Inside Douglas County with U.S. Rep. Cliff Bentz [5:04-10:06]

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?