Fed money to DN again at risk

Congress must decide if it will reauthorize act

Millions of dollars in federal aid to Del Norte schools and roads are tied up in politics, again.

The recently expired Secure Rural Schools and Community Self-Determination Act provided relatively stable, if dwindling, payments to counties with tax-exempt federal lands, regardless of revenues from logging and other commercial activities.

The 2001 law has been on the chopping block before and was narrowly reauthorized by Congress in 2008.

“Every four years we’re sitting on pins and needles wondering what the allocation will be and will it be allocated,” said County Administrative Officer Jay Sarina.

For this year, $854,000 of Del Norte County’s total $2.2 million in Secure Rural Schools funding went to the county road fund, $1 million went to the school district, with the remainder allotted to a resource advisory committee charged with overseeing forest improvements.

Del Norte got its last check in December.

The school district’s funding goes into a $1.9 million reserve fund, which was tapped this year for $760,000 to prevent district-wide pay cuts. The county roads money is also in a reserve, which totals some $6 million, Sarina said.

If Secure Rural Schools money stopped flowing, after a couple of years it would mean “a systematic reduction in services,” for the roads department, he said.

A draft bill in the U.S. Senate aims to keep Secure Rural Schools payments on the books with a five percent ramp down in funding every year for five years, until the next reauthorization showdown in 2016.

A similar bill in the House tacks on a requirement for minimum timber harvests.

“I am a coauthor and supporter the County Payments Reauthorization Act,” U.S. Rep. Mike Thompson, whose congressional district includes Del Norte, said in a statement. “Our students deserve to have the best education and these funds provide that. Also, the county provides public safety and road maintenance on the very lands exempt from taxation, meaning they do not receive revenues. This is wrong. I was successful in leading efforts to compensate our counties in the past, and I hope that the Republican majority will join me in supporting this bill now.”

Currently the House’s draft legislation has no Republican co-sponsors.

If the Secure Rural Schools legislation is not reauthorized in one form or another by June, revenues from federal lands will again be determined by a 104-year-old U.S. law, which cuts counties in for a 25 percent share of the seven-year rolling receipts from commercial activities on federal lands, like logging, mining and grazing.

“We are worried that if the Secure Rural Schools fails to be reauthorized and we return to this model where the only value of public lands that actually counts is timber, then we are going to return to a set of incentives that narrows the opportunities around public lands,” said Mark Haggerty of Headwaters Economics, a nonprofit organization specializing in natural resources.

Haggerty stressed that the value of national forest land is not singularly tied to logging.

Forest restoration, watershed health, recreation and accessibility also have the potential to be economic drivers for the local community, but require more collaboration and funding, he said.

Timber receipts are subject to drastic market fluctuations and in recent years they have been nil or close to it in Del Norte.

In 2010 for example, Six Rivers National Forest grossed $8,971 in timber harvests, according to USDA figures. The forest’s holdings constitute some 55 percent of the county’s total area.

“There’s such an extreme lack of cut on the national forest,” County Supervisor David Finigan recently told the Triplicate, “There’s no funds being generated through the timber yield, so when that started happening years ago that’s when the Secure Rural Schools legislation was created.”

The hope was that with good forest management practices, the timber could come back, but this seems unlikely in the next five years, Finigan said.

Six Rivers National Forest released its first and only published business plan in 2006, which emphasized the shifting priorities of the Forest Service.

“Past management activities on the Six Rivers National Forest focused primarily on timber production, treatment of timber-related activity fuels, and reforestation,” the plan states. “Today, as a result of changing public values and downward trends in funding levels, our management activities have shifted and our efforts now focus more on maintaining and restoring forest ecosystems.”

As for restoring the county’s coffers, Sarina said it depends a lot on the management of the forest.

“Most of this is completely out of the control of the county,” he said. “What we really want is a process where you would have a stable and secure type of a funding source — something that allows the county some assurance.”

Del Norte also receives reimbursement for national land through Payments in Lieu of Taxes, or PILT, a funding mechanism based on acreage, which added $154,000 to the county’s general fund last year. The legislation is permanently authorized, but Congress must appropriate the funds again by 2013.

The proposed drafts to reauthorize the Secure Rural School Act include a provision for renewed PILT funding at the current level.

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