Congress leaves counties in the lurch

We’re glad some in Congress seem so eager to spend $700 billion to try to save the country’s economy, but we wish lawmakers showed even a smidgen as much interest in helping Baker County and dozens of other rural counties.

For what it’s worth, Congress, helping the counties is a whole lot cheaper.

No golden parachutes to worry about, either.

Last week, while legislators were fretting about the financial crisis and debating the $700 billion bailout, Democrats in the House deleted from a bill — which the Senate passed by a 93-2 vote — a pair of programs that are crucial to counties such as Baker.

The cost of continuing those programs is $3.3 billion — slightly less than one-half of one percent of the bailout total.

Apparently it takes a whole lot of zeroes to goad Congress  into action.

Lawmakers’ inability to continue the county payments and in-lieu-of-taxes programs is especially galling because the victims in this case — in contrast to some of the irresponsible high-rollers who got us into this credit mess — are innocent.

County payments started in 2000 as a way to compensate counties for the loss of logging revenue from public lands.

Baker County’s biggest recipient is its road department, which received about $850,000 per year — close to half its yearly budget. If Congress fails to renew the payments, then the road department might have to cut back from 17 employees to 12 — its smallest workforce since the early 1980s.

The in-lieu-of-taxes program came about because the federal government doesn’t pay property taxes on the public land it manages. About half of Baker County’s 2 million acres of land are publicly owned, and thus exempt from property taxes.

The counties that depend on the two programs can’t be blamed for the loss of timber dollars. Nor did those counties decide to cede acreage to the federal government and so forego the property taxes.

Congress seemed to understand these facts in 2000, when lawmakers passed the original county payments bill, known as the Craig-Wyden bill for its two chief sponsors, Oregon Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden and his Republican colleague, Larry Craig of Idaho.

During the past 18 months, county officials have watched, frustrated, as county payments were stuck in the vicious legislative cycle in which the program was one month apparently secure and the next seemingly doomed.

This must end.

If Congress can briefly suspend its partisan bickering to vote on a $700 billion bailout that millions of its constituents oppose, then Congress ought to be able to pass a bill that is by comparison a slam dunk from both a fiscal and a public perception standpoint.

Thanks again, Congress, for caring about the economy.

But even those of us who don’t have any stake in Lehman Brothers would like to be able to get to the grocery store the morning after a heavy fall of snow.