Local governments in Northwest Montana and across the West are bracing for big budget cuts after Congress failed to reauthorize a federal timber payments program that is critical to rural communities.
On Jan. 15, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack announced that the U.S. Forest Service would be paying more than $50 million in timber payments to 41 states and Puerto Rico after Congress failed to reauthorize the Secure Rural Schools program late last year. The money, paid under the Twenty-Five Percent Act of 1908, is considerably smaller than the $300 million the SRS provided governments in 2014.
“There is no question about it; This is going to be a big hit on our budget,” Lincoln County Commissioner Mike Cole said .
The cuts mean Montana, which received more than $21 million from SRS in 2014, will get about $2 million this year. In Lincoln County that means about $313,000 compared to the $2.75 million it received last year.
The Twenty-Five Percent Act of 1908 was created so counties like Lincoln, where 72 percent of the land is under federal control, can maintain their roads and schools without benefitting from property taxes. The payments included 25 percent of the gross receipts from timber sales, leases and rentals on the national forest.
As timber sales began to decline across the west, Congress created the SRS program in 2000 that paid counties an annual average of the three highest payments between 1986 and 1999. In 2001, it paid out more than $448 million. However, payments have shrunk along with government budgets and in 2013 that number had fallen to $295 million. In recent years, the SRS program has been reauthorized annually, leaving rural governments in limbo. Because Lincoln County commissioners were unsure if they would even receive SRS funding this year, they did not include it in the 2015 budget. Instead, road maintenance will be funded by the county’s reserves. Commissioner Greg Larson, who represents Troy, said the road department has enough in reserves to last a few years, but maintained that is not a longterm solution.
“If something does not change in Washington D.C. then we are going to be in a very serious situation,” Larson said.
Both Sens. Jon Tester, D-Mont., and Steve Daines, R-Mont., say they hope Congress would reauthorize the SRS funds in the coming weeks.
“We’ve got to keep pushing people to get this reauthorized,” Daines said. “The Secure Rural Schools program provides critical resources to Montana’s rural communities and we’ve got to make sure that communities like Lincoln County get the support they need.”
He added that the best way to help rural communities is to lift regulations and get loggers and miners back to work.
Flathead County will also be impacted by dwindling SRS funds. In 2013, Flathead County received more than $1.6 million from the program. County administrator Mike Pence said the SRS funding makes up about one-eighth of the road budget.
Officials at local, state and federal levels all agreed that simply reauthorizing the program every year is not a longterm solution, but Tester doesn’t see that happening in the near future.
“The bottom line is I think the Secure Rural Schools program will get reauthorized, as it has in the past,” Tester said. “And if someone puts up a good longterm solution I would probably vote for it, but I don’t think that’s going to happen in the next year or two.”