spotted owl and salmon.”
The task force’s logging plan calls for timber thinning to create a “healthy forest,” which would reduce the risk of wildfires. The task force and governor assert these fires contribute to global warming.
Pedery, however, said that argument doesn’t hold water. He said under some of the task force recommendations, old growth trees would be cut down, which combats global warming more than a reduction in forest fires.
The most discussed option recommended by the task force was to keep lobbying federal legislators to renew the funding with at best a four-year plan and at least a one-year renewal.
That outlook is bleak as the House recently defeated a four-year renewal bill sponsored by Oregon Rep. Peter DeFazio. Last year, the Senate could not get a similar bill to President George W. Bush’s desk either.
Oregon counties faced losing the timber payments in the spring of 2007, but federal legislators granted them a one-year renewal, which was tied to the Iraq War appropriations bill. President Bush, however, has made it clear this year he would veto any bill stuffed with domestic spending.
The House recently approved its version of the war spending bill without any county aid.
The only federal-based hope for counties could come from the Senate if it approves a war-spending bill with the timber renewal, but it would have to be able to sustain a presidential veto.
Lane County lobbyist Alex Cuyler said there is another hope in the form of a tax credit bill that includes a four-year county payment plan; however, he said “it’s a long shot.”
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