Oregon Public Broadcasting

For everyone passionate about the Pacific Northwest coast, Curry County’s unfolding fate is like witnessing a freeway accident in slow motion as victims are thrown through the air all akimbo, screams on their silent lips. (Well, this is a very over-boiled image, but Curry’s situation really is awfully darned bad.)

    Far southwestern Oregon is a time capsule, with its back-road strawberry stands and summer heat teleporting me back to 1960s family trips there, which were marked by hypnotically long days on the highway. My wife, daughter and I still spend a week per year in that corner of Oregon — though we spend a lot less of it driving. I half expect to spot my 10-year-old self gazing across from a passing car, my kindly old cancer-destined dad smoking his pipe in the driver’s seat trying to get in just a hundred more miles before stopping for the night.

    But my interest in the area’s economic plight extends beyond fond recollections and loyalty to my great-grandparents resting in their graves in Grants Pass. Though we here at the mouth of the Columbia have a number of advantages, in other ways all our rural counties face a similar set of problems.

    The frightening economic avalanche bearing down on Curry, Josephine and at least 10 other Oregon counties is the expiration of millions in federal forest payments. In Oregon this $230 million a year made up for loss of timber revenue after lawsuits and other factors severely diminished U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management harvests starting in the 1990s. That funding stream has ended and few look for it to return. In Curry, it provided 61 percent of general government spending and 65 percent of road spending.

    As the Salem Statesmen-Journal editorialized, “the situation is so dire in Curry, Josephine and some other Southern Oregon counties that they could be sliding toward government insolvency. That could have disastrous repercussions statewide.”

    Curry is closest to falling off the cliff, but others aren’t far behind. Another cluster of impacted counties is in the northeast corner of Oregon, where Wallowa expects to let some paved roads revert back to gravel. (Anyone who travels around remote corners of Mexico can testify about how poorly this idea works.)

    This situation generates much discussion among my small circle of amateur and professional regional economists. Some of our topics include:

    • What do you do with an insolvent county? Even in what amounts to a localized economic depression, you still need everything from deputies to nutritional services for little kids. The most obvious answer would be for local people to start raising more money themselves, but nobody likes taxes — especially in rural Oregon, where Curry County voters turned down the most-recent levy 72-28 percent. (As recently as last year, here in Washington there was talk of combining some counties with neighbors. It was quietly suggested, for example, that Wahkiakum be split between Pacific and Cowlitz. But in the final analysis, the potential savings haven’t been seen as sufficient to make up for the trauma and inconvenience.)

    • Unite broke counties with a neighbor? What solvent county would want the headache of supplying more services for desperate, tax-averse people? Oregon Gov. John Kitzhaber has most recently suggested farming out some services to other counties. This, too, will require money, in addition to subjecting local people to long drives for things like contesting a traffic ticket. Congressmen Peter DeFazio, Kurt Schrader and Greg Walden want to take another try at expanding logging, while environmental groups take a contrary tack, mostly wanting to hike hated local taxes.

    • How do our Columbia River counties avoid a similar catastrophe? After all, our scenery isn’t vastly better than Curry County’s and our weather is considerably worse.

    Due to historical happenstance, Pacific County’s forests are predominantly private, while most in Clatsop County are state owned. In neither county have forests been perfectly managed, but we didn’t march up to the present day happily assuming federal checks would always roll in. We’ve supported taxes for a variety of worthwhile purposes. We live at the intersection of the ocean and the greatest river of the American West. We’re remote, but nowhere near as much so as either Curry or Wallowa. We’ve got major national and state parks, and an embarrassment of wealth when it comes to history.

    The fact remains, however, that Northwest counties continue to struggle with crafting new economies that are less dependent on blue-collar, natural-resource extraction in an era when states and the federal government can’t afford to help as much as they once did. At the same time and partly for related reasons, coastal communities are aging as younger people move away for careers and life enrichment.

    Some of my friends and I wonder if at least part of answer would be to take the pending congressional proposal a step further. But instead of permanently assigning half of federal acres for preservation and the other half for logging — with giant corporations still mostly left in the driver’s seat when it comes to value-added processing — we’d like to look for ways to put individual communities and counties in control of our own forests. Maybe with oversight to make sure that harvests are well timed, locally controlled forest cooperatives could manage a county’s lands with an eye toward ensuring steady income, reliable employment, recreational access, habitat preservation and permanent conservation of the most pristine or environmentally valuable places.

    One thing is for sure. For too long, rural people of the Northwest have been treated virtually as peons on land we love. It’s time to try something new.

    Observer editor Matt Winters lives in Ilwaco with his wife and daughter. An archive of his columns is available at http://mythtown.blogspot.com.

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