Deal preserves federal payments to rural schools, local governments in national-forest areas

Rural counties that have relied on national-forest logging to fund schools and other public services would get "a ramped-down, four-year extension of the Secure Rural Schools and Community Self Determination Act [in] the final version of the energy bill," which President Bush may veto, reports Jeff Kosseff of The Oregonian.

Congress passed the 2000 act "to provide safety-net funding to make up for declining timber revenues that the federal government had long shared with rural counties. Oregon has received more than half of the money in the past," Kosseff writes. "The compromise bill would gradually reduce the program's total funding by about 15 percent a year from the 2008 to 2011 fiscal years. It also would spend about $350 million to fully fund another federal payments program, known as Payments in Lieu of Taxes, which is important to states such as Nevada, home to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, and Montana, home to Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus." (Read more)