Story Photos
 Wahkiakum County Commissioner Dan Cothren, left, chats with Bill Swift on Main Street in Cathlamet. Bill Wagner / The Daily News
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Triple-trouble with timber, fish and a bird hammers Wahkiakum County budget
Sunday, October 12, 2008 5:05 AM PDT
By Tony Lystra
Printable version
E-mail this articleCathlamet — The sign at the River of Life Assembly of God Church here says, "Worry ends when faith begins." With the economic triple whammy that has hit this small county that hugs the lower Columbia River, people in Wahkiakum County will need an awful lot of faith to put their worries behind them.
The county government, facing a $1.25 million shortfall, announced this month that it will eliminate 10 percent of its workforce, including two Sheriff's deputies.
A good portion of the timber lands the county relies on for its revenues remains locked away to protect an endangered shorebird.
The state restricted the fishing season on the Columbia River this year, which meant fewer fishermen came to dip their lines, buy gas and stock up on food.
And there's no guarantee the county's only health clinic can scrape together enough money to survive.
The situation has gotten so bad that the prospect of shutting down the county, Washington's second smallest, and merging it into one of its neighboring counties -- Cowlitz or Pacific --- is starting to seem like a real possibility.
"I think those kinds of decisions wouldn't happen immediately, but that's the direction things are heading," said Brian Blake, a Democrat representing the 19th Legislative district, which includes Wahkiakum County.
The problem amounts to the county's worst fiscal crisis in recent memory. And, with the national economy in a death spiral, residents worry their particular troubles will only be confounded as the larger crisis spreads to the private sector.
"There's just a lot of stuff going on that is not significant in itself, but by the time you put them all together, it's catastrophic," said Wally Wright, who is running for county commissioner in November and owns a Cathlamet hardware store. "I'm just terrified."
'Our identity'
At stake, say people in this tight-knit, independent-minded community say, is their ability to govern themselves.
"I would hate to have somebody come in and absorb our county," said Kassy Burdick, a 38-year-old clerk at the Cathlamet Pharmacy. "I think we would lose our identity and what we're about."
The county's commissioners are trying to strike a deal with the state that would restore timber revenues. And some, like Wright, are tossing out new ideas to diversify the economy and expand the tax base, including courting technology companies, using protected timberlands for recreation and opening an airport.
Commissioner Blair Brady said the county may need to raise taxes, namely its hotel tax and its sales tax, which, he said, don't currently charge the maximum allowed by law. Raising those rates by a percentage point, Brady said, could yield an additional $40,000 to $60,000 in revenues.
"They're small steps," he said, "but everything helps."
Not one person The Daily News spoke with last week advocated disbanding the county government. But the prospect is clearly on people's minds.
"Realistically, all emotion aside, and just looking at it from a financial position, it doesn't make sense for a county this small to exist," said Commissioner George Trott, who declined to run for re-election this year, saying he wanted to devote his time to other endeavors. "That would be a tragedy for the county to disappear. I don't want to see it happen."
A bedroom community
Wahkiakum County's residents, many of whose families have lived here for generations, say the area thrived during the last century. There were dairy and beef farms. The timber industry was booming. Commercial fishermen's nets bulged.
Everybody worked. The only ones who didn't, by one account, were simply too hung over from the last paycheck — and a job was always waiting when they sobered up.
Now, the county of 4,000 people is made up largely of retirees. Locals estimate at least 50 percent of the working population commutes to Cowlitz County or the Portland area. High schoolers vanish almost as soon as they graduate.
And yet, Cathlamet, dug into the hills rising above the Columbia's northeastern riverbank, doesn't have the depressed feel of a worn-out timber town. That's partly because residents bring money back from their jobs outside the county. Many of the county's commercial fishermen travel to Alaska each year to fish.
There's also the community's charm, which seems insuperable even in tough times. A siren still summons volunteer firemen during emergencies. Shoppers know one another by name and greet each other with smiles along Main Street. Diners settle in for lunch at Ruthie Doumit's coffee shop, where the walls are covered with paintings by local artists.
