The Republican-backed budget bill that passed in the U.S. Senate Tuesday authorizes dramatic increases to logging on federal lands managed by the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management. But Oregon counties won’t see most of those revenues if the bill clears the U.S. House unchanged.
“Rural counties, all counties that receive timber revenue from the Forest Service and the BLM will lose,” said Doug Robertson, executive director of the O&C Counties Association, a group that supports Oregon timber counties.
Counties can’t collect property taxes from federal lands that are within their boundaries, which leaves many counties with limited options to raise local taxes to pay for schools, law enforcement and public infrastructure. So they’re given two options to make up for those missing funds: Get money from the Secure Rural Schools program, or get a cut of revenues from timber sales on public lands.
Oregon counties have typically gone with Secure Rural Schools, since it provides more funding. That funding expired in 2023. The U.S. Senate recently passed a bill to renew Secure Rural Schools, sponsored by U.S. Sens. Ron Wyden and Jeff Merkley, both Democrats representing Oregon, but it’s stalled in the House.
That has left counties with just one other option: Receiving a portion of revenue from federal timber sales. Federal agencies auction the ability to log public lands to timber companies, then send varying percentages of those profits to counties.
The budget reconciliation bill would take a significant cut of that and send it to the Treasury Department. It specifically directs the Forest Service and BLM to increase logging by about 250 million board feet a year, which is nearly as much timber as the BLM already logs.
The bill would also require agencies to enter into dozens of long-term logging contracts, so timber companies would have no fewer than 20 years to log a section of public lands.
Counties wouldn’t see any of the revenues from those long-term sales.
“This is a terrible precedent,” Robertson said. “We don’t know how much volume will be in those 20-year contracts. Could be huge. And that means an awful lot of money that should be shared.”
This story comes to you from the Northwest News Network, a collaboration between public media organizations in Oregon and Washington.
