[All-Gorge] 🌲 On National Public Lands Day, Stand Up for Public Lands Counties

National Public Lands Day is September 26. Four days later, the law behind Secure Rural Schools, a critical lifeline for our Public Lands Counties, has been written to run out. A letter from the editor of the Skamania Dispatch on what that deadline means for public lands counties like Skamania, and one phone call anyone who loves public land can make.

In This Episode

• National Public Lands Day and the September 30 Secure Rural Schools deadline
• What the 2023 lapse cost Skamania County: nineteen cents on the dollar
• The Levy Scissors: state tax caps and untaxable federal land
• The call to action: ask Congress to renew SRS, then fix it for good
• A habit for public-land lovers: look up the county
• A permanent fix: a permanent trust for public land counties

Resources & Links

• Read the full written letter, with every source linked, at skamaniadispatch.com
• Find your U.S. Representative by ZIP code
• Find your U.S. Senators by state
• The Levy Scissors series
• Headwaters Economics: Economic Profile System (look up any county's public land)
• Headwaters Economics: Endowing Federal Public Land Counties

Stay Connected with the Gorge

The Skamania Dispatch and The Klickitattler are community-led projects of OpenGorge.org.

To stay updated on local news, governance, and community events across the region, you can sign up for both newsletters at SkamaniaDispatch.com. For real-time updates and to join the conversation, follow us on Facebook at facebook.com/OpenGorge.

Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:00

Good morning, everybody, and welcome back to the Open Gorge Podcast. I know Saturday episodes aren't common for us, but today is a really special day. Today, September 26th, is National Public Lands Day. Four days from now, on September 30th, the law behind secure rural schools, a critical lifeline for public lands counties like Schamania, is written to run out. This is the audio edition of a letter from the editor of Schamania Dispatch about both of those dates and about one phone call I hope you'll make to secure the future of these beautiful places by protecting the communities who care for them every single day. National Public Lands Day falls on the fourth Saturday in September. It's the biggest single day of volunteer work on public land in the country. People pull ivy, they fix trail tread, they pick up after summer crowds. I really love this day. Secure rural schools is critical for public lands counties. As far as we've been able to find, Congress has so far failed to introduce a bill to extend it. And now is the time to act. Here in Scamania County, public land isn't a place we visit, it's part of our neighborhood. Nearly 80% of Scamania County is managed by the federal government. Most of that is the Gifford Pincho National Forest, and by our county assessors count, just 1.4% of the land in this county can be taxed at full market value. 1.4%. Secure rural schools is the federal promise that stands in for the property taxes a national forest can't pay. Here it keeps roads open, schools running, and search and rescue crews on the mountain. The last check this law promises arrives in spring of 2027. After that, unless Congress acts, the county falls back on a deal written in 1908, a deal that never predicted the financial and ecological realities of the world we live in today. And we know what that looks like because we just lived it. The program lapsed in October of 2023. Congress took more than two years to fix it. That year, Secure Rural Schools would have paid Scamania County about $2.35 million. The 1908 share paid us only about $448,000. For those of you counting, and I know we sure are, that's only 19 cents on the dollar. Follow that money out. The Stevenson Carson School District's forest money fell from about $811,000 to $158,000 in a single year. The lost money was one of the critical reasons the board gave for closing Wind River Middle School in Carson. And search and rescue? Well, with nothing but carryover to spend, the county's first search and rescue grant that year was $11,519. That's one blade of what we've been calling in our series the levy scissors. The other blade is state law. Since 2001, Washington has let a county's property tax revenue grow just 1% a year. Meanwhile, the cost of insurance, fuel, and road repair climbs a lot faster than that. The outlet Investigate West has reported on what that squeeze is doing to counties all over the state. Because of this law, counties can't raise their own taxes to cover the gap without a special vote for each individual taxing district. They get locked into structural deficits, budgets grinding down year after year of rising costs of what we've seen to be 4% to 6% in inflation or more. And it's not just Washington. Oregon's property tax limits are built differently, but they've come to have the same devastating impact on its public lands counties too. So picture a county caught between those two blades. It starts making decisions out of survival. It reaches for the next big project, a mine, a timber sale, a data center. It cuts the road crew, the public health nurse, a deputy. From far away, some of those choices can look like an attack on the land, but up close, they usually look like a small board trying to keep the school bus running. So, with all of that, here's what I'm asking from you. Call your U.S. representative and both of your senators and ask them to renew secure rural schools. And if you don't know who they are, that's okay. The House has a search page where you can just type in your zip code, and the Senate lists every senator by state. Both links are in the show notes. Tell them you love public lands. Tell them the counties who care for them can't keep doing that on a program that Congress lets lapse. Then ask for something better, a permanent fix, so no county has to hold its breath like this again. And if you're listening from Portland or Seattle or anywhere far from a national forest, please don't skip this one. Your call matters as much as ours. Public land belongs to all of us, and so does the 1908 promise that came with it. After that call, I'd love for you to carry one small practice with you. Next time you read something that upsets you, something that feels like an attack on a national monument, a forest, a national scenic area, or park, stop and look up the county that that fight is in. Check how much of that county is public land and what the federal government pays for it. Headwaters Economics has a free tool for the first one. It's called the economic profile system. Then you can get curious about what else is going on there. Is a school closing? Did a sheriff lose a position? Is search and rescue buying gear out of a shrinking grant? The people who live in these places love the land as much as anyone. They work it, they fight its fires. They go up the mountain in the middle of the night for the hiker who didn't come home. They need steady support to be strong enough to defend the land. And now for the good news. A permanent fix isn't a fantasy. The National Association of Counties, which goes by NACO, runs a national center for public lands counties, because this isn't some Western oddity. According to NACO, 62% of American counties have federal land inside their borders. And that actually counts every single county inside the National Scenic Area here in the Columbia River Gorge, on both the Washington and Oregon side. And Headwaters Economics has made the case for endowing public lands counties. The idea is a permanent trust. It would be built from the receipts that public lands already earn. That money gets invested, and a share is paid out each year, so the principal is never spent. Instead of a check that Congress can let lapse, a county gets a payment that it can actually plan around. The Center for American Progress picked up that thread in 2024, and Scamaney County was one of its case studies. Renewing secure rural schools will keep the lights on for us today. A permanent fund can let a county plan for tomorrow. And a county that can plan is a county that can say no to a bad deal, a county that can protect these critical ecosystems on the front lines of climate change and ensure that they're accessible to everybody who loves them. When I started the Levy Scissors series, I kept coming back to one sentence, and it's the one I want to leave you with this National Public Lands Day. We can only treat the land as well as we treat each other. Thank you for listening. Thank you for volunteering, and thank you for making the call. You can read the full letter from the editor, with every source linked, and a lot of photos of people who live here who protect these beautiful places at schemania dispatch.com. You've been listening to a production of opengorge.org, the home of the Schemania Dispatch and the Click A Tattler. We believe that informed communities are stronger communities. To support our work and stay up to date on everything happening in the gorge, head over to schemania dispatch.com to sign up for our newsletters. You can also find us on Facebook at Facebook.comslash opengorge. Join the conversation and share your thoughts on today's episode. Thanks for tuning in, and we'll talk to you next time.