Doumit, who keeps an art studio above the shop, grew up in the woods around the county. Her father owned a logging company. She said she misses the smells of her father's profession — turned over earth, moss and sawdust, "the tree when it goes down. It's just a wonderful smell."
"There's not a lot of industry here at all," she said. "You don't have the farming. You don't have the fishing. You have very little logging."
Still, Doumit says she's optimistic about the county's future. "We're very special here," she said. "We care about each other more than if you were a part of some other place."
Dwindling revenues
County officials say current problems date to the mid-1990s, when the federal government declared the marbled murrelet endangered, and the state's Department of Natural Resources set aside about 3,000 of the county government's 13,000 timber acres to protect and study the bird.
Revenue from timber sales, which make up as much as 55 percent of the county's budget, started drying up. The county largely depleted its reserve funds to balance its $5.8 million budget. Since 2007, the county, which now employs fewer than 80 people, has laid off 16 full-time employees and cut seven full-time workers to part-time.
Funding was reduced for the Washington State University Extension program, which helps local farmers. The 4-H youth program, the county fair and a publicly funded day care center all lost part of their funding as well.
Things just kept getting worse. The DNR overstated the county's receipts from a timber sale by more than $730,000, contributing to the shortfall. Timber prices fell by more than 40 percent over the last year. The Fed cut interest rates, which deflated the county's investment returns. And contributions from a state criminal justice fund, which relies on real estate taxes, plummeted by $200,000 as the housing market cooled.
Dan Cothren, a commissioner who faces reelection this year, said things should get better over the next year as the cyclical timber market improves. But what's essential, he said, is for the county to work out a deal with DNR and the Legislature to restore the county's access to timber lands.
The DNR took over the lands in the late 1930s after speculators stripped off the trees and abandoned the sites, said Doug Sutherland, the state Commissioner of Public Lands. Since then, the department has managed timberlands as a trust on behalf of 19 counties.
Wahkiakum, Sutherland said, "has been hit hardest" by the murrelet protections.
"We have been working with the county for the past six or seven years trying to sort out, 'OK, what can we do?" he said in a recent visit to The Daily News.
Asked when DNR might have a solution for Wahkiakum County, Sutherland said, "That's the hardest part. And quite frankly, I don't know. It's a work in progress and until we have a better understanding of what we can do, we can't do it."
Options are few
Sutherland said two solutions seem most feasible.
One is for the state to reimburse the county for the roughly 3,000 acres set aside to save the murrelet. Cothren said the county could use those funds, which would probably be paid in installments, to balance its budget. The county would also use the money to buy up new timber properties, which would provide future revenue.
The other option, Sutherland said, is for Washington's 19 timber-funded counties to join in a so-called "unitary trust," which would allow the counties to share collectively in their timber revenues.
But Cothren dismissed the latter plan. The richer counties wouldn't go for it, he said, and there isn't enough time to set up such an arrangement.
The best hope, Cothren said, is to work out a deal for compensation from the state, which would require the Legislature to change the structure of the county's timberland trust.
Blake, the 19th District Representative, said changing the rules in the Legislature this session is "a top priority for me." But, he said, "the prospects are certainly difficult at best." Paying the county for the lands set aside for the murrelet will probably mean tapping state's capital budget, Blake said, and it's going to be a tight budget year.
Cothren, meanwhile, said he will "push real hard" on the Legislature. "We're going to hammer it," he said.
"The timber will always be here, and it's a good crop. It made us strong and it will continue to do that," Cothren said. "We don't have timber, we don't survive."
Atrucker wrote on Oct 12, 2008 12:36 PM:
So joining another county may be your only option. Like it or not. "
FanInTheStands wrote on Oct 12, 2008 7:56 PM:
mole wrote on Oct 13, 2008 11:37 AM:
Dusty wrote on Oct 22, 2008 7:08 AM:
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