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Please notify me via FReepmail if you would like to be added to or taken off the Oregon Ping List.
Posted on 06/24/2008 8:37:39 PM PDT by george76
With two-thirds of Oregon county governments, including Lane County, facing financial crises, Oregon Gov. Ted Kulongoski on Monday urged residents to accept modest local property tax increases and more logging on federal forests to help stave off deep cuts in county law enforcement and other critical services.
Those steps are just two of 54 recommendations in a task force report delivered to the governor on Monday. Kulongoski commissioned the report last year to address the imminent loss of about $238 million in annual federal timber payments, including $47 million a year to Lane County.
The top recommendation was for Oregon to press Congress and President Bush to keep the subsidies coming for four years or more to give counties time to develop solutions. However, Congress and the White House are increasingly resistant to prolonging the nationwide timber-county aid program, given other demands on the federal budget.
Many counties already are cutting back services in order to absorb the federal revenue reductions. Lane County government in the past couple of months has eliminated scores of jobs, mostly in public safety, and scaled back a range of safety services, including jail beds.
The report lays out a mix of steps to help plug the budget gap. Raising property taxes dedicated to county government by 10 percent to 30 percent and accepting a “healthy forests” thinning plan aimed at reducing wildfire threats could cover more than half the gap...
(Excerpt) Read more at registerguard.com ...
Raising property taxes or ...?
It’s always a “revenue problem” with these people, never a spending one.
Gee...Just think how good a shape Oregon might be in if it hadn’t spent a few decades basing its economy on the rantings of environmental doomsters.
I would think the Oregonians would salivate at the prospect of higher taxes.
Cut taxes and cut the timber — and the economy will grow itself.
They salivate at the prospect of more spending. Higher taxes . . . only if imposed on someone else.
That’s the Liberal American way.
I use to live up there. The idiots stopped most logging and now they’re complaining? Bunch of liberal fools. If they cut off all the spending for six months and let the lumber mills start up again, they would be just fine.
Environmentalism only works up til lib money becomes short, then it's thrown over for Capitalism???
Have I got that right?
As I understand it the feds have been subsidizing lost revenues to countys in OR as they’ve lost more and more payments from timber cutting.
This is one more result of the whack job ebviros and their campaign for the spotted owl.
It’s been an ongoing problem for the counties and they haven’t done much to solve it. They’re going to have to because the feds aren’t going to pay forever.
The federal timber payments have long been a major source of money for many Oregon counties. For decades, the payments were based on the amount of logging in federal forests.
But when logging declined, the payments also began to drop. Congress replaced them with safety-net money based on past logging receipts
http://www.oregonlive.com/politics/oregonian/index.ssf?/base/news/121427970261960.xml&coll=7
Increase property taxes and more logging. One of these will happen, the other will not. Guess which one.
The eco have banned fishing, logging, mining, hunting...not much left ?
Sell the land to timber companies. Problem solved.
What are they going to do with the timber after they cut it? The mills that have shut down did so because of market conditions not environmental concerns. Houses aren’t being built so lumber isn’t being consumed. Mills have to pay for logs in 14 days. No one has pockets that deep.
Not quite that simple. Most Timber companies already own land. They are not even allowed to cut on much of the land they own.
I’ve really gone down the tube on the Oregon pings. Does anyone want to take it over?
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Please notify me via FReepmail if you would like to be added to or taken off the Oregon Ping List.
Living in Eugene, I Can’t even cut a limb off a tree in front of my own home. The good people of Eugene and Portland have killed the timber industry and shut down most of the mills and now they would like to drive the city dwellers from their homes with higher taxes.
Coalition For Fair Lumber Imports
Canada's unfair lumber subsidies have for decades harmed the U.S. lumber industry, threatening its workers with mounting unemployment, and denying many tree farmers a market for their timber crops. The impact of these subsidies is apparent everywhere. To learn more about Canada's lumber subsidies, and how to restore fair and free lumber trade between the two countries, see the other pages of this website. You'll see why even many Canadians agree that Canada isn't playing fair in softwood lumber.
On October 12, 2006, the second U.S.-Canada Softwood Lumber Agreement (SLA) came into effect and terminated more than 20 different legal disputes surrounding Canada’s softwood lumber subsidies and below cost of production sales in the U.S. market. The U.S. Coalition for Fair Lumber Imports, an alliance of large and small lumber producers from around the country, supports the SLA.
The agreement encourages Canadian provinces to abandon their long-standing practices of subsidizing Canadian lumber production. These unfair trade practices have caused hundreds of U.S. lumber mill closures, thousands of U.S. job losses, and have suppressed the market for thousands of private timberland owners. The Coalition for Fair Lumber Imports hopes that the SLA will provide the mechanism by which to find a permanent solution to this unfortunate dispute between two great trading partners.
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