Congress supports timber aid for one year.

Byline: Matt Cooper The Register-Guard

Congress is backing a war-spending bill that would end critical timber payments to Lane County after just one year rather than continuing them for five years, Oregon lawmakers said Tuesday.

And President Bush has said he'll veto that bill.

All of which puts a cloud of uncertainty over the question of federal aid for Lane County, leaving voters in the May 15 election in a bind.

Later this week, ballots go out for the first county income tax intended to make up for the looming demise of the federal aid. Yet when they review their ballots, voters won't know whether the federal aid is dead or alive. Without the federal money, the county has said it will sharply curb a range of services and eliminate 250 jobs.

Congress may approve the war-spending bill as soon as the end of the week, but President Bush has said he'll veto it because it requires troop withdrawal from Iraq in 2008.

Oregon lawmakers would then fight to see that the next war-spending bill Congress sends to the president, sometime in May, includes a multiyear timber-payments program for Lane County and rural counties, said Rep. Peter DeFazio, D-Ore.

Lane and other counties in the West have historically received payments for federal land that the counties can't tax, land on which timber sales shared with the counties have plummeted.

Without any federal money or an income tax to replace it, the county would lose $47 million annually. County officials have said they could cut 250 jobs by July 1 to balance the budget.

A majority on the county board favors the 1.1 percent income tax as an alternative, saying it would be used only to replace lost federal money and keep county employees, but not to add services. Ballots go out Friday for the May 15 election.

Tax supporters also say the tax would help the county move from the instability of federal funding to the certainty of a local tax.

The up-and-down news from Washington, D.C., keeps officials in Lane County and across the West on an emotional roller coaster, upbeat one moment and dispirited the next.

While Oregon lawmakers and aides renewed their commitment Tuesday to fight for a multiyear extension of the program, Bush issued some of his harshest criticism to date of the domestic spending, saying the billions of dollars sought for domestic programs such as the timber payments "have no place" in the emergency war-spending bill.

Meanwhile, Oregon's GOP senator, Gordon Smith, said he was disappointed with the one-year payments extension.

`This falls far short of a long-term solution for rural Oregon,' Smith said. `No sooner will counties get up off the mat than this extension will expire again. Not addressing long-term solutions leaves rural Oregon out to dry. If these payments are going to be ramped down, timber harvests (on federal land) have to be ramped up. We need a long-term solution - it is just that simple.'

Commissioner Bobby Green, one of three on the board who favors the county income tax, appears to be losing faith in Congress.

Green, president of the Association of Oregon Counties, said resistance to the bill could force Congress to eliminate the county payments program from the war spending issue and start again the difficult task of trying to pass the timber aid legislation on its own, rather than as an attachment to another bill.

"Now we know we probably won't be getting any federal funding,' Green said. "That's not the kind of certainty we wanted from Congress.'