Record high Capitol Hill meeting schedule pushes public lands funding

Key Takeaways

When he visits Capitol Hill, Jerry Taylor takes along a 33-inch stick, representing the 3.3 million acres in Garfield County, Utah, where he is a commissioner and chair of NACo’s Public Lands Policy Steering Committee.

Different colors on the stick represent the portions of the county owned by the Bureau of Land Management, the U.S. Forest Service, National Park Service, the state and the last 7% of the stick is private ownership. 

“As you can see, we get the short end of the stick,” he said. 

That joke belies a serious tension in public lands counties — a frighteningly small tax base supports not just the developed communities but services of all kinds throughout those federally owned lands that can’t be taxed. The counties provide services on those lands, including road maintenance, law enforcement, search and rescue and emergency medical services. If a recreational visitor who is exploring the forests while in town to hike Bryce Canyon National Park gets lost, a county search and rescue team is probably sent looking. 

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Primer for Counties: Payments in Lieu of Taxes (PILT) and Secure Rural Schools (SRS) Programs

Likewise, when heavy oil and gas trucks tear up the dirt roads in Duchesne County, Utah, Commissioner Greg Miles knows 23% of his county’s budget is trying to keep pace to support infrastructure to make that industry possible.

“It's pretty staggering when you look back and look at it from a distance and think, gosh, we spend almost a quarter of our budget on this,” he said. “We wouldn't probably have a full time Department of Transportation officer in our county, but because the state has one DOT officer that covers three counties, we need more enforcement when it comes to commercial traffic. We've had to outfit that officer and buy a set of scales and equipment for him to be able to regulate the increased traffic.” 

Taylor and Miles were two of more than three dozen county officials who visited Washington, D.C. Sept. 10-11 to meet with staff from more than 80 congressional offices —a high in recent history for public lands fly-ins. They advocated for full funding of the Payments in Lieu of Taxes (PILT) program and the reauthorization of the Secure Rural Schools (SRS) program. PILT pays counties a fraction of the property tax that they aren’t able to levy on federally managed lands and SRS compensates counties for timber sales they’ve forgone because of litigation and federal legislation. SRS has lapsed after last paying out $232 million to roughly 700 counties in 2023. PILT paid $644.8 million to 1,850 counties in 2025.

The benefits of public lands, they argue, extend beyond their own borders, particularly as outdoor recreation continues to draw visitors from across the country. Likewise, the resources extracted from their public lands often leave and are consumed by the national market. Either photos or memories or raw materials from those counties spread across the country. 

Miles joined three other officials to illustrate the challenges their counties face because of uneven revenue-sharing from natural resource extraction in a pair of panel discussions organized by the National Center for Public Lands Counties.

Paul Anderes, a Union County, Ore. Commissioner, noted that 15% of his county’s population fall below the federal poverty line, and 43% live dangerously close to financial ruin. A calamitous drop in timber production over the last 40 years has put his county in that position, a timeframe that has seen the number of lumber mills in his county drop to five from 169 in 1975.

“The adjoining counties to Union County do not have an industrial mill, which is obscene,” he said. “We are in the heart of timber country; we grow trees well. We manage our forest very well.”                              

Klamath County, Ore. also saw its fortunes decline over the last 40 years, as it tumbled from being the wealthiest county per capita in the state down to one of the poorest thanks to decreased timber harvesting. 

“It's frustrating, because the timber is there and so is the infrastructure,” he said, noting that forests in Western Oregon can regrow at more than twice the rate of forests elsewhere in the country. 

“We didn't need to tax our citizens — we had all the money we needed from timber harvests. When environmental protection started in 1991, we went from receiving ridiculous money to no money overnight.”

The timber industry has moved on to private lands while national forests load up on more wildfire fuel. 

Rio Blanco County, Colo. Commissioner Jennifer O’Hearon also suspects federal timber policy contributed to more fuel for a fire in her county.

“We used to have a sawmill in Rio Blanco County, but because of all of the timber not being sold or not being able to be accessed by permitting, we do not timber or we do not harvest our timber,” she said. “The lack of harvesting could have led to more fire.”

The Secure Rural Schools program would, in theory, help provide a portion of that revenue, but it has gone more than two years without reauthorization. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) who wrote the SRS legislation in 2000, is trying to change that, encouraging county officials to expand their advocacy beyond members of Congress to every possible elected official. 

“I fear if we don't get it done now, we're going to start all over,” he said. 

But he also wants to see logging return to national forests. 

“There is this point of view going around that you can either be for Secure Rural Schools, or you could be for harvest. That’s not my view,” he said. “My view is we can have multiple use (timber harvesting and conservation) on our forest. We can get the harvest up, and have Secure Rural Schools. These two are not mutually exclusive.”

Rep. Cliff Bentz (R-Ore.) hopes to include Secure Rural Schools in the farm bill. He also hopes that H.R. 1 will ease a return to logging.

“It includes ways to get back into the woods,” he said. “It's not perfect. There's one portion of it that does not allocate money to counties, but that was not possible under the reconciliation process (which was used to pass H.R. 1). So better to get some wood out and keep sawmills going than nothing at all.”