Under the new Omnibus 2018 spending bill,
some big federal money is coming Boundary
County's way |
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March 28, 2018 |
 With the passage of last Friday's $1.3 trillion
federal budget and spending bill, the
Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2018,
Boundary County will be receiving some rather
large payments from federal programs designed to
help compensate counties for reasons related to
large expanses of federally-owned land within
their borders. Some of these federal payments
have not been received for the past couple of
years, putting many rural counties in a degree
of financial hardship.
The two programs re-authorized and funded as
part of Friday's huge budget bill are:
1. Secure Rural
Schools, which has been on hold and not
paid for the past two years. Friday's big 2018
Omnibus budget bill, which is now national law,
authorized payments to qualifying counties for
both this 2018 fiscal year, and retroactively
for the 2017 fiscal year. Boundary County is one
of the counties that qualifies to receive these
funds.
2. Payment in Lieu of
Taxes, another important source of
compensation for counties that contain a lot of
federal land, like Boundary County. Now six
months into Fiscal Year 2018, there had been no
authorization to make this annual payment,
leaving many rural counties a little short
funded and a little on the edge of their seats,
hoping Congress would do something to come
through with those funds. Friday's budget bill
fully funded the Payment in Lieu of Taxes
program for the 2018 fiscal year, which will
result in another payment going to Boundary
County and other counties around the country
with lots of federal land.
The new budget law calls for the first Secure
Rural Schools payment (the retroactive payment
for 2017) to be made within 45 days of the day
the bill became law, hence that payment should
be arriving to Boundary County within the next
six weeks or so.
Still to come will be two more payments: the
Secure Rural Schools 2018 payment, and the
newly-authorized and funded Payment in Lieu of
Taxes for 2018.
The exact amounts the county will receive are
not quite determined, but the following
information should give a general idea of a
ballpark figure of the kind of money we are
talking about:
Secure Rural
Schools:
The last payment Boundary County received under
this program was back in 2016. According to
Boundary County Clerk Glenda Poston, the amount
the county received that year was a little over
a million dollars, actually $1,055,112 to be
more exact (all dollar amounts in this article
rounded to the nearest dollar). The new Omnibus
budget bill calls for the county to be paid now
the full amounts under Secure Rural Schools for
2017 and for 2018. Presumably the amount
calculated as owing for each of those two years
will be somewhere in the general range of that
2016 payment of $1,055,112.
Note we said the amount "calculated as
owing"—that won't exactly be the net amount the
county will receive. During the two years when
the Secure Rural Schools program was not
authorized or being paid, the government
automatically reverted back to a 110-year old
1908 law that made much smaller payments to the
counties. Under this 1908 payment program,
Boundary County received $226,924 in 2017, and
then received $252,870 earlier this year in
2018. The exact amounts the county will receive
under last Friday's budget law for those 2017
and 2018 Secure Rural Schools payments is yet to be determined, but
likely each will be in the approximately million
dollar range, minus the amounts lissted above that the
county already received in 2017 and 2018 under
the 1908 law. You can do the addition and
subtraction on that; it will still be a fairly
large payment to Boundary County.
The U.S. Forest Service, the agency that
calculates and pays the Secure Rural Schools
funding to the counties, issued a statement
today
saying: "Congress passed [the new] 2018 spending
bill . . . that included reauthorization of the
Secure Rural Schools program. SRS payments to
states will resume, including retroactive
payments to states for FY17. The Forest Service
is reviewing [the new law] and working on its
process for prompt payments to states. We will
release updated numbers once we have them."
Payment in
Lieu of Taxes
Just to give an idea of the amount anticipated
for the fiscal year 2018 payment authorized
under the new federal budget law, let's take a
look at the last few years. Here is what
Boundary County received for Payment in Lieu of
Taxes for the last three years:
2015: $ 369,576
2016: $ 487,674
2017: $ 524,047
It is anticipated that the payment coming for
2018 will be approximately in this general
range, but there is a good probability that the
2018 payment may be even higher. This is because
Friday's budget bill funded the nationwide
Payment in Lieu of Taxes program for $530
million, which is $65 million more than the 2017
program.
