You can see why the Oregon timber counties would be disappointed in Sen. Ron Wyden's new plan for cutting some more timber on the federal government's checkerboard Oregon & California Railroad land holdings. Wyden's plan won't produce as much timber, or as much county revenue, as the language that passed the House, and county officials say they're less confident that it could avoid getting bogged down in litigation.
Sen. Ron Wyden explains his Oregon timber proposal.
Douglas County Commissioner Doug Robertson, president of the Association of O&C Counties, declared "I have to admit disappointment," saying the Wyden proposal comes up short for the association's three bedrock principles: sharply reduced litigation, increased timber cut and increased financial support for local counties. By Wyden's estimation, his bill would approximately double the timber cut in the lands, to 300 million to 350 million board feet, and raise support to county governments.
For Southwest Oregon counties near the edge of disintegration, with public safety resources far below any definition of safety, Wyden's plan must indeed seem inadequate. The O&C language that passed the House allowed for a cut that might reach 500 million board feet, which could provide considerably larger revenue stream to the counties.
The problem is that with opposition by both the Senate and the White House, there is no chance of the House language becoming law. The best, most promising approach is to pass something through the Senate and get it to a conference committee with the House, creating the prospect of something that might actually become law and provide some assistance to the counties.
Even that possibility is far from certain, considering the barren recent record of congressional conference committees. It would be a long shot to expect the current arrangement in Washington to produce anything substantive. But considering the desperate condition of the counties, where in places ordinary law enforcement has vanished as a daily fact of life, the effort is vital.
Both bills increase the logging cut while putting a considerable amount of the 3 million O&C acres beyond logging forever. They both try to limit unending litigation, although the Association of O&C Counties expresses doubt about Wyden's version. With these similarities of direction and goals, it seems that something workable might be made from the two of them.
What's unlikely to survive are two particular aspects of the House bill that are essentially deal-killers to the Senate and President Obama. After dividing up the O&C lands into two different trusts, the House bill places extensive federal lands under state management, an arrangement certain to draw resistance. It also lacks the protections against clear-cutting in the Wyden bill, which offers an approach of "ecological forestry" that may indeed be more expensive and inconvenient, but is also more publicly acceptable.
There are limitations to what any Congress might produce on this issue. The cut is never going back to the billion-board-foot boom times of the late '70s. Even if it somehow did, with all the mechanization of the past decades, that would not recreate the historic levels of jobs. For the counties, whatever comes out of this process – if anything comes out of this process – won't be a full solution, but only part of a pathway to one.
The O&C counties aren't the only groups critical of Wyden's proposal. Some Oregon
environmental groups, such as Oregon Wild, have their own objections to its litigation rules, and some would simply oppose any increased cut on federal lands.
To refuse to advance with the process now would be a long-odds bet on dealing with a more friendly president and Senate in 2017.
Considering the current emergency conditions of many of the counties, it would be a long time to wait, for an outcome that may not arise – and years of full Republican control of Washington in the last decade didn't exactly resolve the problem, either.
Despite the counties' deepest hopes, 1978 is not coming again. What the counties, and all of Oregon, needs is to begin finding a path to 2020, and the years beyond.
