When The Well Runs Dry

Shortly before the Oregon Legislature released its revenue forecast last week, providing details of its budget for the fiscal biennium, State Economist Tom Potiowsky issued a statement saying the dramatic freefall of the state's economy has ended, and a full recovery will be noticeable by 2011.
Try passing that off as good news to the 14.7 percent of Deschutes County residents currently unemployed (or 12 percent of all Oregonians), because nothing short of going back to work will kill the pounding hangover they feel brought on by the current recession, regardless of any speculative elixir Potiowsky or other Oregon economic experts may serve up in the weeks and months ahead.
"We are living by faith, hoping that some magic will come out of the sky and that we'll be able to sustain ourselves under current conditions," Sen. Margaret Carter (D-Portland) said at a recent Salem press conference.
Instead legislators are finding that they have to perform surgery on this ailing patient with a cleaver rather than a scalpel.

Spring is here, and the forest fire season will soon be upon us. Every year,the cost of fighting forest fires increases so that now, firefighting accounts for close to half the Forest Service's budget. The cost to tax payers has risen to the billions of dollars.
How do federal agencies handle this burden? The Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management often end up raiding other programs in order to pay for firefighting. Congress has started to address this issue, with the House of Representatives recently passing FLAME, acronym for the Federal Land Assistance and Management Act. It would create a separate account to fund fighting the most expensive wildland fires.  If it passes the Senate and becomes law, biologists and recreation managers will no longer have to fear for their budgets when large fires break out.
Unfortunately, FLAME does nothing to address one of the key reasons why forest fires have become so costly: the increasing number of homes built on private land near forested public lands.
So far, across the West, only 14 percent of the private land next to publicly owned forests has homes on it. But this relatively small percentage is tremendously expensive. If you add up the efforts of local areas, state and federal agencies, the cost to protect homes from forest fires exceeds $1 billion per year. If 50 percent of the forested private lands were developed, the costs of firefighting could exceed $4 billion -the size, almost, of the Forest Service's entire budget.
A recent economic case study illustrates the gravity of the problem. On average, protecting homes from forest fires in Montana costs $28 million annually. By the year 2025, unless Western states start placing some restrictions on home construction, the costs likely will rise to $40 million annually.