Details on these two programs
What are these programs, and why do they pay all
this money to Boundary County? As mentioned
earlier, these programs are designed to
compensate counties for reasons related to there
being a lot of federal land within the county.
Boundary County definitely fits into that
category.
According to documents on the Boundary County
official website, land ownership in Boundary
County breaks down as follows:
Federally owned land: 61.0%
State owned land: 13.2%
City/County owned land: 0.2%
Privately owned land: 25.6%
The numbers behind those percentages: of the
1,278 square miles that make up Boundary County,
almost 1,000 of those square miles are
government owned. The remaining 300 square miles
or so are privately owned.
The Payment in Lieu
of Taxes program has to do with the fact
that the county cannot assess or collect
property taxes on most of the land within the
county—land that is owned by the federal
government. Since the county receives no
property taxes from the federally-owned land,
that leaves the taxes from the small,
privately-owned 300 square miles of land to fund
the government services necessary for the entire
1,278 square miles of Boundary County. The
federal government's Payment in Lieu of Taxes
program is an effort to compensate counties with
a lot of federal land for their not being able
to receive tax revenues on those lands.
The Secure Rural
Schools program compensates counties who
have a lot of federally-owned timber, like
Boundary County. The federal government gains
revenue on timber sales within Boundary County,
and that revenue generated from Boundary County
timber goes to the federal government. To help
counties who have to watch timber revenue earned
within their borders flow away to federal
coffers, the government came up with a program
to help compensate counties for that loss. That
program is the Secure Rural Schools program,
which makes payments to qualifying counties to
make up for some of that lost timber revenue.
Consistent annual funding not always
guaranteed
Boundary County is one of the 700+ counties in
the United States that receive Secure
Rural Schools funding (often referred to as
"Forest Funds"), and Boundary County is also one
of the approximately 1,900 local government
entities that receive money from the Payment in
Lieu of Taxes program. Very many of the counties
who receive funding under these programs tend to
be more rural, and generally less prosperous
areas, who have counted on these federal
payments to help their budgets, their schools,
and to provide county services.
But as one might expect, this financial
compensation from federal government programs is
always at the mercy of politicking, the state of
the economy, availability of funds, competition
from other programs around the country that need
money, and the whims of Congress. In recent
years, Congress has at times not funded or has
delayed funding these programs, or has left
anticipated funding up in the air with no
indication of if or when the expected
compensation might come through. This has made
it difficult for counties to budget and plan for
how much money they will have available for
their own fiscal years, and often has left some
counties struggling financially while waiting to
see when or even if those needed compensatory
federal dollars will arrive.
And the final details
There are rules on how counties can use the
money received under these programs. In Boundary
County, money received under Secure Rural
Schools is divided with 30% of the total going
to schools, the remaining 70% going to road
projects. In the Omnibus Bill passed last
Friday, amendments were made to part of the
Secure Rural Schools Act to allow counties to
use SRS funds for law enforcement patrols, and
training and equipment related to emergency
response.
Money received under the Payment in Lieu of
Taxes program can be used for any governmental
purpose. In the past, Payment in Lieu of Taxes
funds received by Boundary County have gone
directly into the County's Justice Fund, used to
fund several departments, but which mainly helps
fund the Sheriff's Office.
With these programs now being fully authorized
and funded in the new 2,232 page Omnibus 2018
spending bill, rural counties like Boundary
County can now breathe a sigh of relief that
these compensatory funds will be available to
help with county expenses and services.
That is, for six more months. The new Omnibus
2018 bill funds our federal government until the
end of September. Then the whole process begins
all over again.
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• Photo Credit: File:US Capitol
west side.JPG." Wikimedia Commons, the free
media repository. 5 Jul 2017, 06:23 UTC. 29 Mar
2018, 07:07 <https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:US_Capitol_west_side.JPG&oldid=250346215>. |
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