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Sheriff: Loss would be 'catastrophic' for Shoshone County

JEFF SELLE/jselle@cdapress.com | Hagadone News Network | UPDATED 10 years, 5 months AGO
by JEFF SELLE/jselle@cdapress.com
| January 17, 2015 8:00 PM

WALLACE - Shoshone County may lose a tremendous amount of federal funding and leaders in the community are pretty worried about it.

"Our county is bigger than the whole state of Delaware," said Shoshone County Sheriff Mitch Alexander. "If we lose this funding, it is going to be catastrophic."

Alexander said the county relies heavily on the Secure Rural Schools funding it receives to replace the money it once got from federal timber sale receipts.

Since 1908, the federal government has been paying states with federal timber land 25 percent of the revenue the federal government earned from selling timber.

However, in the 1990s, the U.S. Forest service began reducing logging to protect endangered species and salmon. That shrunk funding to 746 rural counties that have federal timber land within their borders.

U.S. Sens. Larry Craig, R-Idaho, and Ron Wyden, D-Oregon, secured federal funding to restore the shortfall of revenue, but Congress decided not to reauthorize it this year.

In 2014, Idaho counties split $28.3 million of Secure Rural School funding, but the counties will only have $2 million to share among themselves this year.

"If that happens, I am afraid Shoshone County as a whole is going to be devastated," Alexander said.

Alexander pointed to Oregon, where counties rely even more heavily on the federal timber funding. In 2012, Josephine County had to dismantle its sheriff's office due to lack of timber money.

Oregon received more than $230 million a year in SRS funds, and Congress was not going to fund the program in 2012.

The governor of Oregon established a task force that year to see how many counties were affected and found that more than a dozen counties were only a couple of months behind Josephine.

The funding was later restored, but now they are in the same spot they were then, Alexander said.

"If something like that happens to us, the taxpayers are going to have to decide what services they want to fund," he said, adding the county will have very little money to work with. "I don't want to scare anyone, but it is a reality that we may face."

Lindsay Nothern, a spokesperson for Sen. Mike Crapo, R-Idaho, said Idaho's congressional delegation is working with the Oregon delegation to get the funding restored.

"There is a lot of concern going around," Nothern said. "The counties are upset, and they should be upset."

Shoshone County commissioners could not be reached for comment Friday afternoon.

Caitlin Rusche, with the Idaho Association of Counties, said she was sending a press release explaining the cuts to all of Idaho's counties on Friday.

She said there hasn't been a lot of awareness so far in the smaller communities.

"Congress' failure to reauthorize SRS will, in many cases, cripple the counties' ability to provide the road and bridge services their citizens have come to expect," she said.

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