Inside Douglas County with U.S. Rep. Cliff Bentz

This is Inside Douglas County on news radio 939 FM and 1240 KQEM. It's our daily in depth look at people and issues that are shaping the local area. Inside Douglas County is presented by concrete builder supply. Now inside Douglas County on news radio 939 FM and 1240 KQEM. Afternoon, thanks for being here as we cover a number of things happening around the Umbhwa Valley focusing on Congress today. Second District Congressman Cliff Benz just off the floor of the House. A little bit of Go Congressman. Thanks for being on. Great to be with you Kyle and thanks for the opportunity as usual. Now you were speaking in the past hour regarding secure rural schools. That has been a bit of concern. It passed the Senate didn't make it through the House yet and I understand a vote's coming in the next few hours. Yeah well that's all true. Let me just say that the movement of the bill through the Senate was quite different than the movement of the bill through the House because the movement through the Senate didn't have any money with it. So it was merely passing the bill and saying, gee we hope you can find the money over there in the House somewhere. And so it's a little disingenious I think for those on the Senate side to be saying they supported the bill when they didn't put any money in the bill. Now there's much confusion and people running in different circles about why the money wasn't in the bill in the Senate. But it doesn't change the fact that the money was not in the bill in the Senate. And so when it got over here some months ago the challenge became where are we going to find the money? Because that's up to about $400 million spread over a number of states. I want to say 18 and maybe off of it. But Oregon is like third biggest state when it comes to getting money under secure rural schools. We get about 50 million a year. And this particular bill covers three years. Last year or this year next year. And so it's about $150 million issue for Oregon. And so it's extraordinarily important. And I'm just very happy that we went to this whole bunch of us went to the speaker and said we have to have your support on this bill. And I say a whole bunch of us are probably ten of us in the speaker's office and to the speaker's everlasting credit. He helped us find the money. And so I'm very, very happy that we now have funding in the bill. We just testified in favor of it to move it on the suspension calendar. A recorded vote was requested. And that means we'll be voting on it tonight. But the Democrats supported it also. And so I anticipate no problem whatsoever in getting it in the past. Exactly how many people will vote against it. I can't tell you about the good news. It's going to pass. And talk about the impact of this legislation since it was first enacted 1990. Well, we should talk a little bit about why we need it. And the answer is that we need the legislation because of the spotted owl. And when the spotted owl was protected back in 1990, a forest activity, logging on the federal forests, fell by 80 percent, 80 percent. And so you know better than anybody what that did to our timber community to destroy them. Literally destroyed them. And many of them are in my district. And so that was in 1990. In 10 years later, 2000, they decided Congress did to send to enact the secure role schools, which basically was in recognition of the horrific damage that had been done to our timber dependent communities. And thank goodness they did something. And so this legislation has been extraordinarily important to Oregon and in California, Washington. Idaho, Montana, these states have still serious, serious problems in small towns that used to have a sawmill and good jobs and now don't. And so this bill is hugely important for those counties that found themselves basically on the verge of bankruptcy. And so it's a great big deal. And I know it is because I hear from every one of my county commissioners saying over and over and over again, what are you going to do about it? And you can imagine, I took forms and charts and graphs that my staff put together in to show them to the speaker, to show the precipitous decline in timber revenue, to show the decline in timber logging activity, to show the decline in sawmills and jobs, and the dramatic increase in demand for welfare programs like SNAP benefits and Medicaid. I mean, some huge percentage of people in my district are on those programs, and they're absolutely essential. But in many respects, it's because of the owl. And then turning to the owl, we had 1200 pairs of owls in 1980. Today we have 200 pairs of owls. And so you ask yourself, what have we spent these billions of dollars in these lives ruined for watching the owl continue to shrink in population down to 200 pairs? And good news only knows how many billions of dollars spent unlost. It's really, really sad, but the little bit that needs to be done in the form of SRS, hugely necessary, but extremely sad that we would need it. And of course, here in Douglas County, we were really kind of smack dab right in the middle of this whole issue. I think you're the county that gets most of the money under this program because you have most of the timber. Are we still a lot of it? You're close. I don't have to break down