Our county received $9 million a year in Secure Schools payments. This amount was based on a formula of the average 25% of the profit from timber receipts we used to get off our National Forests when they were logged. This was used exclusively for schools and roads. Before they gave us a one year extension last year, we were looking at being unable to plow snow off raods in the winter and maintain the roads in general. Now, post Northwest Forest Plan (spotted owl) and with non-paying Stewardship Contracts, the default to timber receipts will average about $250,000.
They also removed the full PILT payments. This is the In-Lieu of Taxes payments that the federal government pays to the County and states for its federal lands. It is based on a small percentage of the frozen value of the land when withdrawn - in our case 1904. Not only is it pennies on the dollar, it has not been fully funded in years.
In our County, 65% of the land base is in federal lands. That leaves us without the tax base to adequately fund basic services and restricts our land-locked communities from physical and population growth.
Remember the Appalachian area in the 1950s with its poverty? - That is what our federal government is re-creating in its policy on Western rural lands.
The eco nuts love to see small rural communities fail.
This is just another way to attack working families.
Yes and yet we have The Nature CONservancy and all their little immitators manipulating the remaining rural private property from so-called "willing sellers" into federal/state ownership at hugely marked up government (taxpayers) cost to take more and more land off the county's dwindling property/schools & roads tax rolls!!!
Then everytime CA has a budget crisis with Pete Wilson, Gray Davis or Arnold Schwartzenfrauder, they abscound with our local property/schools & roads tax revenues!!!
Marsh2 is so correct it's sickening!!! Rural American timbered counties are treated like the USSR used to treat Siberia!!!
Alaska is less than 1% privately owned. ANWR is on Fed land, Prudhoe on State land. Tax base? What is that?