ENTERPRISE — There were a couple of comments on the condition of Wallowa County’s forests Wednesday, April 23, during the meeting of the Wallowa County Board of Commissioners.

Jack Snyder said he doesn’t believe the U.S. Forest Service is managing the forests as it should be and allowing timber harvests on a scale to keep the forests healthy.

Commissioner John Hillock said he sent an email that morning to the new local head of the Forest Service.

“We might get lucky now. The head of the Forest Service has never been a Forest Service employee,” Hillock said. “He’s always worked in the private sector. … and I’ve asked him the same question.”

The commissioner said on the Morgan Nesbit Resiliency Project about 20 miles southeast of Joesph in the Eagle Cap Wilderness it originally was going to be more than 80,000 acres harvested, but now it got scaled back to about 12,000 acres. He said the Forest Service also is considering many acres of controlled burns.

“But that won’t happen because we don’t really have the climate to do it effectively,” he said. “But at least if they get a road in there and do it effectively, they can do it in years to come.”

He also mentioned the Eden Bench area where there would be salvage from the fire there two years ago.

“They’re very proactive,” he said. “They want to go salvage it because there’s good timber in there. … That’s our plan. I’ve been trying to get the local ranger to do things differently from what they’re doing because people in general don’t like it the way they’re doing things. That was part of my letter today that things aren’t happening they way we want.”

Hillock said the delay of Forest Service jobs coming from the Trump administration was just that, a delay.

“They put it on hold, but they should be coming back any time,” he said. “Those jobs, I’m assuming, will start up again right away.”

Legislative action

Commissioner Lisa Collier said there are a number of bills in the Oregon Legislature dealing with the size of timber harvests. She offered to dig up more information on those bills. In fact, she said, more information on legislative actions will be presented to the county in May during the next quarterly town hall.

“Hopefully we’ll have more bills so we can get more pressure on the agencies,” she said.

Hillock said the economic benefit to the county, much of which was used for schools, has dropped considerably.

“We got about $6 million in the 1960s and ’70s … but we got a lot of things that we can’t afford to have anymore,” he said. “We’ve lost about $700,000 in revenue from the Forest Service in the SRS.”

SRS is the Secure Rural Schools Act that provides counties with funding based on timber acreage.

“We still get the PILT (Payment in lieu of taxes),” he said. “I did some research to see what (the federal government) pay us, which is about 75 cents an acre. The worst rangeland on the Imnaha pays about $5 an acre. Since they have a lot of timber, they should be paying us about $5 an acre, which they don’t do.

Hillock said the state Constitution doesn’t allow the state to tax federal land, but Collier said there’s a way around that and both commissioners agreed to research that.