here in front of me. But Douglas County is extremely, extremely timber dependent. And I worked carefully and closely over the years with Tim Freeman, a Commissioner Freeman, and he's been absolutely a godsend when it comes to explaining the challenges and trying to work through the difficulties and helping message the need to do something in this space. And so we have other legislation I'm working on right now. It's right here on my desk on the ONC land issue, which is equally challenging and a huge disservice on how those lands have been managed by the government, not allowing us to take timber from them and, of course, the fires and everything else that happened as a result of not getting fuel out of the woods. It's all driven sadly by the owl. One of the things, Kyle, that I looked at carefully was how to say to the nation. And I tried to say it just a few minutes ago in my remarks regarding this bill that if society wants to do something like whether it's protect the owl or reinstate the wolf, then society needs to pay for the damage done by that reinstatement. There is no doubt about it. Society should pay for all of these things that society thinks that we need. And it's not fair to impose those costs squarely upon communities like Roseburg and others. It is not. And so I'll be making a floor speech tomorrow morning on the wolf. I'll be making that exact point about the cost to the eastern part of the state. Now it's starting to migrate your way that the wolf imposes upon rural communities. And it's ridiculous that the nation is not stepping up to pay for those costs. It's ridiculous. And so anyway, I forgive me for going so long on this, but it's super important. Now, and one of the things tied into the timber issue came out of the current administration in a shift. And I don't have the details right in front of me, but where some of the funds that used to go to counties are now, I've all went through. Is it was early or proposed going to be going to the federal government, which is another challenge for counties? This has to do with tax revenue. And I think what needs to be understood there is that one of the provisions in the big bill was designed to try to increase the amount of logging. On federal land by imposing a obligation on the forest service to enter into 20-year contracts, not a huge number of them. But under the way that the rules work in our reconciliation process, which is what we had to use to get the big bill passed, you could not allocate any of the money that came from federal forests to counties that tax dollars, none of it. Because if you did, then that provision, that extra logging provision that would have kept sawmills open and jobs available would have been thrown out of the bill entirely. So the loss was the counties don't get tax money from it, but the gain is that we should have more timber jobs and more timber for sawmills in the United States. That was the trade-off, and I went straight to Bruce Westerman, the Chair of Natural Resources, on this issue, and spoke to him at length. I think at least three times, but there was no getting around it. We couldn't get the Senate parliamentarian to see it our way. So it was either take that provision that gave tax dollars to the counties out, or have the whole part of the bill be thrown out. Now is there the potential to shift that though in the future? I'm sorry, say that again. Is there a potential to change that though in the future? Well, there is, but once you'd understand that the amount of timber that's going to come out under that particular provision is extremely small and modest compared to the good parts of the rest of the bill that aren't subject to that particular requirement. So I just would say, yeah, we'll try to fix it for sure, but it will require, it will require 60 votes in the Senate, and not just 51 as was the case with the reconciliation bill. But we'll try to fix it, but it will take 60 votes in the Senate and that required, we only have 53 Republicans. So whether we can get those seven Democrats to join us or not as a question. I know a lot of scrambling takes place in the last couple of weeks of the session, the calendar year. What is the potential for getting the state veterans home in Roseburg closer to being federally funded or pushed up that list? Well, what will be happening this year? And my staff had to go back after our last conversation and look into the prioritization and kind of a who's on which of the 80 spots that are waiting for funding. And the answer was that this time around the money that was spent by the veterans administration on homes was all spent on repairing and fixing existing homes. No new homes were funded whatsoever, zero. And the amount of activity under that particular heading is driven entirely on how much money was put in there by the appropriators. And this time around, this is a bit of a guess, but I believe it was 250 million. And the total asks in that queue of 80 projects is around 1.5 billion. And so the question is, where do we get the 1.5 billion if we wanted to do all 80 projects? And so we can make that argument, we will make that argument, but it takes a lot more than just me making that argument to get that kind of money. And again, it was kind of like us getting the SRS money. We had to go find it because