OLYMPIA – There’s an injustice in timber country. But wrongheaded and maddening as it is, it’s fixable. The thing is that year in and year out, Wahkiakum County and many other Washington counties scramble like mad to hack their way through an economic thicket not of their own making.
Specifically, explained state Rep. Dean Takko, these regions are forced to find a way to make ends meet — to pay for vital public services and programs — in spite of the fact that they’re hamstrung by federal rules and regulations (e.g., spotted-owl fiats, for instance, and marbled murrelet edicts).
These regions are blessed with thousands of potentially very valuable acres of public timber land. This land, however, brings in no revenue for the counties at all if the aforementioned fiats and edicts constrain sales.
When the federal regulations ease up, Takko explained, the local counties can do just fine, perhaps quite well, in fact. But then, if the hammer comes down on timber sales and property-tax revenues go down the next year or two, the county is, well, up a creek.
“There needs to be sustainability and predictability in terms of logging receipts,” he said.
In his hunt for an answer to this conundrum, Takko won unanimous support in the House of Representatives just the other day for his House Bill 2329. The measure is in the Senate for more consideration.
The bill will authorize state-forest land pools to be managed by the Department of Natural Resources for the benefit of smaller counties (counties with a population of 25,000 or fewer people).
Takko said the idea is “to help counties that have existing state-forest lands encumbered with 30-year or even longer timber-harvest deferrals associated with wildlife species that are listed under the federal Endangered Species Act.”