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On April 25, the Board of
Supervisors hosted its first all-day workshop
on the National Forest and Local Economies.
This was a day set aside to take stock of
where we were, where we need to be and some
possibilities about how to get there.
If not reauthorized
by Congress, PL 106-393 - The Secure Rural
Schools and Community Self Determination Act
is scheduled to sunset this year. The workshop
opened with presentations on the impact that
that this will have on local schools and our
County Road Department. Representatives from
local schools detailed the $4 million in
revenue that will be lost to local schools.
Larry Alexander, Chairman of the Siskiyou
County Resource Advisory Committee (RAC) spoke
about all the projects that had been funded in
local Forests and surrounding communities with
PL 106-393 monies. Loss of this funding source
will impact local Fires Safe Councils and
other organizations.
County
Public Works Director Brian McDermott
talked about the impact that loss of the funds
would have on our County roads. There are
1,364 miles of roadways and 175 bridges in the
County Road System. Of these, 556 miles of
roads are unpaved. Currently, 65% of the Road
Department budget goes to salaries (82
employees,) 25% to overhead and/or fixed
operational costs, and 10% to materials -
asphalt, oil, gravel, etc. for maintenance of
roads. (Materials expenditures are currently
less than $1 million per annum or $750 a
mile.) The cost of materials continues to
escalate.
Sources for the $8,885,000 in annual revenue
currently received by the County for roads
are: $4 million from the
Secure
Rural
Schools and Communities Self
Determination Act; $735,000 from TEA 21
Federal and State funds; $750,000 from
Proposition 42; and $3.4 million from gas
taxes.
If the Act is not reauthorized, revenues would
revert to the 25% timber receipt formula
established for federal lands. This formula
was established early in the last century.
Because Forest
communities are restricted in the growth
necessary to provide sufficient tax revenue, a
portion of net revenue from forest use and
harvest is allocated to affected county roads
and schools. Restrictions on harvest from the
Northwest Forest Plan for spotted owls and
other species has dropped timber receipts from
several millions of dollars to a current level
of about $250,000 per year.
With a default to timber
receipts, future total annual revenues would
be $6,250,000. This would come from: the
$250,000 timber receipts; an increase in TEA
21 funds to $1,100,000; a possible increase of
Prop. 42 funds to $1,500,000; and gas taxes,
staying at the same level of $3.4 million.
This means an annual revenue deficit of
$2,635,000 from current levels. It is obvious
that this will severely impact our ability to
maintain roads.
The workshop
also examined the close relationship that
local communities have to use of the National
Forest. A study was done in 2004 to look at
the social and economic impacts on the
communities of
Butte
Valley,
Scott
Valley and the mid-Klamath River
corridor in the decade following the Northwest
Forest Plan. The study looked at changes is
population numbers, age groups, median
household income, unemployment and other
factors. Each community had a different
response, but indications were that they were
all impacted in some way. It is no surprise
that the mid-Klamath was severely impacted.
Forester Steve Hensen
from Roseburg Forest Products indicated that
today Trinity
County has one sawmill, Lassen and
Modoc
Counties have none. There are 70-90
million acres of forest that are in Class 3
condition – at high risk form wildland fire.
The Klamath National
Forest (KNF) grows 654 million board feet (mbf)
of timber in a year. We are currently
harvesting only 15 mbf of saw logs a year.
That means that we are harvesting only 3% of
the growth and leaving 97% to accumulate each
year. The KNF hopes to increase harvest to 44
mbf per year by 2007. At the cost of
preparing a sale, they would need 120 mbf
harvested each year to get $2-4 million in
timber receipts.
Forester Bill Turner from
Timber Products presented a graph showing KNF
harvest levels over the years. Many times the
graph dropped due to lawsuits by
environmentalists. Turner said that it is
becoming increasingly more difficult to find
timber to supply the mills. In the region
stretching from Corning,
CA to
Roseburg, OR,
it is anticipated that we will lose another
mill in the near future.
Last year, Timber
Products got only 12% of its logs from the
National Forest. In the four years prior to
that they got 80% of their logs from the
National Forest. Currently, more timber logs
are imported from
British Columbia than are produced
in the entire National Forest.
A future column will
discuss some of the opportunities for
participation in processes for managing
federal lands and various strategies presented
at the Forest workshop.
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