you've got to take the money away from somebody under the so-called take-o arrangements. And if you can't find somebody to take that money away from, then it doesn't happen. And so it's one of this all has to do with how in the world we try to get our $2 trillion years that we're going in the whole little down. But the good news is we did get 250 million and the better news is, at least it went to fixing homes that we already had. The bad news is, we weren't able to get the other 100 to 1.2 billion is what it would have taken to get the rest of those projects funded. I know for a lot of people in this area, they've been watching the push for this for basically about 15 years now. And I get the question a lot is, why is this dragged on so slowly? Well, probably because there are, let's go back for a moment, I've been in this job for five years. So for 10 years, one of the most powerful men in Congress, Greg Walden, was unable to get that money. And he was chair of energy and commerce, which I finally was able to get on the earlier this year in January. And when we have a person that powerful that can't get that kind of money, you know there's a real challenge. And so now I've been in swinging trying to get our hands on the money, but you've got to be able to find some place to take it from. And I emphasize this because the Freedom Caucus has been, and frankly so, I'm very aggressive in trying to figure out how to spend less money. Now our veterans are some of the most important people in the United States and the question is, how in the world do we make sure they're taken care of? And that's why the VA bill always flies through. But there are certain things that other veterans want in addition to that that are more difficult and the heavier lift. But I think I forgotten, I knew all these numbers when I voted for the veterans bill earlier this year. I've forgotten how many billions were putting there, but it's a lot. But it doesn't mean we won't keep trying on this. A few more topics in the next few minutes here. You are working on the Dow's Watershed Development Act. Tell us more about that. I travel around the district and did so again also during the shutdown and talk to different cities about what they need. And when we were in the Dow, a year and a half ago, we were meeting with the city and the city council and they said, hey, we're in the process of trying to expand our water reservoir. It's about an hour and a half drive up toward Mount Hood from the Dow's. And my chief of staff said, hey, if you need additional property, which they were talking about meeting, we might be able to get a bill through Congress that would transfer title of that property to the city of the Dow's. And they said, well, sure, if you try that, we'd sure appreciate it. So we did. We introduced the bill, got it through committee. And I just carried that bill on the floor here 45 minutes ago. And it's passing unanimously. I think by actually, I don't think there's going to be a vote on it. I think it's going to go by consent on the suspension calendar. So he will now go to the Senate. I'm very hopeful that he'll have support over there from our Oregon senators and then move his way to the desk of the president. So he would transfer 150 acres that currently are partially under the existing pool of water behind the dam that serves to supply the drinking water to the Dow's. And then some additional property to allow expansion of that dam to about triple the size of the storage capacity of the dam. So I'm very, very happy to help cities in a situation like that because what we basically did is took the land from the federal government and handed it to a city. The use is not going to change very much, though, it'll just be more of the area around the reservoir covered with water. But it dramatically reduces the bureaucracy and studies and all kinds of other stuff you have to go through if it's owned by the federal government. Now, while this is for the Dow's, is this sort of a model that can be used for other communities, even here in our part of Oregon? Absolutely. And if somebody has a similar situation and I brought this up, I don't know how many different meetings saying, hey, if there's a parcel of federally owned property that a city needs, another government needs, then let us know and we'll see if we can do this. I wasn't the only one down on the floor today doing carrying these kinds of bills. There were several Indian tribes there, I believe, asking for transfer of land, federal land to them to help fill in gaps in their properties. But this is something everybody agrees with. There's no, it's crazy to try to keep a federal land locked up. If everybody agrees, it could be better owned by another public entity. What are some of the other things you're working on ahead of the Christmas recess? Well, I'm sure you won't be surprised to know that I've been working for the past, actually, almost a year. Literally, there's hardly been a day go by when we haven't been working on the health care subcommittee of energy and commerce, which I sit on to try to figure out how to manage through various health care issues, including the extension or not of the Obama care tax credits. And so, even today, I worked two hours earlier this morning before anybody got the office on that