Public lands counties fight for SRS reauthorization

Key Takeaways

A “wish list” for projects in Modoc County, Calif. is often best left as a fantasy. Expenses have slimmed down over the decades to barely cover the basics for a county of 8,000 residents, trying to balance its budget when more than two-thirds of the land is owned by the federal government and untaxable. 

The last time the Secure Rural Schools Act (SRS) lapsed, routine maintenance on county roads, roads that led to the same national forest land that beguiled the county’s finances, just didn’t happen. And with the latest SRS reauthorization expiring at the end of September, Modoc Supervisor Ned Coe is getting worried, and he’s letting members of Congress and the Trump administration know it during the PILT (Payments in Lieu of Taxes) Fly-In June 24-25 in Washington, D.C. 

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“Secure Rural Schools is a higher priority for me, personally, because there is a degree of certainty, currently, for PILT,” he said. “Absent a reauthorization of it, we’re going to be pausing all routine maintenance on our roads. It’s not a matter of picking a ‘good option,’ it’s about survival.”

The substantial loss of federal funding delays the materials and labor that only get more expensive with time, leaving the county with less buying power and reducing the scope of work it can tackle. Missing out on money also eliminates a source of the local matching funds that could unlock grants to complement financing for other projects.

“It’s maintenance we should have done, but we just couldn’t afford it,” Coe said.

The PILT program, like SRS, compensates counties for their untaxable land — more than a quarter of U.S. land — but because the programs are part of the appropriations process, counties must regularly make their case to the federal government to fund the programs. 

Nearly two-thirds of counties contain PILT-eligible land, and in FY 2026, PILT payments totaled $733 million, a fraction of what tax revenue would be generated under private ownership. SRS stabilizes the budgets of counties that had relied on timber harvest receipts to fund their services.

The 2026 PILT Fly-In drew 10 officials from public lands counties to Capitol Hill to advocate for those programs’ continued funding. That process entails a significant amount of education and outreach to a steady stream of congressional staffers, many of whom are encountering those programs for the first time.

“If they’re not from the district, it really helps to be able to show them what we’re working with, spend some ‘windshield time’ driving around,” Coe said. “We can show them the rural nature of northeastern California.”

And how the nature of life in these counties has changed.

“We used to be about the timber harvest, and now we’re focused on fire management because what isn’t being harvested is becoming fuel,” he said. “What had been an asset is a danger to our communities.”

In the 1970s, sawmills could run in every small town, he said, and offer young people a path to a sustainable career. Now, he lamented, it means leaving home for college in hopes of coming home to find something that will support a family. 

Modoc County is wedged against Oregon and Nevada, far from the beaches and palm trees that accompany the California image with which Coe is fighting for attention. 

“They might not know that it’s hours between communities, that most of us are looking at three-plus hours to go to a Costco or a Walmart,” he said.

Coe is focused on bringing the staff for his member of Congress, Rep. James Gallagher (R), up to speed on PILT and SRS. Gallagher is filling the term of Rep. Doug LaMalfa (R), a public lands champion who died in January. Gallagher spent six years on the Sutter County, Calif. Board of Supervisors a decade ago.

Coe also worries that mid-decade redistricting in California will have shifted the lion’s share of population of his new congressional district away from public lands counties, leaving him and his colleagues in northeastern California without a champion in the House after the mid-term elections.

“We may have to rely on other congressional representatives,” he said. “The new member may do a great job representing Marin County, but those priorities will be very different from what we’re dealing with 600 miles away.

“It’s going to be an uphill challenge to have a very rural community not represented by someone who understands the reality of what we’re facing.”

Coe, who is the second vice president for the Western Interstate Region, first learned about public lands issues when he was 7 years old. While volunteering and then working for the California Farm Bureau, he got into the weeds, and then won a seat on the Modoc County Board of Supervisors in 2018. And he ran knowing the challenges the county was up against.

“Absent a reauthorization of SRS, we’re going to be right back where we were a few years ago, pausing our routine maintenance and falling further behind,” he said.