Counties press state to fund land transfers

Officials from Wahkiakum and other small counties with timber land bases are lobbying in the legislature for a bill that would allow them to replace encumbered land with productive forests.

Wahkiakum County Commissioner Dan Cothren reported Tuesday that he and officials from Skamania, Pacific and Klickitat counties testified before state Senate and House committees about the proposal.

The encumbered lands have harvest restrictions placed on them to provide habitat for endangered species. In the case of Wahkiakum County, some 3,000 of the counties 12,900 acres are locked up because they have old timber with large limbs that could could be used for nesting by marbled murrelets.

The counties acquired the lands in the mid-20th century after timber companies logged and abandoned them to tax foreclosure. To provide revenue for the state and counties, the legislature created county forest board trust timberlands. The state Department of Natural Resources manages them for a 25 percent fee from sale of timber logged on them. A court decision in the 1990s established the principle that the trust lands are to be managed for the financial benefit of the counties.

Since the acerage was locked up around 1997, Wahkiakum has seen trust timber revenue drop from 40-45 percent of the county budget to 30 percent. And because the lands are locked up, the trust land available for logging is reduced, so the county likely will see a further decline in trust timber revenue as less mature timber is available.

Under the federal Habitat Conservation Plan for habitat, Cothren said, the lands could be encumbered for another 30-70 years.

Under the legislation, the state Board of Natural Resources would transfer the encumbered lands into a DNR managed Natural Resource Conservation Area ownership that would preserve the habitat. The counties would receive compensation for the appraised market value which they would use to purchase other timberland in the same county.

Under earlier legislation, the DNR has conducted a study of the lands that would be affected. It concluded that Wahkiakum would have 944 acres, Pacific 2,335, and Skamania 4,153.

Cothren disagrees with the Wahkiakum acreage figure. Because of the location next to a conservation area, logging would be limited there to thinning, which provides little financial value.

The officials are pressing to have those lands included; in Wahkiakum's case, the total would be around 2,500 acres, and it would have a value of $3.7 million. Pacific would have a smaller total, $1 million because it has less encumbered trust land, and Klickitat would have none.

Cothren said the hearing before the Senate committee went well, with members asking questions, but members of the House committee seemed preoccupied with the task of cutting millions of dollars from the state budget because of revenue shortfalls.

"They had a glazed look in their eyes," he said. "I'll be back up there; we have some things going on to get the appropriation.

"It's a bleak session to get anything done, but we've got to get something started. If it's only $1 million, let's take it and go with it. Otherwise we'll get to a black hole."