issue, and then over the weekend, I was working with a doctor out of a bend, and we were going through different ways of trying to manage our way through this. One thing that's hugely deceptive, Kyle, is that this expansion or extension of these tax credits only affects, at the most, 4.5 percent of the people covered by health insurance or other insurance programs in the United States, 4.5 percent. Yet, if you listen to my Democrat colleagues and public radio and other places like that, you would think it's the whole kit and caboodle, but it's 4.5 percent. And of that, 4.5 percent, a big bunch of, it's about 26 million people, a big bunch of them, are hardly affected at all by the extension or non-extension of those tax credits or tax credit. And so, I would just say it's extremely important, we need to get it right, but for people to say we haven't been working on it, that would be wrong. We have been working on it, and not just the last couple of weeks, but the last year, at least, on this. It's a big deal to a lot of people, and we're working on it, so I've taken up a lot of time. And, of course, we have all at the end of the year of things. One of the things we've been working on is the NIL, the Name Ambition Like This Bill, it's called the SCORE Act. I think if you watch any football at all, you've seen it advertised by big conferences, like the one the U of O is in. I'm on that committee also, and I have some real problems with the SCORE Act. I will support it, because it has things in it that I think benefit all colleges and athletes. There are some real problems in the bill, and we hope to get those, I hope, that they'll get the attention they may need additional attention over in the Senate. And then, of course, I've been working on power related issues, electrical power issues, and then working with the Secretary of Energy's office. I met with the Assistant Secretary just last week, and we're going over how we can get BPA to do a better job, a much better job in helping get transmission bills that will reduce the chances of us. Having power outages, and perhaps even someday help us reduce cost. And I could go on, we're working on a lot of stuff, and I wish we hadn't had that shut down. It was crazy for the Democrats to force it upon us, and they didn't get anything out of it except a huge waste of time. And now, here we are rushing to try to get all these things done. And we also, we have two bills coming that are going to address the wolf, and to try to get the wolf be listed in the rest of either the United States or in my bill's case, the half of Oregon. It's not where it's not the listed in the half of Washington state, where it's not the listed. And then the management of that population would then be taken over entirely by the state of Oregon, ODEF and W. Which we vastly prefer to what's happening now at the federal level. Although, when we have the change of the administration, things dramatically improved when it came to MATWILF management, but I'll stop there. Well, a couple of minutes left here, I wanted to hit another thing or two maybe. What about, in general, just the mood back there in Washington DC, seeing all the changes on the White House property, the East Wing gone, etc. What do you make of all that? I was in the White House three nights ago. Actually, it was, I guess it was Friday night. And I was invited to join the president and listen to Andrew Ocele, and who has to be one of the best singers I have ever heard in my life and his daughter. And he was on the stage, a little short stage in one room in the White House, standing with his back to this large curtain, bordered by two huge Christmas trees. And that was the hole in the wall to lead to what was the East Wing. I think, as we crammed ourselves into the room, that we all recognized the need for a much larger space when the president or the succeeding president's want to entertain. So there will be a larger space, and he certainly isn't the first one to change the way the White House looks. I think the one that gets the most notoriety is Truman, because he was the one that put the balcony in on the face of the White House. The Truman balcony, as it's called. So changing the White House is not new. I was also on the patio that was installed to cover the grass lawn on the Rose Garden about two months ago. And that was a step in the right direction. Not one rose was hurt, hurt. They're all right where they used to be. But that space is now much better for people being entertained by the president, as was the case that night. And so I would say that most Republicans are totally in support of what you're doing. The most Democrats are totally opposed, but that's pretty predictable. All right, Congressman Cliff Benz out of time. Thanks for being on today. We appreciate it. Thank you, Kyle. Look forward to our next conversation. 1258 News Radio 93 9 FM in 1240 KQEM. You've been listening to Inside Douglas County on News Radio 93 9 FM and 1240 KQEM. A daily look at the people and issues that are shaping Douglas County. It's presented by Concrete Builders Supply. The show will be available as a podcast in just a few minutes at 541radio.com. So share it around and let others who weren't listening live know about today's show. 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