Budget cuts could affect schools, roads
When Sanders County passes its 2009 fiscal budget, it will likely be short a substantial amount of money normally used to fund schools and roads.
“We used to get timber receipts from the Forest Service, but now it is down to about nothing,” Sanders County Commissioner Hank Laws said.
According to Laws, the U.S. Forest Service started supplying timber receipts to counties in the early 1900s when they wanted infrastructure, including roads to help get to federal lands and schools for local federal government employees.
Since then, the Forest Service has been giving the counties 25 percent of the revenue that they generate off of federal land use, including timber harvesting and grazing rights, he explained.
Laws said that the timber money first started declining in the late 1970s, when people began to protest timber sales. Since then, the funding to the county from the forest service has consistently shrunk while expenses rose. Sanders County Commissioner Gail Patton said the road budget has been especially strained.
“In the 1980s, we were getting squeezed by inflation, rising equipment costs and the price of oil,” Patton said. Recent gas prices have been equally harmful. Materials for filling in a simple pothole can cost three or four times higher than they did even a few years ago.
In 2000, the federal government passed a law, the Secure Rural Schools and Community Self Determination Act of 2000, which looked at the past 14 years of timber sales and money the U.S. Forest Service provided to counties, and then took the three highest years of value, averaged those together and offered that to the counties as a full payment. The law ended in 2006, but in 2007, congress extended it for one more year. However, it has yet to be renewed again.
The law changed the determination of federal forest distribution amounts. Counties could choose either the averaged payment or an amount based on the actual receipts. All counties chose to take the full payment option.
So far in 2008, Law said that, while an extension or renewal has been attached to bills in the federal legislature, it hasn’t been passed.
“We’re probably going to lose that money,” Laws said. “Which is a shame because one-third of it went to schools and two-thirds of it goes to the county road departments.”
According to Sanders County Treasurer Carol Turk, Sanders County received $1,491,691.67 after the law was passed. The school system received $491,448.82, the county road departments received $982,987.60 and the county received $17,345.25.
“So far we’ve lobbied them to extend it, and we would like to make it permanent but they haven’t,” Laws said.
He said that the timber money makes up about 40 percent of the road budget for Sanders County, so if the money doesn’t come in some serious cuts are going to have to be made.
If the extension isn’t passed, Laws said that they’re probably going to cut back in the budget and there will be less services for the public. Over 70 percent of the land in Sanders County is either reservation land or owned by either the state or the U.S. Forest Service, according to Laws. He said that only leaves less than 30 percent of the land that is taxable, which makes money from the timber receipts all that much more important.
Laws said the commissioners are getting into crunch time right now because they’re supposed to have a budget set by the second week in August, with or without the forest receipts extension. Currently, that budget does not include the federal money, though the commissioners could amend it later if congress decides to pass a bill.
Laws said budget cuts will hit close to home.
“As unfortunate as it is, right now we’re just making cuts to the budget, which means we’re cutting public services,” he explained. “This money goes to our schools and our roads and it is really something that we need to have.”