Walden urges Pelosi to support county payments

June 09, 2008

U. S. Congressman Greg Walden
Oregon 2nd District
PRESS RELEASE: June 9, 2008

Walden urges House Speaker to support emergency county payments extension

- WASHINGTON, D.C. - Congressman Greg Walden (R-Ore.) yesterday urged House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to include in the new emergency supplemental bill a one-year extension of the Secure Rural Schools and County Self-Determination Act (county payments), which could come to the House floor for a vote as soon as this week. The Senate version of the legislation contains the vital provision for America’s rural counties and schools.

Below the letter to Speaker Pelosi, you can also find a pair of editorials that ran in the Baker City Herald and The Bulletin in Bend regarding Congressman Walden’s long-term plan to reauthorize and fund county payments as well as PILT and provide relief for Americans extremely frustrated with the high price of our dependence on foreign oil.

June 8, 2008
The Honorable Nancy Pelosi
Speaker of the House

Dear Madam Speaker:

I write to you today to emphasize my support for including in the new supplemental one year of emergency funding for the Secure Rural Schools and County Self-Determination Act (county payments program). As you well know, the Senate version includes a one-year extension of funding. Your support last year ensured that local communities and approximately 4,400 schools in over 600 rural counties across America could continue to provide the essential services in these counties where as much as 80 percent of the land base is federally owned and thus off the local tax rolls. We all appreciate your help in that effort and encourage your support once again this year in the new supplemental.

While last week brought about a division on the House Floor among advocates for reauthorizing the county payments program for an additional four years, I want to make sure that you know our differences over how to pay for the renewal of the program should in no way be interpreted as a lack of support for the goal of reauthorizing and funding the program, or as a lack of support for the one-year extension of emergency funding in the new supplemental.

I know that many of my colleagues on your side of the aisle have written, as I am, to urge your support of this additional year of emergency funding. I hope you will support us in this bipartisan effort to help thousands of local schools in over 600 of our rural counties across America.

Sincerely,
Greg Walden
Member of Oregon


BAKER CITY HERALD
Politics vs. Counties
Published: June 6, 2008
The eight-year-old federal payments program that's vital to Baker County's Road Department seemed doomed just a couple weeks ago.
The program, known as "timber payments" or "county payments," was recently revived, but now a partisan squabble between two Oregon congressmen and their parties threatens to cancel the payments for good.
The adversaries are Republican Greg Walden, who represents Baker County and the rest of Eastern Oregon, and his Democratic colleague, Peter DeFazio, whose district is in Western and Southwestern Oregon.
What really galls us about this dispute is that it has nothing to do with the county payments program itself. Of course both Walden and DeFazio want to continue that program — it supplies tens of millions of dollars to their districts each year.
The obstacle that imperils the payments is the puerile partisan fight over what Congress should do about Big Oil.
That's a fascinating debate, to be sure.
But that debate won't plow the snow from Baker County's roads next winter.
Both Walden and DeFazio have proposed ways to raise money to continue county payments for the next four years.
Walden wants to allow oil companies to drill in the outer continental shelf, dozens of miles offshore, and collect royalties from the companies. His plan does not include drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, an idea that's popular with the oil industry but the very mention of which causes many environmentalists to gesticulate wildly.
DeFazio, meanwhile, thinks the government should get the money for county payments by forcing oil companies to pay royalties for current offshore oil and gas leases. Although those companies have been exempt from paying such royalties, DeFazio contends the government has a legal right to collect the money.
Walden and other Republicans disagree. They also claim that if the government had those royalties it can't legally dole the dollars out to counties.
This is nothing but posturing and guessing.
We care about reality.
And the reality is that the bill the Democratic leadership brought to the floor of the House this week — the bill that includes DeFazio's proposal to charge royalties on the existing oil and gas leases — has essentially no chance to become law.
In a Thursday afternoon vote on the bill in the House, the tally was 218 for and 193 against — 56 votes short of the two-thirds in favor required to pass the legislation (a simple majority was not sufficient because the bill was presented under what's known as a "suspension of the rules," meaning alternatives, such as Walden's, could not be proposed).
More Democrats voted no on the DeFazio proposal (19) than Republicans voted yes (16) — more evidence that the Democrats' effort is futile.
The Senate has considered DeFazio's proposal three times and rejected it every time.
And even if enough senators changed their minds, President Bush has threatened to veto the bill.
Walden's proposal, by contrast, could clear Congress and gain the president's signature. Even DeFazio voted yes on the matter last year.
The House leadership should put that proposal to a vote as soon as possible.
County payments must not be left in limbo any longer — especially not when the only possible reason we can discern is the desire of some lawmakers to show their constituents, who no doubt are angry about escalating fuel prices, that Congress will punish the greedy oil companies by extracting from them those royalties.
That might satisfy someone's lust for revenge, but it won't send any money to Baker County.
We prefer Walden's idea — Make Big Oil pay up, all right, but in doing so let the companies tap new sources that will boost the world's supply and, just maybe, push prices down.
That way, Baker County can afford not only to pay people to drive the snowplows — it can keep the plows fueled, too.

