Beth Nakamura/The Oregonian
Originally published on March 2, 2021 8:00 am
Thirty years after Oregon lawmakers began giving the state’s timber industry tax cuts that cost rural counties an estimated $3 billion, industry lobbyists warned them not to follow through on efforts to reinstate the tax this year.
Legislators are considering whether to add to taxes paid by the logging industry after an investigation published last year by Oregon Public Broadcasting, The Oregonian/OregonLive and ProPublica found that timber companies, increasingly dominated by Wall Street real estate trusts and investment funds, benefited from the tax cuts at the expense of rural counties struggling to provide basic government services.
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Oregon lawmakers have filed a spate of bills aiming to reverse decades-old timber tax cuts that deprived counties of billions of dollars and to eliminate a quasi-governmental state agency that has acted as a lobbying arm for the industry.
The measures follow an investigation published last year by Oregon Public Broadcasting, The Oregonian/OregonLive and ProPublica. The newsrooms found that timber companies, increasingly dominated by Wall Street real estate trusts and investment funds, have benefited from tax cuts that cost counties at least $3 billion over the past three decades. Half of the 18 counties in Oregon’s timber-dominant region lost more money from tax cuts on private forests than from the oft-blamed reduction of logging on federal lands stemming from environmental protections for the northern spotted owl.