Timber communities in Oregon suffer as Wall Street funds glean profits and tax revenue from private forest lands

"Falls City is an Oregon town built by the timber industry. Its surrounding forests are still being logged. But Falls City isn't seeing the profits. It's been that way ever since corporate timber changed the rules," says the caption for this video.

Rural logging communities in Oregon are suffering as profits and tax revenue have been siphoned by Wall Street investment funds’ growing control of private forest lands, reports ProPublica, in partnership with Oregon Public Broadcasting and The Oregonian.

In Falls City, a town of about 1,000 in the Coast Range, "More trees are cut in the county today than decades ago when a sawmill hummed on Main Street and timber workers and their families filled the now-closed cafes, grocery stores and shops selling home appliances, sporting goods and feed for livestock," report Tony Schick of OPB, Rob Davis of The Oregonian, and Lylla Younes of ProPublica. "But the jobs and services have dried up, and the town is going broke. The library closed two years ago. And as many as half of the families in Falls City live on weekly food deliveries from the Mountain Gospel Fellowship."

“You’re left still with these companies that have reaped these benefits, but those small cities that have supported them over the years are left in the dust,” City Manager Mac Corthell told a reporter.

"Wall Street real estate trusts and investment funds began gaining control over the state’s private forest lands" while public attention was focused on environmental rules that limited logging on federal lands, the reporters write. "They profited at the expense of rural communities by logging more aggressively with fewer environmental protections than in neighboring states, while reaping the benefits of timber-tax cuts that have cost counties at least $3 billion in the past three decades. . . . Half of the 18 counties in Oregon’s timber-dominant region lost more money from tax cuts on private forests than from the reduction of logging on federal lands."