County budget can be fixed by responsible logging.

Byline: GUEST VIEWPOINT By Sharon Schrenk For The Register-Guard

For years, residents have sat back and waited for a solution to Lane County's funding woes to magically appear. And for a while, it did. The federal government stepped in and directed hundreds of millions of dollars to rural Oregon counties through the county timber payments program.

But that safety net is shredding. Come next Sept. 30, the program expires again - the extension that just passed was for a single year beginning last October 2006. Lane County will then again be millions of dollars in the red.

A recent attempt to pass a new county income tax to cover this shortfall failed miserably - by more than 70 percent, in fact. Our neighbors have spoken, and have made it clear that they are unwilling to pay extra taxes to keep county services.

That means the worst-case scenario has come to pass, and the chickens are coming home to roost. When federal payments end, Lane County will be forced to lay off 250 county employees, cut the number of sheriff patrols, reduce prosecution and incarceration of criminal offenders, eliminate more than 100 jail beds, shut down parks and curtail numerous other public services.

The sad thing is that there is no need for the county to be in this dire financial situation. The solution to the county's money problems surrounds us all. For decades, Lane County helped pay for all its services from shared revenue generated by timber harvests on federal lands. But when those harvests were basically eliminated by pressure from extremist environmental groups in the 1990s, an important revenue stream for county governments was also eliminated.

If we want to help adequately fund county services, all we need to do is reconnect county funding with sustainable management of our public forests.

By applying today's sophisticated harvesting techniques and technologies, along with the sustainable management practices that have been developed in recent decades, we can achieve a number of goals at once. We can provide critical funding to Oregon's counties, improve the health of our forests and help avoid catastrophic forest fires by responsibly managing public timber lands.

Thankfully, we will soon have an opportunity to weigh in and have our voice heard regarding the proper use of our public forests. The Bureau of Land Management will be asking for public comments on a number of forest management options for its forests in Western Oregon. Every person affected by the decades-long lack of timber harvests - which is anyone who benefits from county roads, sheriffs, jails, libraries and many other county services - needs to ask what is best for our future.

Is it locking up our public forests and turning them into overgrown tinder boxes, just waiting for the day that a single spark leads to the complete destruction of hundreds of thousands of acres and wildlife habitat, while also severely damaging air and water quality?

Or do we encourage a reconnection with the land and resources that have long supported our region by improving the health of our forests and the financial stability of counties by practicing science-based, sustainable forest management through selective harvesting, replanting and state-of-the-art technology?

Oregon has already lost hundreds of thousands of acres of forest and critical wildlife habitat to widespread, devastating fires. How many more acres of forests do we have to watch burn? How many streams and lakes do we have to see chocked with soot and ash?

I, for one, say it's time to responsibly manage our forests to help improve their health and fund critical county services that are soon to be reduced or eliminated. Managing our forests isn't a case of `either/or,' as some would have you believe. By striking a balanced approach, we can achieve our goals of sustaining our environment and sustaining our communities.

Sharon Schrenk is co-founder and former owner of OR/PAC Feed & Forage Ltd. in Junction City, which bales straw and hay for shipment to Japan, Taiwan and Korea.