Oregon's Big Timber Elite Dodge Paying $100 of Millions of Taxes to Oregon

Oregon’s Big Timber Elite Dodge $100s’ of Millions in Oregon Taxes That Support Counties and Schools

In 1999 the Oregon Legislature and Governor Kitzhaber through House Bill 3575 granted timber companies and individuals across Oregon who own more than 5,000 acres of forest land an exemption to paying the timber harvest “privilege tax. 

The resulting precipitous drop in $100s’ of millions of tax revenue collected by the Oregon Department of Revenue over the last 10 years can be seen below

(Note: HB 3575 was fully implemented by 2004-05).

(Oregon Department of Revenue –Forest Products Taxes and Severance Taxes. 2008).

The Oregon Legislative Revenue Office wrote in Research Report #5-2007 “The revenue loss associated with repealing the Privilege Tax and lowering the specially assessed values of forest land property is an estimated $70 million per year.”

In light of these indisputable facts of revenues lost to public schools and counties, Oregon citizens should demand that Governor Kitzhaber and Oregon Legislature remove this unfair tax exemption granted to the wealthiest people of Oregon.

Further, these timber companies and wealthy individuals pay a miniscule amount of property taxes to each county.  In Lane County for tax year 2006 the timber industry owned 47% of the private property yet they only paid 4% of the counties total property taxes.

 (Source: Oregon Legislative Revenue Office Report #5-07)

To add insult to injury, these same timber companies and wealthy individuals are exporting as much as a billion board feet of raw logs from Oregon to Asia per year without any assessed taxes going to Oregon schools or counties. To address the resulting rampant destruction from this “gold rush” we will push for a state  surtax on clear-cut and riparian logging.

We need not listen to the hollow rhetoric by timber industry pundits, politicians, and wealthy timber families that we must destroy our remaining publicly owned State Forests, BLM forests, and National Forests, as well as our waters in the name of raising revenues for Oregon’s public schools and counties.

Join us to demand that these wealthy tax dodgers pay their fair share to create a fair and just taxation system to support Oregon’s public schools and counties.