Timber education subsidy disputed

In 1908, the Payments Estates Law was passed, which required that 25 percent of the receipts from national forest commodities be given to counties for roads and education.

September 8, 1999
Web posted at: 4:22 p.m. EDT (2022 GMT)

In 1908, the Payments Estates Law was passed, which required that 25 percent of the receipts from national forest commodities be given to counties for roads and education.

For years, schools within counties that contain national forest lands have received a portion of the receipts that logging companies pay to the U.S. Treasury. But environmental groups are criticizing this policy. According to the Wilderness Society, "the timber industry is attempting to use rural students as hostages to increase logging levels on national forests in order to get timber sales back up."

The Wilderness Society believes rural schools should have a stable source of funding that is not tied to commodity extraction," said Michael Francis, director of the National Forest Program for the group. "Revenue from resource extraction from the national forest is inherently unstable because it is tied to supply and demand for the widely fluctuating resource. A historical look at the supply and demand for these resources shows that their values travel on the roller coaster of boom and bust."

Due to changing public views on how the forest should be managed, the forest service timber sales program has taken a dramatic downfall since the 1990s, directly affecting the counties those forests surround

In 1908, the Payments Estates Law was passed, which required that 25 percent of the receipts from national forest commodities be given to counties for roads and education. Due to changing public views on how the forest should be managed, the forest service timber sales program has taken a dramatic downfall since the 1990s, directly affecting the counties those forests surround. "These 25 percent revenues are and will continue to decline," said Francis.

To help counties in Oregon and Washington deal with the financial shock of the spotted owl injunctions of the early 1990s, Mark Hatfield, then a senator from Oregon, got a "safety net" provision passed by Congress. In order to provide this safety net, millions of federal dollars are being spent, but the funds will soon run out when the terms of the provision are terminated in 2003, according to the Wilderness Society.

The House Resources Committee is currently in the process of addressing the issue. The Wilderness Society would like to end the link between logging and assistance. They are proposing to provide funding based on a 10-year average of a county's payment history from a U.S. Treasury Trust Fund that would act like an entitlement, guaranteeing that counties would receive the funding.

The Wilderness Society is also recommending that Congress set up a commission to study tax equivalencies. "We plan to bring the information we have gathered to Congress as well. We have been doing lots of research, gathering records of community receipts to show the inequities to rural school children in the current system," Francis said.

Copyright 1999, Environmental News Network, All Rights Reserved

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