THE BULLETIN
Fund payments with new leases
Published: June 07, 2008

It’s a good thing words, unlike sticks and stones, can’t break bones. If they could, Reps. Peter DeFazio and Greg Walden would be in traction. And fellow Beaver State Rep. David Wu would be under arrest for wielding a dangerous weapon in a completely wackadoo manner.
Amid the carnage, we suppose it would be some solace for Walden to know he’s in the right.
The three launched their verbal battle last week during a debate over a bill that would accomplish something that all of them want, and in a manner that all of them support. They’re split largely on the method of payment.
The bill, H.R. 3058, would extend so-called timber payments made to rural counties. The program began several years ago as a way to mitigate the miserliness of the federal government, which doesn’t pay property taxes on its forestland. Neither does it permit much in the way of logging anymore, which at least would allow rural communities to generate a little resource-extraction revenue.
Though these payments have helped rural counties immensely, renewing them has become an increasingly difficult task for Oregon’s congressional delegation. H.R. 3058 would likely be the final extension. Assistance payments would decrease steadily over its four-year duration, sending rural counties a clear message that the program was phasing out.
But phasing in H.R. 3058 will be a challenge. On Wednesday, most of Oregon’s congressional delegation took a class trip to the verbal woodshed and armed themselves from the hyperbole stack. DeFazio accused opponents of his version of the bill, including Walden, of favoring oil companies over “hundreds of teachers, hundreds of deputy sheriffs, road workers and public health.” Walden accused DeFazio of leaving a “trail of broken promises and broken process.”
And Wu, straining to make a biblical analogy, proclaimed that “rural Western Republicans sacrificed their kids because Big Oil asked them to. They need to learn that Big Oil isn’t God.” On Walden’s behalf, we’d like to thank Rep. Parable for the clarification.
Oil companies, you may have guessed, would foot the bill for timber payments under the terms of DeFazio’s bill. They’d also foot the bill under the alternative Walden favors, which you may not have guessed.
The DeFazio bill targets some of the oil companies that took advantage of 1995 legislation (the Outer Continental Shelf Deep Water Royalty Relief Act) that provided incentives for risky, deep-water oil exploration. For leases issued between 1996 and 2000, the legislation allows oil companies to extract a certain amount of oil and gas before paying royalties. For oil and gas extracted beyond those thresh olds, however, royalties are just fine. Nobody’s debating that.
What is under debate is the way the Department of Interior, which issued the leases, applied the law.
For most leases, the department imposed additional “price thresholds” that affect oil companies’ supposedly royalty-free oil and gas. These leases require the payment of royalties on “royalty-free” fuel when market prices reach a certain level. But for other leases — those issued in 1998 and 1999 — the department left out the price triggers. This omission, many argue, was a big mistake that will cost Uncle Sam billions of dollars in fossil fuel revenue. Naturally, lots of the oil companies who hold those leases say they should be honored, potential flaws notwithstanding.
Neither DeFazio nor Walden shares the oil industry’s view. DeFazio wants to fund county payments by slapping a so-called “conservation of resources” fee on each barrel of oil extracted under the terms of a trigger-free lease. Walden’s just fine with the application of such fees. But he argues that it’s illegal to spend the money raised in this way on something totally unrelated. “Conservation of resources” fees, he says, should be used on, well, conservation. He’d like to raise money for timber payments, rather, from new leases issued for offshore exploration.
We haven’t sacrificed our children to Big Oil, but it seems to us that Congress is a little too eager to slap around oil companies that took full advantage of an incentive Congress gave them. Congressional wisdom these days holds that the Department of Interior goofed in failing to impose “price triggers” in 1998 and 1999. But that’s not what a U.S. district court in Louisiana said last year. According to the court’s opinion, quoted by a June 5 Government Accountability Office report, “The Interior has no discretion to enact a price threshold requirement that applies to volumes below the minimum volume of royalty-free production.” Royalty-free means royalty-free, period.
Uncle Sam, naturally, has appealed the ruling, and we suppose it will be years before we know who’s right. But this uncertainty bolsters Walden’s argument that timber payments should be tied to new leases.
The subtext of Walden’s proposal, of course, gives many left-leaning congresspeople the willies: There have to be new leases in order to collect the money. Some people would rather stop oil exploration in domestic waters completely. But given the rising cost of fuel these days and the almost universal desire for energy independence, we suspect they’re a minority — and a shrinking minority at that.
Congressman Greg Walden represents the people of Oregon’s Second Congressional District, which is comprised of 20 counties in eastern, southern, and Central Oregon. He is a member of the Committee on Energy and Commerce and a member of the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming.
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