Tina Smith: “Absolutely. I will be making it several more times in this presentation--5 hours condensed into an hour and a half, I…”

“Absolutely. I will be making it several more times in this presentation--5 hours condensed into an hour and a half, I suppose. But when you and Senator Craig first cut the deal--and I was an original cosponsor with you--you had to have a basis for the money, the formula for distributing it. You all wisely came up with what is the historical timber harvest on Federal lands. That made sense. It makes logical sense. It is defensible. Now some of our neighboring Senators don't like that deal anymore. They want to change that. They would like to ignore that history, but that is the basis of the formula for these secure county schools payments. It is literally replacing the money lost from the way Oregon historically operated in collaboration with the Federal Government. The terms were changed. The terms were changed in the 1990s. There is a cost to not harvesting timber. The rest of the country wants us not to harvest timber, but there is a cost to not doing that, and the cost is borne by humans, by local governments. I think it is a dastardly thing on the Federal Government's part to walk away from this now, for it to change the terms and not care for the people impacted by that.”