Political Quotes

“For well over a decade, the National Association of Counties lobbied this Congress to be more responsive to the needs of those States who had large tracts of public land, and in 1976 the payment-in-lieu-of-tax concept became law. That was simply to say that the Federal Government, beyond other resources that it was utilizing in those counties, in those public-land States, ought to be like other landowners; it ought to participate directly as it relates to paying some form of revenue in the form of a tax on an allocation of a per-acre basis of those lands. That worked well in concert with other forms of revenue that were flowing off from public lands in our States. For example, in the State of Washington, in the State of Oregon, the State of the cosponsor of this legislation, and in my State of Idaho, many of those public lands were yielding public timber. We here in Congress said that a portion of the stumpage, the price paid for the timber, should flow back to counties, and that money should be used for bridges, schools, roads, and that was all well and good. It did help our counties provide what was primarily their major responsibility: The support of the infrastructure of an existing central government at the county level. That has changed dramatically, Madam President, as we see diminished timber cuts and, therefore, diminished revenue flows to many counties.”