Here is a draft of Wednesday’s editorial:
It’s disappointing that some environmental groups prefer higher taxes to increased logging on federal land in Western Oregon.
Oregon Wild, Sierra Club, Geos Institute, Coast Range Association, Klamath-Siskiyou Wildlands Center and the Larch Co. oppose a bipartisan proposal that would change the management — and boost logging — on the O&C forestlands in Western Oregon.
The federal Bureau of Land Management oversees those 2.6 million acres, which are named after the old Oregon & California Railroad. Eighteen counties share in the tracts’ timber revenue, which has fallen sharply. That decline — coupled with the end of compensatory funding under the Secure Rural Schools and Community Self-Determination Act — has put some Southern Oregon counties in danger of insolvency.
A proposal from Oregon’s congressional delegation would split the O&C lands into two purposes — half managed for timber production and half managed for conservation.
The environmental groups say a better alternative is higher taxes: almost tripling the timber severance tax; asking counties’ voters to approve higher property taxes; and transferring the timberlands to the U.S. Forest Service, with any resulting tax savings being given to the counties.
Those goals are politically implausible.
It will be difficult enough to win congressional approval for either continued payments to counties or the split harvest-conservation management of O&C lands. It would be even more difficult to get the federal government to move the land between agencies, to achieve savings in their management and then to turn that money over to counties.
Furthermore, this is no time to be increasing taxes, either on property owners or on timber companies. And given the status of Oregon’s timber harvest, even a substantial increase in the severance tax would be unlikely to produce substantial revenue.
Oregon’s congressional delegation has helped set aside vast parts of the state for wilderness protection, with neither timber harvest nor development allowed. That’s as it should be. But logging of trees, a renewable resource, should be permissible on many other forestlands.
The environmentalists’ plan doesn’t make sense. By promoting it, they could derail a reasonable proposal from Oregon’s congressional delegation.
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